Star Trek Into Darkness: Spoiler Review

Okay, if you haven't seen Star Trek Into Darkness, please do not under any circumstances read this particular review of the film as it will be full of big spoilers.

Alright, so in my non-spoiler review of the film I said two things: The first being that while the first two thirds of the film were very good, the last third was not for reasons I couldn't go into then and as a result, the film boldly went where it had already gone before.

The second was also whether Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing the iconic Trek villain Khan and that director JJ Abrams and co were keeping that under wraps until the film's release, something that I did not mention in my review was that this was the one big fear I had going into this movie and as a result, it kept me from being more excited for it than I was.

Well, sadly Benedict did indeed play Khan in the film and that John Harrison the name his character has is merely a false name, needless to say when I heard him say "My Name is Khan" in the movie, my head and my heart both sank as it was seeing my worst fear about the film being confirmed right in front of me.

As a result of that, I kept asking myself when I came out of the movie "Why did Benedict have to play Khan, I mean Ricardo Montalban did a brilliant job with the role and if you're going to hire someone like Cumberbatch, give him his own character"

The other feeling I had coming out of the film was "Every Single Star Trek villain since Khan has been weak with the exception being Christopher Plummer's Chang in Star Trek VI and so to rectify that they've retread Khan again"

And not only retread Khan as a character but a large chunk of the third act also retreads great sequences from the Wrath of Khan which is probably the only Star Trek film to really transcend the genre to become a great Sci-Fi film in its own right.

I mean you have:

- The replay of the ship's warp drive being out of action with a big disaster about to happen, in Khan it was the Genesis device being detonated, in this film its the Enterprise about to crash down to Earth and so Kirk has to do what Spock did in that film and realign the warp core and risk his life to do it.

- The replay of the death scene which in Wrath of Khan is beautifully handled and very touching (the film's director Nicholas Meyer has stated that when they were filming it the crew and cinematographer were crying) whereas in this film it comes across as very heavy handed and has none of the heart and gravitas of the Spock version mainly because this time Kirk lives.

- You also have Zachary Quinto saying "KHHHAAAAANNNNNN" which in this movie just made me cringe whereas in the Wrath of Khan it's a great moment and well delivered by Bill Shatner.

- And lastly you have the near pointless addition of Carol Marcus played here by Alice Eve who isn't too bad but just made me think of Patsy Kensit in Lethal Weapon 2 in that the film is less interesting when she's on screen and frankly, she only seems there to stick her chest out and spill the beans, what a waste of a great character from a Sci-Fi classic.

Now in my non spoiler review I didn't go a lot into why I gave it a 1.5 out of 5 as it was hard to say why that was the case due to spoiler reasons, hopefully this review will rectify that somewhat and will give readers a feeling of why I felt that rating was justified in a much better way than I was able to put in my initial review of the film.