FILM 12 OF 14 · 201312
STAR TREK

Star Trek Into Darkness

NOMADIC PICK · WORTH DEBATINGSlick, divisive, and great for argument.
US RELEASE
16 May 2013
UK RELEASE
9 May 2013
RUNTIME
132 minutes
UK CERTIFICATE
12A
DIRECTED BY
J.J. Abrams
MUSIC
Michael Giacchino
BUDGET
$185 to $190 million
BOX OFFICE (WORLDWIDE)
$467 million
FIRST STARDATE
2259.55

WRITTEN BYWritten by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof

PRODUCED BYJ.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk, Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci

IN BRIEF

SPOILER-FREE

When a Starfleet officer turns terrorist and strikes at London and San Francisco, a demoted Kirk is sent to hunt him down, only to find the fugitive is far more dangerous, and Starfleet far less honest, than he imagined.

SYNOPSIS

SPOILERS
Red alert: the full plot, ending included. Haven't watched yet?REVEAL SYNOPSISHIDE SYNOPSIS

On the primitive planet Nibiru, Kirk saves Spock from an erupting volcano but lets the natives glimpse the Enterprise, breaking the Prime Directive. Back on Earth he loses his ship, and Admiral Pike takes him on as first officer. Then a Starfleet agent, John Harrison, persuades officer Thomas Harewood to bomb a Starfleet archive in London in return for a cure for his dying daughter. The building is secretly a Section 31 facility. Harrison next attacks the emergency meeting of senior officers in San Francisco, killing Pike, and escapes to the Klingon homeworld, Kronos.

Admiral Marcus restores Kirk to command and orders him to kill Harrison with 72 experimental torpedoes. Scotty resigns rather than load them, and a science officer who has joined the crew turns out to be Carol Marcus, the admiral's daughter. On Kronos, Harrison surrenders after fighting off a Klingon patrol, and reveals that he is Khan, a genetically engineered superhuman revived from centuries of cryosleep by Marcus to design weapons. The torpedoes hold his frozen crew. Marcus arrives in the warship Vengeance, intending to destroy the Enterprise and spark a war with the Klingons. Kirk and Khan cross to the Vengeance, where Scotty is already hiding, but Khan betrays them, kills Marcus and seizes the ship. Spock takes advice from his older self, tricks Khan with the torpedoes and cripples the Vengeance. With the Enterprise falling towards Earth, Kirk enters the radiation-flooded warp core to realign it, saving the ship at the cost of his life. Khan crashes the Vengeance into San Francisco, and an enraged Spock chases him down. McCoy finds that Khan's blood can heal the dead, Uhura stops Spock from killing him, and Kirk is revived. A year later, Khan is back in cryosleep with his crew, and the rebuilt Enterprise sets out on a five-year mission.

BEHIND THE CAMERA

Writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof began work in 2009, and an intended June 2012 release slipped while the script and casting came together. Filming ran from January to May 2012, with sets at Paramount and Sony in Los Angeles and location work including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Around 30 minutes was shot with IMAX cameras, and the film was converted to 3D afterwards. Paramount kept the villain's identity under wraps, with J.J. Abrams saying he wanted to preserve the surprise. Critics were broadly positive, singling out Benedict Cumberbatch, but casting him as Khan drew accusations of whitewashing, and Nicholas Meyer, who directed The Wrath of Khan, warned that homage without new layers becomes a gimmick.

DID YOU KNOW?

  1. 01Director Edgar Wright, of Shaun of the Dead fame, directed a single shot in the film.
  2. 02The UK release was brought forward a week to 9 May 2013, so British audiences saw it before North America.
  3. 03Leonard Nimoy's brief scene as Spock Prime was his final film appearance before his death in 2015.

CONNECTIONS

  • Khan first appeared in the original series episode “Space Seed” (1967), played by Ricardo Montalbán, who returned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
  • The warp core scene deliberately reverses Spock's death in The Wrath of Khan, with Kirk dying behind the glass and Spock giving the famous cry.
  • Section 31 was introduced in the Deep Space Nine episode “Inquisition” (1998).

AWARDS

Academy Award nomination (visual effects); Saturn Award nominations including Best Science Fiction Film and Best Supporting Actor (Benedict Cumberbatch)

SOURCES WE CHECKED