I’m really not the best person to judge anything Star Trek because I’m pretty apathetic to the whole franchise. Then again that might be of some help.

I enjoyed the 2009 reboot. Fun little sci-fi picture. Looked good (ode to the lens flare), great cast, good story and acting with enough nods to the franchise past to keep everyone smiling. Now the sequel comes along and I find it to have all of the same qualities. Into Darkness has a much better villain with Mr. Benedict Cumberbatch devouring each scene he is in. Since it’s a sequel everything is kicked up a notch. More at stake, grander action set pieces. It all works well, I really like the set design in particular and the SFX are top notch.

A lot of hate from the Trek purist comes from an apparent “that’s not homage, that’s a rip off” on the writers part. I know very little about Star Trek lore so I’m left out in the dark in this regard (which probably helps me like the movie more). But, I gotta say there seemed to be a lot more impersonations in this one. The first movie, the actors played their characters with a certain understanding of what was done before them, but also made it their own. Here, things got out of hand (I’m looking at you Karl Urban). There is a lot of lazy writing going on in this flick actually. The good guys get a lot of convenient ways out of trouble. Things just seem to fall just right into place in almost every single encounter. There’s some goofy editing too. For example, someone says “we have 3 minutes to do this or we’re dead!” and a lot more than 3 minutes go by. Later, a ship is careening into Earth and if they don’t get control quickly, they’ll be burned alive by the Earth’s atmosphere. They get power back and hit the breaks about 200 feet above the clouds. Yeah, sorry, you didn’t make it. How did that get through the common sense department? On a more goofy note, we get a glimpse of the always enjoyable Alice Eve in her underwear and it looks exactly like what’s sold today. We figure out space travel but no advancements in undergarment tech in the next 300 years (at least they are consistent, Uhura was rocking underwire in the last movie)?

Good start to Summer 2013 movies.