Star Trek into Darkness - is it wrong that I'm annoyed I enjoyed this?

Anyone who has had any conversation with me about the J J Abrams-sponsored rebooting of the Star Trek series will know that I am vocally opposed to the idea.  To me, the concept of taking a successful series with hundreds of hours of television, film and print to its name, ripping up the canon and starting again is utterly ridiculous.  It's indicative of the dearth of ideas in modern mainstream cinema that a studio is able to simply appropriate a well-known franchise for its own purposes, throw away the lore and start over.  Note that what's happening to Star Trek is different to what's happened over and over again to comic book franchises like Spiderman and Superman.  Rather than simply adapting the original series into a new one, they have written a storyline that tells us how the whole original series never actually happened!  By doing this they don't have to introduce any characters (we all know who they are), develop the relationships (we all know them) or tell us any background story.  Instead they can just lazily fire a bunch of special effects at the screen, drop the occasional sound byte to keep the fanboys happy and watch the dollars roll in while taking a huge great dump on top of a series that - for all its faults - really was something special.

Let's put all this to one side for a moment.  Because despite all the reservations I have and anger I'm harbouring over this "it never happened" approach to the entire Star Trek series - Star Trek into Darkness is an annoyingly good film.  Action, characters, fast pace, set pieces - this is how a good swashbuckling action space adventure should look.  The film is superficially about politics and the persistent conflict between militarism and diplomacy - which keeps things true to the way in which Star Trek has always been an allegory for contemporary politics.  Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise have to hunt down a terrorist.  Tasked with killing him on sight Kirk must decide if this is the right thing to do, and then has to deal with the fallout of that decision.  The film telegraphs itself quite a lot and if you are a Trekkie (as I am) the revelation that the antagonist is called Khan should telegraph almost the entire plot.  Therefore this review will continue with some mild SPOILERS.  Though I don't really think you can have spoilers when a film is based on an already existing film.  Can you?

It's a film that maintains an exceptionally high pace.  There is little time to sit back and appreciate what's going on.  In the space of the opening 20 minutes Kirk is disobeying the prime directive, demoted to commander, saving the federation then is re-instated as the Enterprise's captain, handed a gun and told to save the galaxy.  While you don't have time to think about it everything seems fine, but once you stop it isn't hard to see a lot of cracks in the plot.  Most Star Trek fans will likely weep at the relentless raping of the canon that goes on throughout.

When the film's antagonist (played masterfully by Benedict Cumberbatch) reveals his true name to be Khan, this should set off a chain reaction of thought processes inside the mind of any Star Trek fan.  The film begins to parallel the events of Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan quite closely, even coming to a final finish in which Khan and Kirk face off against each other on stranded ships and someone has to make the ultimate sacrifice - but this time with a Chekov's gun providing a dirty great cop out.  This is something that I would have expected to hate.  It's one thing to 're-boot' Star Trek and effectively cancel all the Trek that has existed up to now, but it's another thing entirely to mine the plot of an existing Star Trek film for ready-made plot points that you then shy away from when a major character might get killed.

But it turns out I don't hate it - and even as I write this I feel dirty for thinking it.  The reason why I don't hate this film is because it has a script that understands the central relationship of Star Trek, which was the Kirk / Spock relationship and how it represents two sides of the coin that is the human psyche.  Here are two characters that are perpetually on the same side, looking to resolve conflict and explore the world around them, yet each of them constantly disagrees with the other about how to do so.  Kirk represents the reckless animal instinct that resides inside everyone, the desire to lash out at enemies and do what 'feels' right.  Spock is everyone's alter-ego, the person we know we should be but understand we can't, the person who uses reason, intelligence and logic even when doing so defies every instinct.  The film is all about the clash of approach between the characters, and how by working together eventually a little of each rubs off on the other - arriving at compromise.  By the film's conclusion Kirk understands and uses Spock's logic, while Spock realises that Kirk's has its place.

In a sense then the film has boiled one of the most interesting relationships in 20th century science fiction down into a quick 2 hours for the popcorn-going cinema crowd.  And that is a shame.  But at the same time the film is so well made, contains nice nods to the original series, funny moments and comes at you at such a pace that none of it seems to matter as it brings Star Trek to a new audience.  Apart from the utterly mental over-use of lens flare distracting the shit out of every single scene.  But then that's J J Abrams!

I still don't think Gene Roddenberry would approve of it, but that in itself doesn't make Star Trek into Darkness a bad film.  It is a good film as long as you don't think about it too much.  So I'm going to stop thinking about it before I change my mind.

Review ends.