If you haven’t yet seen Star Trek Into Darkness but are interested, then you may want to hold off on watching the video below. You know, spoilers and all.
For a while now, the Screen Junkies YouTube page has been turning hit movies inside out with their Honest Trailers video series. And with Star Trek Into Darkness having been released on VOD recently (three weeks before its Blu-ray/DVD release), it’s the perfect time to get into why this film was less a new J.J. Abrams flick and more like that other J.J. Abrams flick. I think it was just called Star Trek then. Or maybe it was called Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It works either either way, really.
Right off the bat they bite down on the film’s title, just like everyone in the world did upon hearing it for the first time. “Did someone forget a colon?” And if you thought you’d seen all the lens flare work that Abrams had up his sleeve before, the mini-montage shown here is painful to the eyes. It’s like wearing swimming goggles permanently - only without the pleasure of swimming.
I love how they break down the many ways in which Captain Kirk is a horrible leader, from really failing to protect anything in the universe to replacing Simon Pegg with Anton Yelchin as chief engineer. Fictional characters or no, you always want to keep Pegg by your side. Or at least I do. Platonically.
And while having Alice Eve strip down for absolutely no reason was the probably the most gratuitous way for this film to use its female characters, I actually find Uhura and Spock arguing about relationships to be a tad more insulting. “Are you really gonna do this right now?” Cringe-worthy stuff. And while I’m a huge “Eggs Benedict Cumberbund” fan, his villain was nowhere near as menacing as I was thinking he’d be - and I actually agree that some of his actions could be deemed justifiable from a certain perspective.
Star Trek Into Darkness isn't a truly terrible film by any means, but it definitely didn’t live up to its predecessor, and this is perhaps why everyone at a recent Star Trek convention voted this to be the worst film of the franchise. Below Galaxy Quest, even.
Care to find out how the Screen Junkies team does it? Check out the behind-the-scenes video below, and underneath that you'll find their take on Abrams’ first entry in the franchise.
