Star Trek Into Darkness – 2013
I’ll say right off the bat, that I am a pretty enthusiastic Star Trek fan. I have always loved the franchise, no matter what iteration. I love all the TV shows, the movies, the old ones, and the new ones, and this movie does not disappoint. One of the things that I love about Star Trek is that great visual effects is always at the forefront of the story-telling. As I’ve said before, I love seeing things on the big screen that I cannot see in real life, and Star Trek always delivers.
There is no doubt that Into Darkness had some pretty flawless visual effects. My only problem, and I’ll get this out of the way quickly, is that there wasn’t much here that was really new or innovative. The story was good, and it was an enjoyable movie, but visually, we’ve seen just about all of it before. We’ve seen the phaser/gun battles, the spaceship battles, the ship crashing into the planets’ surface, the brawls, the new Abrams-style transporter effects, the explosions, and the precision skydiving action sequence. Did it all look perfect? Yes, it did, but we’ve seen it all before. The story, while good, just didn’t require much more.
The only scene that I’ve never seen Star Trek do was a sequence in which the Enterprise is plummeting through the clouds towards Earth, and their artificial gravity has been disabled. Kirk and Scotty are running along a corridor, and the gravity keeps shifting so they end up running on the walls, leaping over an open doorway! It was like the incredible hallway sequence in 2010’s Inception, though in reality, if the ship was in free-fall at that altitude, everyone would be floating around, and they would not be able to run on any surface, but never-mind that.
All that being said, it is difficult to call the visual effects for Into Darkness as anything but flawless. The action sequences were fast-paced, exciting, and engaging. The colors were bright and futuristic. And Abrams actually went out of his way to correct one of the issues I had with his first Star Trek film. He dramatically decreased the number of lens-flares, which I appreciated. And the part where the gigantic Starfleet warship, the USS Vengeance, crashes into downtown San Francisco was very intense. First, it hits the water, but then moves into the city, toppling massive skyscrapers like they were made of paper. The large-scale destruction was very exciting to watch! After that, the brawl between Spock and Khan was pretty awesome, too.
Oh, and upon reflection, there was one other cool effect that I’ve never seen in any other Star Trek. There was an exciting sequence where the Enterprise and the Vengeance had a little space battle while flying at warp speed. The Enterprise is out-gunned, and is physically knocked out of its warp stream. It is forced back into normal space. We actually got to see the famous ship crashing through the speeding wall of the warp stream. And lest I forget, the movie’s opening sequence was great. We go to see the Enterprise rise up out of an ocean, and rescue Spock, who is trapped inside a violently erupting volcano. That looked awesome!