Star Trek Into Darkness – movie review [ no spoilers ]

Grade: A

Let me start by going over the things that I DIDN’T love…Okay, now that we have that out of the way.  I’m not kidding. Based on one viewing there’s nothing about this movie I didn’t love.

Visuals – Yes, by all means you MUST SEE IN IMAX 3D. I usually avoid 3D movies because they rarely deliver anything other than a few gimmicky scenes. And it’s horribly distracting when the movie pops between 3D and 2D. Within the first few minutes of the film I completely forgot that I was wearing the glasses and was completely drawn into each scene. Some of the shots of the Enterprise left me breathless.

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Story – I’ve watched a lot of J.J. Abrams work and this is unquestionably his best. The story flowed from scene to scene. It was put together extremely well and payed homage to the other storyline perfectly. ( You’ll understand when you see the movie. )

I’ve noticed that many stories want to arrive at a certain destination and sometimes there are scenes that force the story down a certain path that doesn’t feel altogether plausible or the characters feel like they aren’t behaving correctly. That was never the case in this movie. It felt like all the pieces fit together effortlessly and flawlessly.

Acting – Spot on from beginning to end. The interactions between the crew was simply fantastic and is the highlight of the movie. There is tension and humor throughout. There weren’t any raucously funny moments but numerous scenes where the entire audience was laughing and even more chuckle worthy scenes. As far as humor goes only Star Trek 4: The one with the Whales had better humor.

I can’t wait to go and see it again and make sure my first impression is lasting. Usually I find a few flaws here and there upon a second viewing. But the worse case scenario is that I’ll drop the grade down to an A-. There’s no way it could fall below that.

This was as difficult a task of finding peetimes as for any other movie I’ve ever seen, with the exception of Inception for different reasons. The pacing is so quick and there is so much humor in the first half of the movie that it was a conundrum trying to pick out a decent peetime or two. With the help of Shanee Edwards we have 4 peetimes and we both agree that the first two are the only ones we would recommend using. The second half of the movie is jam packed with unmissable scenes. We have two peetimes during that part of the movie but you’ll be happy if you plan ahead and don’t need them.