Fred 🇵🇷’s review published on Letterboxd:
🎄Christmas Aboard the Enterprise 🚀
You know that amazing feeling you get when you discover a remix of a song you love that somehow reenergizes it, giving it new license and making you appreciate the original all the more for it? That's how I feel about Star Trek Into Darkness.
J.J. Abrams's follow-up to his Trek reboot is a laser-focused, propulsive orchestra of bombast. Unlike what I suspect most fans feel about this film, I think it serves as the perfect companion piece to the amazing Wrath of Khan. So much of this feels like a purposely calibrated mirror image of its predecessor, positing that some things, frightening as they may be, are just meant to play out the way they will.
The "what-if" intrigue in its ice cold blood is exciting enough but it's even more so in the hands of someone who's proven twice that he knows how to unearth the driving sentiment of this franchise's characters. Once again, I found the crucial beats moving. Even Benedict Cumberbatch, in a steely twist on a role this film wisely does something different with, managed to get me to feel a range of emotions.
I get that many feel protective of not just Khan but of the Trek of yesteryear. But at least to me, this dazzling and often gorgeous spectacle is so feverishly proud of its origins and simultaneously unafraid to chart its own path into the cosmos that it deserves to be considered not just as a part of the fabric of its predecessors' stories but as a rousing tale of its own.
P.S. The debris field sequence is one of the most breathtaking things I've ever seen and I wish I could see it all on IMAX as I did the first time, just to have that experience feel as intense as possible once more.
P.P.S. Peter Weller is sneakily good in this. Loving that journey for him.
P.P.P.S. I somehow haven't talked about Michael Giacchino's score for these films and that's not cool. Each film's is perfect tbh.
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