Thanks, I Hate It: Star Trek Into Darkness (Patreon)

The idea that the Star Trek movies have to play as pure sci-fi action to attract an audience has led to some phenomenally bad movies. The franchise's appeal has always rested in its philosophical underpinnings and the overt, thoughtful ways in which it expresses them. Anti-war sentiment, non-human personhood, diversity, and anti-capitalism have been part of the series' creative makeup since its inception in the late 1960s. The original series and its successors  stumbled into and embraced earnest corniness nearly as often as they succeeded as fiction, but there's a valiant spirit behind Star Trek's attempts to make humanist philosophy, consultation, and art appreciation into compelling drama.

Into Darkness discards that spirit, opting instead for an action romp full of good-looking young people, city-leveling explosions, and fate-of-the-universe crises. The problem is that where the rebooted series's first installment had enough charm to coast enjoyably through its lightweight subject matter, Into Darkness lands like a brick and doesn't budge again. That it moves self-consciously through the paces of the much better Wrath of Khan, which succeeded both as an action movie and as a quietly philosophical character piece, does it few favors. Whenever the movie tries to emulate Nicholas Meyer's 1982 shoestring-budget space opera about an aging Kirk confronting his own mortality it bounces off the shiny, plastic-smooth faces of its youthful cast and immaculately bland lily-white antagonist.

Benedict Cumberbatch steps into the Ricardo Montalbán-originated role of Khan with none of the late actor's gristly tension, opting instead for a kind of robotic calm meant to hammer home his genetically superior supremacy. Leaving aside the ugly connotations of changing a genetically perfect superman from a Southeast Asian character to a Caucasian one, Cumberbatch just doesn't have the electric presence to make his master schemer believable. Nor does his lack of solo screen time do any forever for his characterization, which remains broadly antagonistic and aloof with no intriguing cracks or wrinkles to provide so much as the appearance of depth. He is Teflon, a non-stick surface perfect for cooking unseasoned food.

The other major offender in Into Darkness's failure to get off the ground as an action movie is, well, its action. The film slouches from one shootout to the next without breathing room or characterization beyond the level of quips. Khan shoots up some Klingons with a big gun. An atmospheric aircraft attacks a panel of Starfleet  brass. The Enterprise's crew dives onto another ship. It's all just sort of a big diffuse blur, and by far the worst of it is the climactic fistfight between Kirk, Spock and Khan, a brainless reduction of the movie's paper-thin themes to three uninteresting characters slugging it out in a deeply boring and poorly choreographed brawl. There's no rhythm to it beyond a feeble back and forth, one character gaining the upper hand only to be knocked back down, followed by a third reversal, then a fourth.

The movie's a blank prefab room with Star Trek wallpaper, a space designed to be looked at and identified as part of a larger branded property. It holds nothing, presents nothing, and says nothing. Worse, its lack of style and skill render its characters and set pieces both fictionally and physically inert. One imagines what someone more adventurous and less visually staid than Abrams might have done, even with the exact same neutrally charming cast and setting. Into Darkness is one of the most astoundingly complete failures I've ever seen on the sole grounds of creative cowardice.