Director: J.J. Abrams
In John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), the mysterious traitor who commits a terrorist attack on Starfleet, it appears that Captain James T. Kirk (Christopher Pine) has met his match. On the surface, Harrison is his ideal—similarly driven by emotion and ego, Harrison nonetheless comes with both a supreme level of skill and a confidence in his actions that Kirk lacks. His very capability makes him a frightening proposition, but it is not impossible to imagine an alternate reality wherein Kirk has gone rogue, driven by his own reckless impulses and unimpeachable sense of personal morality. When Star Trek Into Darkness plays into this dynamic, the film matches its thrills with a certain amount of cerebral intelligence. Pine’s Kirk is the leading asset in the series, and unfortunately Zachary Quinto’s Spock still seems ill-served by the script. That Kirk and Spock are again pitted against each other in the battle between logic and ego seems again confused by the fact that Spock spends much of the film providing evidence why he does not necessarily adhere to his own code. But Kirk, who is faced with decisions that could result in abandoning his own code or even putting others at risk, carries the greatest emotional weight of the new series, and Harrison, if underwritten, provides a compelling contrast.
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