How is into darkness doing

The acting is superb. The core cast established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in , and they've only gotten better. The racial politics of casting a British guy as an Indian man originally played by a Mexican actor are dubious as hell, but there's no question that Benedict Cumberbatch's performance is spectacular. Unfortunately, Into Darkness is wrestling with way, way too much story for one movie.

That's a lot of ground to cover in two hours, and the whole movie suffers for it. The pacing is choppy and weird, racing past plot holes and lingering on brutal hand-to-hand combat drawn out so far past the point of feasibility that it actually gets boring. But the problem isn't that Darkness tried to pull together a single coherent story using pieces from previous Trek incarnations.

The problem is that it pulled almost arbitrarily from each, a Mad-Lib of allusions with no real attention to the underlying machinery that makes them tick. It's the Silent Hill: Homecoming of Trek film: loads of potential that falls short because in the rush to recreate the window dressings, no one noticed the actual, substantial structure that originally supported them.

The result is a mishmash of story fragments that don't really fit together, dubious causality, a plot driven by crises that never quite stand up to scrutiny--and, of course, Carol Marcus. Let's take a minute to talk about Dr. Carol Marcus. While she doesn't do that much in the film—Project Genesis and its staff are mostly collateral damage in Khan's quest for vengeance—she's smart, resourceful, and no one's damsel in distress.

Even before we meet her, Carol is established as a force to be reckoned with, both as a scientist and as the girl who broke Kirk's heart and no, she doesn't regret it or take him back or die. Carol Marcus of Into Darkness? Not so much. She's a general's daughter who snuck onto the ship for nebulous reasons and has all the personality of a houseplant. She doesn't do anything except get used—unsuccessfully—as a bargaining chip.

Her vaunted expertise proves nigh useless, because, ladies, we all know that real validation comes with a lingering glimpse from Kirk and a longer one from the camera as you strip down to your underwear on a shuttle in a scene that's obviously supposed to be saucy and charming, but mostly just ends up stupid and awkward and sad.

Uhura remains a badass, but unfortunately she's been overcome with a case of Generic Lady Motivation. Y'all, Nyota Uhura is a highly professional officer who has thus far made a point of keeping her personal relationships the hell out of her job and took Spock to task the one time he failed to do the same.

Once you start looking at the source material, you open the floodgates. The fact that Kirk is back only a few minutes later, rather than taking an entire extra film, also weakens the moment. Of course, in the end, it's probably a good thing that Kirk was brought back quickly, otherwise, the next Star Trek reboot movie would have been an entire remake of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , and we probably didn't need that. Star Trek Beyond was better than that. Armchair Imagineer. Epcot Stan.

Future Club 33 Member. Dirk Libbey. Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. JJ said to me early on that Star Trek was all about positivity and people finding the best in bad situations. He's very driven by that, and we tried to keep that in the movie.

Michael Kaplan costume designer In the original TV show they would get beamed up, travel, do everything in those uniforms. In this film there are a lot of high-powered meetings with Kirk and officers, and I wanted to add a level of sophistication, where — like any military service uniform — there would be different parts. So they now have dress uniforms, and shuttle suits, which they travel in. Mary L Mastro hair department head Because it's set in the future, I wanted to give it a little futuristic twist.

You can't have a futuristic movie and have period hair, it can be distracting. If you look at old westerns, they have hairstyles from the period they were shooting. JJ's very particular about that sort of thing. MK The wetsuits the crew wear at one point were really difficult to make. I wanted all custom colours, but we looked and they just didn't exist, so we ended up dyeing them, and through a lot of trial and error we found dyes that would work.

Zoe Saldana looked pretty stunning in her red wetsuit, JJ's favourite costume. It was a big success putting her in a red wetsuit. Jack White food stylist We did drinks for a bar scene that light up and glow. We used a lot of nice reds, and one black drink. Propmaster Andy Siegel and his crew found some floating light bulbs that glow then go off and come back on again. You drop them in the glass and the glass lights up.

A fun thing we found was an ice cube ball, a round ice cube that fits perfectly into the cocktail glass. They're found in traditional Japanese restaurants, a good-luck thing they serve with desserts. SC Everybody wanted to do some blissful tropical island planet, but nobody wanted it to look like a standard blissful tropical environment we're familiar with here on Earth, because that doesn't feel like you're going any place special, it just feels like vacation.

So I thought, "Well, we don't want it to be green. Portions of the trunks are this beautiful magenta. I took a photograph of timber bamboo, a beautiful jungle of it, and played with it in Photoshop and turned it really deep ruby red, and it was beautiful. I thought, "My God, if we put that with the turquoise water of Fiji and then pure white sand, what does that feel like?

DM JJ loves to use as much real set and world as possible. We built a piece of the red planet, including the volcano, outside in Marina del Rey [in California]. We shot it all at night so we could control the lights and manipulate it so that the steam that we were making would block out the sun and give us a lot of texture. All the sparks and fire is real. MK Spock's suit is to protect him from the heat of the volcano.

I'd never seen a space suit in copper, and I think copper's very beautiful. I went for the look more than the correct reasoning. Copper is probably the worst material to use when you're trying to protect yourself against heat. There needed to be ventilation in the helmet so that it didn't fog up, so that Zachary Quinto wasn't perspiring. It's a little bit scary because you have to be screwed into it, and if an actor's claustrophobic he could really start to panic, so I think you have to keep your mind away from those thoughts.

NP The Nibirans are an indigenous culture of people, and the thing that really drove it was the find of a particular guy to play our main Nibiran.

His physical state is so interesting and unique that it allowed us to do very little makeup work to create a really unique creature. MK We tried lots of different things to come up with the right feeling for the natives, and in the end it was draped and dyed fabric.

We wanted something that was not too sophisticated, so that it would be very recognisable as a primitive race. The planet is all red, so I chose saffron gold, because it pops out.

MLM Benedict Cumberbatch was one of the last to be cast.