Reseñas de la crítica

The inevitable sequel, which comes laden with import in its grammatically puzzling subtitle Into Darkness, takes any good will banked from the first film and shits all over it... This sort of misplaced fan service, all winky-winky left-field insertions of the usual canned McCoyisms and Scottie exclamations, backfires here even more than one might expect, especially when the same logic of pastiche is applied to recent history...

...it's this optimism that shows the passion in which the film was made: With its emphasis on its ensemble, the exploration of space by Abrams surrogates Kirk and Spock and their crew, along with the depths in which history can be revised by Abrams and his team, a bright future certainly can't be tackled alone.

Star Trek is as breezy and funny as Iron Man – but Robert Downey Jr always seems faintly embarrassed to be in the blockbuster business whereas this retains its awed reverence for the starship Enterprise and its motley crew, even while playing their dynamics for comedy.

Too much Star Trek has become – like too much contemporary Doctor Who – about itself to the exclusion of anything else. Into Darkness sets off on a mission to revisit places we have gone before in a manner that needs to be broken with if the franchise is to live long and prosper under Abrams's captaincy.

What this movie does with a not-unfamiliar-to-some story is pretty clever, and the incarnation of a classic villain by British cheekbone virtuoso Benedict Cumberbatch is vivid and engaging.

Abrams and his screenwriters (Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof) are so obsessed with acknowledging and then futzing around with what we already know about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty and company that the movie doesn't breathe... For all its sloppiness and blind spots and fanboy pirouettes, though, "Star Trek Into Darkness" is still an involving film with more heart than most summer blockbusters.

Abrams immediately sets the tone for his sequel: bigger, louder, and in many ways better than the first. Upping the action, lens-flares, and bromance melodrama between Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock, Star Trek Into Darkness treads old ground in the series, but with a confidence that makes it all its own... In both space and on Earth Abrams manages to create a sense of depth and wonder in the large-scale sequences, be it a city crumbling or masterfully re-imagining the Enterprise at warp speed.

Into Darkness is ambitious, but its ambitions have more to do with size than sweep. The previous film got much of its charge from daring to tell Kirk's and Spock's stories from the beginning: Whatever the gripes of fanboys, the story felt new and allowed us to get to know these characters again. This time out, everything has a certain inevitable familiarity. Still, there are many ground-level pleasures to the film, including a couple of excellent action scenes and some wonderful performances...

It's made with verve and gusto – some of the outer-space shots are among the most beautiful to be found in the genre — and an entirely predictable formula. It throws in a few winks at the "Star Trek" nerds in the same obligatory way it slaps a veneer of post-9/11 apocalyptic sobriety on its plot. (I'm getting pretty sick of that one, honestly.)

There's the deadening finale, in which Harrison flies a rogue starship into a bustling metropolis. In composition, as well as in extras-plowing and building-toppling action, it shamelessly calls to mind the terrible morning that two hijacked planes weaved their way into downtown Manhattan, without ever earning the evocation.

Even more than its predecessor, Star Trek Into Darkness is densely plotted, and occasionally borders on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and action constantly percolating.

Markedly grander in scale, although never at the expense of its richly human (and half-human) characters, "Into Darkness" may not boldly go where no "Trek" adventure has gone before, but getting there is such a well-crafted, immensely pleasurable ride that it would be positively Vulcan to nitpick.