Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

For a change, one with glowing reviews led Jack and me to say, "Meh." It has some spectacular action sequences, including air battles, gunfights, and fistfights, and we wanted to care about the people, but it's sooo looong--longer than its 2 hours and 9 minutes should seem. Like early Indiana Jones, each time we thought, "How will they get out of this one?" But they do. And Jack noted, "It all boiled down to a fistfight on a moving train." Not really a train, but you'll know it when you see it. Perhaps we're not the best people to judge as we are not Trekkies.

Like the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek, which we loved, Zachary Quinto (last in Margin Call) as Spock is much more interesting than his co-stars: plus he's a movie hero on the Aspergers spectrum. Also reprising their roles are Chris Pine (most recently in People Like Us) as James T. Kirk, Zoe Saldana (most recently seen in The Heart Specialist) as Uhura, Karl Urban (small part in Red) as Bones, John Cho (perhaps second best known as Kumar's buddy Harold, he's made appearances in a lot of projects, including American Beauty (1999), American Dreamz (2006), Identity Thief, and the now-canceled series Go On) as Sulu, Bruce Greenwood (last in The Place Beyond the Pines) as Pike, and, with their intense Scottish and Russian accents respectively, Simon Pegg (most recently in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) as Scotty and Anton Yelchin (Like Crazy) as Chekov. Benedict Cumberbatch (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and Peter Weller (some of my favorites: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), RoboCop (1987), RoboCop 2 (1990), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and a 2010 series arc on Dexter) join in the action and drama.

Also last blogged in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was composer Michael Giacchino. Here's a long selection of tracks from this movie.

If you are a Trekkie definitely see it. There are some laughs, intentional and un-. For the record, the rottentomatoes critics average 87% and audiences 92, and it's #6 at the box office in five weeks of release. We didn't hate it. But we didn'y love it either (that's not a typo--Scotty and his countrymen sometimes say didn'y for didn't and can'y for can't).

Milestone alert! This is the 600th movie covered in babetteflix since September 3, 2008. I saw 21 before I started writing and summarized them after. More statistics: right now I have three in draft mode, not including the ten I combined when I got so far behind in February. If you haven't noticed my index over on the right, you may look them up alphabetically by English title.