First Teaser Trailer Released for Star Trek Into Darkness

First Teaser Trailer Released for Star Trek Into Darkness

Hot on the heels of our Monday speculation surrounding the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness, comes word that Paramount has released the first teaser trailer. In terms of creating a spectacle, I think there’s a good chance they’ve succeeded admirably… there are at least three brief scenes that clearly take Star Trek places I’ve never seen before.

True, there’s an awful lot of fisticuffs for a Star Trek film. And a lot of screaming, and what looks like 23th Century kung fu. That’s weird.

But there’s also some terrifically exotic alien landscapes, a huge cast, and what looks like breath-taking urban action. Overall, I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

The clip sheds no further light on whether or not Benedict Cumberbatch is indeed playing Gary Mitchell — although he is shown in Star Fleet uniform, so that puts to bed conjecture that he’s playing Khan.

Check it out below.

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markrigney

Call me crazy, but I’m plain old tired of movies where the fate of the world is at stake. Enough already. I love STAR TREK, or at least I love the generosity of its original incarnation, and a lot of the humor, and many of the what-ifs, but must it continue to go where every Avenger has gone before?

darangrissom

This reminded me a great deal of the original Star Trek series. A pretty blond screams, Kirk punches someone, and there’s a set with way too much red.

While I loved the more cerebral movies (Star Trek IV was a masterpiece), I think it’s fun to see the camp and action turned up for a change. I hope the third installment is The Tribble Menace.

Jackson Kuhl

>so that puts to bed conjecture that he’s playing Khan.

Speak for yourself.

Glenn

I’m with you markrigney. I’m also tired of the same thing in fantasy books. It is possible to make a movie, or book, tense without having the fate of the universe at stake.

markrigney

Thank you, Glenn. It’ll be the two of us against the world, since the box office continues to reassure me that we are very much in the minority.

markrigney

John (and, more importantly, Hollywood) – Stakes are not about quantity over quality. The spectacle of planet-threatening catastrophe can be arresting, but it does not necessarily equal emotional involvement or an earned emotional response. If stakes were all about scale, stories/plots wouldn’t have main characters: we’d have Army A vs. Army B, or Alien Race X vs. Alien Race Y. But that’s now how we human consumers want stories told: we want to have a hero (Captain Kirk, say) vs. a single definable menace (a horda, say––or however you spell that thing from “Devil in the Dark”).

Story form helps us narrow the field; it points us to what matters. The Star Trek universe tends to work best when the crew works against all odds to save each other, as friends and companions, from whatever the latest trouble is, even when it’s silly: a bar fight over tribbles. Small-scale stakes, those tribbles? Sure, but immediate and involving, especially compared to a planet getting pulverized. After all, we don’t have time to get to know all those people. It’s too big to properly wrap our minds, much less our emotions, around.

Hollywood knows this, actually. And often, they get it right. Look at CASABLANCA. It’s not about winning World War II and stopping evil. It’s about a small band of people doing their best in the face of a war that’s too big for any one story to contain. Limited scale = greater emotional involvement, and keeps the stakes high.

I’d argue STAR WARS (huge and vast) is at its most involving when it shrinks is focus and becomes all about Luke saving Han or Han saving Luke or Leia saving a droid…etc.

I could go on…but maybe I’d better save the rest of my opinionated self for a future blog post on this very topic…

Cheers – M

Jackson Kuhl

> And J.J. Abrams and Co seem committed to striking out on their own and finding their own turf to claim, rather than turning to any of the other films for inspiration.

Not films. I think that might be the mistake everyone is making: assuming the new movie is a remake of the second. Whereas I suspect they may have reinterpreted “Space Seed.”

tchernabyelo

It seems pretty clear that “old” Star Trek continuity was completely thrown out by the first Abrams movie (sure, there were tips of the hat to the pre-existing version – in particular, Spock’s handover) but really, this is to all intents and purposes a complete reboot (which is, after all, now normal practice in Hollywood on profitable properties – why come up with new ideas when old ones can be endlessly recycled?) and while I’m sure they may draw inspiration here and there from the known “canon”, at base this stuff is a new creation and trying to shoehorn it into a Rodenberry mold is futile.

Frankly, if that trailer wasn’t recognisably Star Trek from the uniforms, it would be a generic, confusing Hollywood SF trailer – fantastic visuals, no signs of anything resembling an intelligent story (hi, I’m all powerful, I want unspecified revenge for unspecified reasons, uh, that’s about it).

I may watch, but it’s not doing a powerful job of persuading me so far.

[…] Paramount released a one-minute teaser trailer which generated more questions than it answered. Then, viewers who attended the opening of The Hobbit on Friday were treated to […]

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