Star Trek Into Darkness

A super villain whose name is Khan, a confusing plot and some superb action

Though Star Trek is inter-galactic, its conceptual origins, especially the notion of the Starship Enterprise being a project of ‘The Federation’, lie in Cold War rhetoric of the 1960s. The US, its Western allies, and, on the other hand, the USSR and its satellite states were federations in a sense. It is in the re-invention that problems seem to be setting in. The Cold War has been over for a while, and the world is more multicultural than ideological.

But principally, the problem in this particular edition, Star Trek into Darkness, is in the narration. The USS Enterprise is essentially a family. True, an oddball of a family, with a human-Vulcan, a Scotsman, a Russian called Chekhov, an East Asian called Sulu and for those who might remember, a bald Deltan navigator called Lieutenant Ilia, played by a Parsi called Persis Khambatta. There was a lot of quality film time spent on interactions between these characters, and the wit and in-jokes aboard the Enterprise was really the charm of the TV series. ‘Family’ made the unlikely stories of adventures in some faraway galaxy acceptable to a wider audience, not just science fiction aficionados.

In this film, there is extraordinarily little time given to banter on board, and from the first dramatic scene onwards, we have to weave through a convoluted plot about how a 300-year-old genetically-engineered super-human called Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) has sabotaged the Enterprise by planting one of his kind in each of the 72 torpedoes on board. In essence, Khan is a genetically manufactured terrorist.

Halfway through the movie, this Star Trek story has lost you and all you can do is sit back and watch the action, admittedly well done. The biggest impact of this film is going to be on Shah Rukh Khan, because now, with a super villain called Khan reappearing on internet search engines, he is going to be stopped at every airport in the galaxy.

About The Author

Ajit Duara