Blu-ray Movie Reviews

It’s been 50 years now, and poor Mr. Spock still doesn’t have a captaincy. But fans of the Neverending Franchise like him just the way he is.

Or was. Or will be. Star Trek Into Darkness is the second installment of the “new” Trek saga. In the first, director J.J. Abrams cleverly (or alarmingly) rebooted the whole thing through some sort of time-warp, high-tech thingy. The Enterprise is now far more advanced, and some of the relationships are very different, particularly between Spock and Uhura.

The story opens with a bang, and Kirk loses his captaincy for violating the Prime Directive. There’s a terrorist attack on Starfleet. Kirk gets the ship back and is assigned to search out and eliminate the perpetrator, an old acquaintance I won’t specify just in case you’re one of the two Trekkers who haven’t seen the film. Action ensues, and there’s a twist at the end that’s either an homage to or a blatant rip-off of an earlier Trek plot.

That aside, Into Darkness is a smashing success. It’s loaded with action (but not to excess—neither New York nor San Francisco was harmed in the making of this film), good performances (particularly from an ominously creepy Benedict Cumberbatch), and a clever plot.

The picture on the UHD/HDR version is spectacular—one of the best of the new UHD discs I’ve seen. The command deck of the Enterprise is awash in bright, punchy lights. Details in dark scenes are never obscured, and like the best HDR, everything looks impressively real, but not artificially hyper-real—with one exception. The backgrounds on the disc menu are way overdone and gave me that classic “I have a bad feeling about this” vibe before the movie itself dispelled my concerns.

The film’s aspect ratio also shifts back and forth between 2.35:1 and 1.85:1, roughly the way it was projected in IMAX theaters (it also shifts on the HD disc). It’s effective, though projector fans with 2.35:1 screens will not be amused.

The sound is equally spectacular. Though I was unable to audition the Atmos feature on the UHD disc (the HD disc doesn’t have Atmos), the Dolby TrueHD soundtrack can’t be faulted.

A few extras are on the HD disc, though most are on a separate disc dedicated to them. Not all of them are new, but they’re enough to keep Trek fans up well past their usual bedtime.

Blu-Ray
Studio: Paramount, 2013
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 and 1.85:1
Audio Format: Dolby Atmos / TrueHD 5.1 core
Length: 132 mins.
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana
Director: J.J. Abrams