Star Trek: Into Darkness is better than Star Trek: Beyond

If you’ve ever been to Inverse’s website, two things you’ll take away from it are that 1) their website is super cool looking and 2) they aren’t afraid to take big swings with opinions. Reading their website the other day, they ranked all 13 episodes of Star Trek in order of their least to most favorite. Harmless enough, right? Well, it turns out they believe that Star Trek: Beyond tops Star Trek: Into Darkness, and I was left thinking; am I the only one that liked Into Darkness?

I genuinely enjoyed it, and I’m not some newbie who’s never seen the previous movies. I know what the past had to offer and a lot of it I like, other parts I don’t. I watched the original set of Star Trek movies before I had seen any other piece of Star Trek property. I must’ve watched The Undiscovered Country a dozen times the summer it came to HBO.

Yet, I loved Into Darkness. Benedict Cumberbatch was a great snarling villain, and his delivery of lines is as quotable as Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. The inflection in his voice and the way he drags out certain sounds, like his “Shall we begin…” line is just music to my ears.

The whole Scotty resigning angle was great, especially with how returns. The “Killaprise” as Inverse calls it was magnificent and I loved the magnetic hum that it made, almost as if to warn you that you can’t escape; not really. Carol Marcus was great, played by the wonderful Alice Eve, and Bone’s desperation with her will never be unenjoyable to listen to.

The desperation that Kirk has to protect his crew when the Enterprise is dead in the water, the tribble callback, the Klingon fight; it’s all so great. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. The Klingon redesign was rough, the miracle blood was hard to accept and the twist with Cumberbatch having to be Khan wasn’t great. It didn’t kill the movie for me by any means but they were building up to their own thing and it could’ve been great.

Whenever I get bummed by some of the negatives about the movie, I just remind myself “Kirk battled Robocop” and I’m happy.

For me, Beyond doesn’t have that. It’s disjointed, tries to do too many things at once, hammers home the “oh man, the 2000s were so cool!” vibe that the new films tried to embrace, and has a villain that’s pretty dang forgettable.

I can’t in good conscience agree that Beyond was better than Into Darkness. To each their own, Inverse, but we’re not going to agree on this one.

Into Darkness, for my money, is heads and shoulders better than Beyond.