Star Trek Into Darkness

Quite good! Lots and lots of close calls. Kirk succeeds in bringing everyone back alive time and again, but he has to cut a few corners and ignore a few orders to do so. Villain is quite formidable and takes quite a few really hard punches from 

Kirk (Played by Chris Pine) without much reaction. We immediately recognize him once he's named, of course. As with any other prequel, we know that certain things will end up a certain way, so my reaction at one point was “Oh, man, how are they gonna fix THIS one!?!?” Interestingly, Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Spock (Zachary Quinn) appear to have a romantic relationship, a relationship that we know doesn't survive into the series, so that's a story we know we'll see in a  sequel.

The Independent blanches at the tacky capital city of the Federation. The reviewer remarks on the London of the film: “Our capital in the 23rd century now resembles Dubai on steroids – thank God we won’t be around to see it.” I always wondered, seeing the original series, how the citizens of the Federation related to the Enterprise and its crew. The movie doesn't add much to what very little we know.

Update: The Rachel Maddow blog compares Admiral Marcus to Dick Cheney. Has some mild spoilers.