We’ve had an announcement trailer, a teaser trailer and – if you were lucky enough to catch it – the first nine minutes of the movie on IMAX screens. Now there’s a new international trailer for **Star Trek Into Darkness and it has a few new tidbits to reveal. Here’s what we took from the latest clips – containing some spoilers, or at least guesses-at-spoilers. For much, much more on the film, pick up next week’s new issue of Empire for the full story…
It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that all these shots come from a sequence early on in London. After all, you can clearly see St Paul's there in the skyline near the exploding building. Said exploding buliding is the Kelvin Memorial Archive, a Starfleet facility. Yes, that’s a nod back to the starship destroyed back at the beginning of Star Trek (2009) and another tribute to Abrams’ grandparents. We suppose it might be a spoiler to admit that Benedict Cumberbatch’s John Harrison is on the scene, but given that he’s already been described widely as a terrorist, it shouldn’t worry you too much to know that he’s linked to explosions.
Apparently it’s Starfleet protocol that the captains and first officers of local ships all gather at Headquarters when there’s a terrorist attack – so here is that group meeting. At the head of the table is Peter Weller, who it turns out is playing a character called Admiral Marcus rather than the “businessman-type / CEO” that was rumoured. We guess being high up in Starfleet is a *bit *like running a company. Is he any relation to Alice Eve’s Carol Marcus? Our money’s on “yes” but there’s no confirmation on that just yet. Weller says, “By now you’ve all heard what happened in London. The man who did it… is one of our top agents.” That’d be Cumberbatch then.
"Your commanders have committed a crime I cannot forgive," says Harrison. "None of you are safe.” What crime? We're not sure. And would we be safe if we spent the rest of our day in a really well-protected bunker? Wrapped in Kevlar? Inside a space suit? Here we see Harrison looking out over what we think is an alien landscape (rather than the bombed ruins of Earth, one hopes), and he’s also glimpsed laying the smackdown on a bunch of guards, proving that he’s not just a genius but a bit of a badass as well.
It should be clear from this grab and the scenes that preceded it that the Starfleet HQ meeting is being rudely interrupted by someone in a flyer outside. Someone hovering right outside the window – and it’s not one of those nice window-cleaners in a children’s hospital who dresses as Spider-Man to delight the kids.
Chris Pine’s Kirk figures out what’s going to happen just in time and shouts a warning to the rest of the meeting. But it’s too late; bullets are flying and we glimpse at least one person injured as the flyer outside swings around and covers the whole room with its range of fire. When Kirk says later in this trailer that Harrison murdered innocent men and women in front of him (Kirk), he’s talking about this scene (at least).
What do you know, it’s Harrison in the flyer! And those lines around him? They look awfully like Harrison’s being beamed up (or down) somewhere. Well, that’s one way to escape the scene of the crime we suppose. This was part of the footage screened for a lucky few a couple of weeks ago, and it certainly got our attention. Without saying too much, we can tell you that Kirk plays a key role in bringing Harrison’s attack to an end, as you’ll glimpse in a shot later in this trailer, but that beam means he doesn’t get to take Harrison prisoner.
Kirk, naturally, is keen to go straight after Harrison and bring him to justice – or at the very least punch him in the face a few times. Kirk’s worried that this is just the start of a campaign – but when told that Starfleet’s not so much in the vendetta game, answers that perhaps they should be. Could this see him about to go rogue? Is he going to ignore orders and go after Harrison himself? We’d never bet against it.
The Enterprise gets to warp speed, so we know this story isn’t entirely Earthbound, as a few have suggested (and as some of the earlier trailers seemed keen to imply). Then we see what we guess is a shuttle – unlike any Federation shuttle we’ve seen before – flying over (what looks like) the same planet we saw Harrison standing on earlier. We know there are Klingons in this movie; could this be a Klingon planet?
A nice little action/comedy bit here, as that speeding shuttle-type thing holding (at least) Kirk, Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) flies sideways through an unaccountably narrow space. Does this remind anyone of Star Wars? Hey, this J.J. guy should totally have a go at doing something like that!
OK, we mentioned Klingons a minute ago – does this look like one of them to anyone else? That big-shouldered, belted tunic seems suspiciously Klingon-y. Which puts all the big action scenes in this environment on a Klingon world or colony, and it looks here like Harrison is taking them all on – no mean feat given the Klingons' warlike outlook. Abrams said the Klingons’ role here would definitely be “adversarial” – but to whom? To Harrison, to Kirk or to all and sundry?
It’s clear that, at some point, Kirk and company are going to get hold of Harrison. We’re guessing that they don’t manage to keep him for long. Still, here he is facing off against a worried looking Bones (Karl Urban), a determined looking Carol Marcus and a redshirt who looks like Ryan Gosling but probably isn’t. Although Christian Slater did turn up in The Undiscovered Country for a momentary cameo so we’re not going to rule it out.
It appears that our gallant leader takes a beating from Harrison. Uh oh. And here’s a question: are they on the Enterprise in this sequence? This ship’s a bit more metallic and grey than most of the compartments we saw last time, so are they in the bowels of the ship or on another spaceship? Because while it could be a room in Engineering or something, the shot that follows has Harrison talking about “cold corpses” in front of what looks like a dark-tinged bridge that does *not *belong on J.J.’s Enterprise.
We have no idea what this is supposed to be – a flying crane? Some sort of lorry-style transport? – so let’s call it an unidentified flying object, but it does come from footage that screened alongside the first 28 minutes (but not *in *the first 28 minutes) last week, and it was part of a lengthy foot-chase that saw Spock chasing down Harrison, who leapt aboard one of these things. The two continue slugging each other on top of this UFO, and it all gets rather down-and-dirty as you can see from Harrison’s stomp here. You’ll also see, in other shots in this trailer, Harrison jumping off one side onto another, similar vehicle, and Spock throwing himself off the front of this one in pursuit.
The first Abrams Star Trek film, as you may remember, featured a Felix Baumgartner-style space jump from the Enterprise’s shuttle to the drilling platform of Nero’s ship. Echoing that is a scene here where Kirk and one other person (we’re not saying who and you can’t make us) are ejected at speed from the Enterprise towards… another ship (we’re not saying what). But you probably didn’t notice this shot because immediately after it came…
All right, all right, let’s keep it moving.
After a brief snippet from that nine-minute prologue that sees Kirk and McCoy running through red trees, Uhura’s looking grave. “We’re outgunned, outnumbered,” she says. “Then we come out shooting,” says Kirk. In the next shot, looks like he was speaking literally, as Spock and Uhura do just that when emerging from that strange disc-shaped shuttle.
While Uhura’s saying that they’re “outgunned” we see the side of the Enterprise taking extraordinarily heavy broadside fire from… something. It looks like the ship’s shields have completely failed at this point. This may explain other fleeting glimpses we’ve seen in previous trailers of, for example, Scotty hanging from a walkway in a listing ship and crew people being blown around all over the place.
“I am better,” says Harrison, in that godlike voice of Cumberbatch’s. “At what?” asks Kirk. “Everything,” replies Harrison. You know who else was better at everything? Who was, in fact, genetically engineered to be better at everything? One Khan Noonien Singh. We’re just saying. This would seem to be the most compelling evidence yet that there’s more to this John Harrison guy than meets the eye (and he’s definitely not a Transformer).
OK, we think there’s something a bit sneaky going on in the next few shots. First we see the Enterprise, heavily damaged and falling into a planet’s gravity well (we think it’s Earth, but certainly it’s a Class-M in the series’ parlance). Then we see a ship similar to the Enterprise crashing down on San Francisco – specifically on Alcatraz island (a nod to Abrams’ swiftly cancelled series set in the prison?). But we don’t believe it’s the same ship. We’re pretty sure, in fact, that the crashed ship has a lip around the deflector dish that the Enterprise doesn’t have, so please keep your hat on.
Take a look at the complete clip below and see if you can spot anything else that’s very exciting to be going along with. But don't tell us what they are! Argh! Spoilers!
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