Damon Lindelof Talks Tone For Star Trek Into Darkness
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Everyone knows the sequel movie is always darker than the original. Over the years, that approach has been the general rule for trilogies such as The Matrix Reloaded, The Dark Knight, and The Empire Strikes Back. If the title suggests anything about the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness, it should certainly be a more bleak adventure for the crew of the starship Enterprise. But the film’s co-screenwriter, Damon Lindelof, contends that the film will not be as dark as people might expect.
In an interview with Collider, Lindelof talked about many aspects of Star Trek Into Darkness, including the film’s tone, setting, and his approach to the much-anticipated sequel. Lindelof describes the film as having a great sense of humor, which is completely contrasted with the film’s title.
While Lindelof, along with co-screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, tried to inject the same type of humor in the Star Trek reboot, they didn’t want to go overboard like in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Lindelof explains:
We’ve been talking about this a lot and I think that certainly the marketing materials and the title of the movie are selling this idea of a darker Trek, but hopefully especially for the people who have seen the first nine minutes — a totally dark Trek is not Trek … And I think that one of the things that the best iterations of Trek, whether it was episodes show or the movies that were highly successful, is that they were able to find a blend of those two things where the stakes were monumentally life or death but there were still moments of great humor.
If you think about it, Star Trek has always been a funnier series than people give it credit for. Most of the humor in the reboot Star Trek came from Karl Urban as McCoy and Simon Pegg as Scotty, so we can probably expect more of the same from Star Trek Into Darkness. [If we get the equivalent of Scotty in the engineering pipes again, I’m flying to Hollywood and throat-punching somebody. – Ed.]
Star Trek Into Darkness opens in theaters everywhere on May 17, 2013 in IMAX 3D.
