Star Trek Into Darkness has the Perfect Narrative

J.J Abrams' 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness is a movie I consider to be a perfectly constructed narrative. It hits all the points in Snyder's beat sheet. The opening sequence is it's own adventure and yet carries repercussions that propel the rest of the plot. It begins with an attention grabbing image of the strangers running in the red planet, and then the reveal of the Enterprise under water. In the span of ten minutes a story unravels before the main plot. It presents the conflict of the whole film, which is Spock's conflict between emotion and logic and the fact that Kirk would do anything to save his crew.


The conflict created on the red planet comes to fruition when Kirk meets with Admiral Pike and he realizes that he lost everything he cared about. In this Kirk has jump started the dark night of the soul when we see him in a bar in Act 1. Pike then acts as a moral compass with Kirk and presents another theme of Fatherhood. This then propels into the main plot, which is the conflict with Kahn. Kahn begins the conflict by making it personal with Kirk when he kills Pike. Kirk has lost this figure of a father and that propels him to act irrationally in hope of revenge.

This propels the main action sequence pursuing Kahn. This seems to be able to end once Kahn is apprehended, but then the midpoint comes and there is a switch in antagonists. That midpoint is the revelation that Kahn's crew is hidden in the torpedoes. This new revelation makes Kirk suspicious of Admiral Marcus, and Kirk refuses to kill 72 innocent people, and not Kirk has become Marcus's most dangerous enemy.

This propels the conflict presented in the beginning to resolve. For Spock to come to terms with both his emotional and logical mindset when bargaining for Kirk and the crew to be returned to the Enterprise, and still foiling Kahn. Spock does a mild deception by taking Kahn's crew out of the torpedoes and giving Kahn active empty torpedoes. This consolation between emotion and logic continues to Spock's dark night of the soul when Kirk dies saving his crew. This resolves Kirk's personal conflict on always putting his crew before even his own life. Spock is overtaken with grief over Kirk's death and it propels act three, which gives the new emotional Spock a need for revenge. Spock then pursues Kahn through the streets of San Fransisco and might have killed him if his logic had not eventually come back to him in a hope that Kahn's blood could save Kirk.

In the end everything is resolved, and the last image is of the Enterprise flying off into space with the famous words that open each new adventure, symbolizing that their adventures are not over yet and now that each character has accepted the theme of the movie for themselves they proceed as even greater individuals. This is a very basic run down of the narrative techniques in Star Trek Into Darkness. In my opinion this movie has a perfect narrative because the action propels itself and everything is connected, there are no loose ends. Every minute of the movie is necessary and no time is wasted. It is truly a masterpiece.

Star Trek Into Darkness. Dir. J.J Abrams. Universal Pictures, 2013.