Corona | Coming Attractions

Paramount has released  what they're calling a "preview" of a teaser trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness. Running at one minute and three seconds long, the video gives us our first meaty look at the second movie in the Star Trek rebot universe. The same fresh faced cast from 2009's Star Trek film is back for the sequel along with Benedict Cumberbatch who's playing the mysterious bad guy out to put sad faces on those smiling Federation citizens.

The voiceover that you'll hear in a moment is Cumberbatch's character, making some threatening remarks and promising that he's about to start dishing out his "vengeance". Is that a clue as to the identity of the baddie?

Up to last week I was making a guess that Cumberbatch is playing an old original Trek series character named Gary Mitchell, a Starfleet Academy friend of Kirk's that he was forced to kill when Mitchell was granted godlike powers on a faraway planet. Now, I don't think anymore that Cumberbatch is playing Mitchell; the voice isn't American like Mitchell's should be, nor do we ever see the sparkly silver eyes that Mitchell had when he was turning bad. Maybe the villain will be a new and original character.

However, I'm still undecided about whether the character that Alice Eve plays in Star Trek Into Darkness is Carol Marcus, the future mother of David, Kirk's scientist son. Seeing Eve in the blue Starfleet uniform and her sharing a look with Kirk make me believe that she's got a romantic part to play in the movie.

Paramount promises that they will release the full teaser trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness on December 17.

UPDATE!

I've added the Japanese version of the Into Darkness trailer because it contains 12 seconds of additional footage. SPOILER DISCUSSION follows after the trailer.

I like the extra couple of seconds seeing what looks like the Enterprise crashing into what I'm guessing is San Francisco bay; the sihlouette profile of the starship and the titanic spray of water coming head on to the shore looks impressive and awesome.

What I'm not crazy about is the blatant Wrath of Khan ending of the trailer, showing what looks like Kirk and Spock touching hands with a glass wall between them. That's heavily suggestive of the death scene of Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Really, J.J.? Your team can't be that creatively stifled to have to borrow from one of the most memorable moments in 11 Star Trek movies and 500 TV shows, can they?

I don't like this image because it tries to play J.J.'s marketing of his movies both ways: he's getting us to wonder if they will kill off Spock in the second Star Trek movie just like it was done 30 years ago in Star Trek II. Why try so hard to not reveal who the villain is or what even Star Trek Into Darkness is about and then give the impression that you're going to kill off a major character pretty much the same way the original version died?