Given that I found '09 no more than diverting, I'm amazed to find that INTO DARKNESS scores in every way wherein the earlier film failed, particularly since the later film shares the same writing-team. There is one additional writer's credit for Damon Lindelof, though he served as a producer on the first film as well. Though the characters haven't really spent that much more time together since the first film-- the "five-year mission" does not occur until the end of this film-- the writers manage this time to play off the "classic" personas in terms of both their original history and their revised elements. Naturally as in the series Spock and Kirk get the lion's share of attention, but every character gets more than just a little turn, playing some substantive role in the plot. The script's use of both pathos and humor is also far more pronounced.
The difference may be explained by the director and his writers having played to their strengths in a concerted fashion. The reboot still has none of the original franchise's fascination with strange alien cultures and cosmological phenomenon; again what we have is a futuristic thriller. But in place of a nebulous revenge-seeking foe who amounts to little more than "Khan Noonian Singh writ small," this script not only produces a new and viable verison of Khan, but adds a secondary villain designed as a condemnation of military imperialism-- though with a good deal less pontification than one sees in earlier TREK movies. I particularly liked the fact that the script takes issue with the prevalent cultural idea of simply "blowing away" an enemy political figure deemed to be dangerous to a government's interests.
I won't say that there aren't problems with the exceptionally complicated plotline. Many aspects of the plotline involving the two villains fall apart when one asks the question, "would Character A really do X in response to the actions of Character B?" But films often fudge such details. The backstory of the murder-story in Hitchcock's VERTIGO is just as logically untenable as the backstory details in DARKNESS, but VERTIGO remains a classic despite its well concealed lapses. DARKNESS, if not a classic for the ages, does a decent job of involving the audience in the passions and complications of the characters' lives, so that only later will some audience-members experience the famed "refrigerator moment."
In contrast to the mediocre action-scenes of the '09 film, Abrams brings a sense of visceral excitement to both outer space battles and hand-to-hand fights, as well as gleaning the maximum dramatic impact from them. Since my original viewing of "Space Seed" from the classic series, I had wondered what might have transpired had Khan had a dust-up with Spock. Now thanks to DARKNESS, I not only get my Khan vs. Spock fight, but one that fits in with the dramatic arc between Kirk and Spock.
EDIT: I originally rated the mythicity of the latter film as "good," but have since downgraded itto "fair."
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