The Star Trek Into Darkness marketing has danced around the mystery identity of Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain (known as ‘John Harrison’), working two-fold as a means of keeping fans interested and guessing. Not to mention, preoccupying everyone who might otherwise put more effort into figuring out the rest of the film’s secrets.
Director J.J. Abrams is keeping tight-lipped as ever on the Cumberbatch situation, by instead drawing attention to other characters whose role in the Star Trek reboot followup remains something of an enigma (if less so than Harrison) – specifically, the Klingons and Alive Eve as Dr. Carol Marcus.
First off, here is the official Star Trek Into Darkness synopsis, followed by that image of an (intentionally?) captured Harrison being escorted by a brigade of Red Shirts (uh oh), which was previously only available in watermarked form:
When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis.
With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction. As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.
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We’ve known for a while now that Harrison isn’t the only antagonist in Star Trek Into Darkness, after our Bad Robot Productions visit, where we glimpsed the design of Klingon battle armor and weaponry featured in the movie. Indeed, those readily-recognizable Trek aliens were nearly included in Abrams’ franchise reboot, but ended up on the cutting room floor instead.
Here is what Abrams was willing to offer MTV, about the Klingons in the sequel:
“… Their role in this is definitely adversarial and you’ll see how that plays out. But you don’t have to know about any preexisting stories to watch this film. “
As for Eve playing Carol Marcus, Abrams reinforced previous statements from Chris Pine, claiming that although she and young James Kirk definitely have some romantic chemistry, it gets put on the back-burner – what with she and the rest of the Enterprise crew scrambling to prevent Harrison from enacting his terrible plan of revenge.
“Wouldn’t [Chris Pine] like that [having Alice Eve as a love interest]. [Kirk] meets [Carol] fairly early on and again- she plays a science officer, she’s someone who is part of the adventure and it’s an action-adventure movie so once that gets going it’s a difficult thing to park the story and say ‘lets do a romantic interlude.’ But her role is important, she wouldn’t be in the movie otherwise.”
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Star Trek Into Darkness stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Karl Urban, John Cho, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood, Alice Eve, Peter Weller, Nazneen Contractor, Noel Clarke and Joseph Gatt.
Look for Star Trek Into Darkness in theaters (2D, 3D and IMAX 3D) on May 17th, 2013.
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