Star Trek Into Darkness Teaser: Five Things We Learned

The first extended footage from Star Trek Into Darkness hit the web today and has made quite a splash already. As a teaser, there’s a lot of quick cuts, meaning that we’ve got a lot of information but very little context for any of it and often, not a lot of idea of what follows what. Still, here are five things that stuck out to us:One of these things is just like the otherThere are a few instances of mirroring; in addition to the most obvious one, where they seem to be homaging Spock’s death scene from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, you get a couple of spots where Abrams mirrors himself as well. First of all, there’s a shot of Kirk and McCoy running from something or another; they’re wearing robes and they leap off a cliff, which serves as kind of a visual callback to the car going over the edge in Star Trek. There’s also a sequence in which Kirk stumbles upon Cumberbatch on the bridge of (his? another?) ship, where Cumberbatch is in the Captain’s chair wearing a Starfleet uniform. This is a bit like when Kirk himself commandeered the captain’s chair in the first film. There’s also a look at a Starfleet vessel rising up out of the water near the beginning of the trailer, which mirrors what looks to be the Enterprise crashing down to the water at the end.Funeral for a friend?You’ve also got Kirk speaking at a starfleet ceremony — likely a funeral, since the plot synopsis for the film hints to a major attack on Earth in general and Starfleet in particular in this film. There’s always the possibility that if it’s not actually Kirk or Spock who appear to be sacrificing themselves in that Japanese-exclusive scene from the trailer, this could be mourning whoever did.