Star Trek Into Darkness

Skippable, and it is the sharpest self-inflicted wound in the franchise. The entire point of splitting the timeline in the previous film was that these characters could now go somewhere the originals had not. The follow-up goes directly to the most famous story the originals already told, restages its climactic scene with the two leads swapped, and ends on a line of dialogue lifted from it.

The problem with the restaging is that the original scene worked because of twenty-five years of friendship and a death that stuck. Here the equivalent moment arrives about two hours into a relationship and is reversed within minutes by a transfusion, which drains it of everything that made it matter and introduces a cure-all the franchise then had to ignore.

There is a good film in the first hour. The opening on the volcano planet is a genuine Prime Directive dilemma played for real, the London bombing sequence is well staged, and Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent for as long as the character is allowed to be his own man rather than a retread. The studio's long public insistence that he was playing somebody else became its own embarrassment.

Nothing in Beyond requires it beyond a line or two. If you are working through the Kelvin films, this is the one to leave out.