It was fortuitous that Star trek premiered in London on Thursday. Fortuitous because it book-ened a week which started with a tragic factory fire in Bangladesh. A factory producing cheap clothing for global brands sold internationally... today we find ourselves at a crossroads between the world we have always had and (metaphorically) the world of Kirk and Spock.
JJ Abrams keeps things bright and breezy, and other than a staggering over-use of lens flare directs with a sure hand. Pitched at the opposite end of the blockbuster spectrum to Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight Rises, Star Trek Into Darkness forgoes desolation, loneliness and struggle in favour of a light-hearted approach...
I've spent the first part of the year digging away at his life to write the new biography Benedict Cumberbatch: Behind the Scenes. I found someone who's got a class-defying desire to succeed. A man whose job very nearly got himself killed in a South African car-jacking. And a man who's professional life hides a very real sadness at home.
If you spend any amount of time on public transport, particularly in our anti-social, paranoid, abrasive capital city, you'll notice that the vast majority of people neither talk nor look at each other and instead opt to waste away their existences in the soul-destroying cesspool of social media, angry birds, BBC iPlayer and other such pointlessly depressing activities found on smart phones.