Check out the first still in high resolution the gallery!

Check out the official poster for the next installment in the Star Trek franchise titled “Into Darkness” along with the official synopsis below!

In Summer 2013, pioneering director J.J. Abrams will deliver an explosive action thriller that takes Star Trek Into Darkness.

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.

You can continue reading the article in its entirety over at The Associated Press

Chris Pine is boldly going where Capt. Kirk has never gone before. In his sibling drama “People Like Us,” he gets slapped around by his mom and pummeled by his sister.

The earthbound sibling drama is light-years from Pine’s role as forceful ladies man Kirk in “Star Trek. And it’s a departure for “People Like Us” director Alex Kurtzman and producer Roberto Orci, who moonlighted on the intimate screenplay for nearly eight years as they co-wrote such action epics as “Star Trek” and its upcoming sequel, the first two “Transformers” flicks, “Mission: Impossible III” and “Cowboys & Aliens.”

In very un-Kirk-man-like fashion, Pine gets a sharp slap to the face in his first scene with Michelle Pfeiffer, who plays his mother, angry that it took his father’s death for her self-absorbed son to finally come home for a visit.

After discovering his dad had a daughter with another woman, Pine’s Sam ends up getting the stuffing beaten out of him by his newfound half-sister, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks).
Pfeiffer and Banks put their all into it, recalls Pine, who unlike action man Kirk, had to stand there and take his lumps.

“Liz is a tornado when you unleash her,” Pine said in an interview alongside Kurtzman and Orci to promote “People Like Us,” which opens Friday.

As for taking a palm to the cheek from Pfeiffer, Pine remembers it coming in the first scene the two shot together.

“I recall very, like, method-y, whispering conversations between Alex and Michelle before the first take, and then she slapped the (crap) out of me,” Pine said. “There’s something to be said for it, because there really is no way to duplicate the shock of that.

“And similarly, the scene with Banks, there’s just no way. The way that they shot it, it was very kind of handheld, super-present, really in the room, fly-on-the-wall kind of stuff. There’s no way to mime that to make that real. It wasn’t going to be really violent, she never hit me in the face or anything. So you could let her go rip-riot with a certain amount of safety involved. That was important to capture, because Liz, Frankie, in that moment is rightfully, righteously angry at Sam.”

Star Trek fans, rejoice!

The rebooted franchise’s star Chris Pine is teasing us with what to expect from J.J. Abrams‘ highly anticipated sequel flick, which just wrapped filming last month…

We cannot wait to see what Benedict Cumberbatch brings to the table with his portrayal of a new super-evil villain.

“He’s one mean dude!” Pine told us at the L.A. Film Festival premiere of People Like Us. “He’s great. Wait till people see. He’s going to knock it out of the park, I promise.”

Details are still being kept very under wraps, but Pine, 31, promises the flick will be “bigger and brighter, faster and louder on the effects side. And on the character side, these characters are all still on their journey to becoming the crew that we know and love from the original series.”

While Pine says the best part of filming was “getting back together” with his castmates like Zoe Saldana and Zachary Quinto, his least favorite part may have been having to bleach his hair for his role as James T. Kirk.

“These are not personally applied frosted tips, my friend,” he laughed about his blond highlights. “These are work-related.”

What does Pine’s model girlfriend Dominique Piek think of the dye job? He smiled, “She may be over it.”

source

Question: How is the new Star Trek film?
CHRIS PINE: Oh, it’s good! What am I going to tell you? Those big films are scary things. There’s so much money behind those things. There’s that hype. You enter a machine. I’m just happy that the people behind it were such good, welcoming types. J.J. [Abrams] runs that ship. J.J. is a wonderful guy. What they bring to this kind of film is a small character-driven story, matched with robots or aliens or spaceships. That’s a very hard thing to do, and a lot of people don’t pay attention to that. It’s really interesting that, in The Avengers, the character that people relate to is The Hulk, and I think the reason why they relate to The Hulk is because he’s fragile and human and faulty.

Do you feel pressure for the sequel with Star Trek because it is so highly anticipated now?
PINE: Generally speaking, the more money that’s involved in anything, the more people are expecting and hoping that it’s not going to fail. If you’re a part of that process of whether it’s going to fail or succeed, you’re only human and you hope that it does well. But, there’s only so much, as an actor, that you can do. People are either going to respond to it or not, and I would drive myself crazy if I tried to control it anymore than that, other than a really fervent desire that people come and watch it and like it. We at least tried to do a really good job. Critics think we try to make bad films. They think we want to spend five months of our lives making something bad. We always go out with the best of intentions, whether it’s fluffy comedy or a drama. It’s always in the effort of, “Please come, like it, enjoy it, take something away!”