Star Trek Into Darkness First Footage Revealed On Conan

We've been fooled once already with promises of footage from Star Trek Into Darkness, when Karl Urban arrived at Comic Con swearing up and down he'd bring a clip from the set of the film… and following through with four-minute video of him surfing, then a snippet of J.J. Abrams standing around on the set. Now Abrams himself has gotten in on the silliness, premiering the first legitimate footage from the film on Conan… but doing it in his own, unique, secretive way. Take a look below.

The thing is, that's actually a pretty awesome clip! Spock is in a volcano, he's wearing a weird helmet thing, there's a giant fireball coming right at him-- this is all legitimate information about <i>Star Trek Into Darkness</i> about something we knew pretty much nothing about before. Of course, given that it's only three frames, that's pretty much all that's possible to know-- and I"m not going to sit here trying to glean anything else, since Abrams has made very, very certain that we don't know anything else at all.

What we do know? Star Trek Into Darkness reunites all the primary cast from the 2009 Star Trek, including Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock, and adds Benedict Cumberbatch as the mysterious villain who may or may not be named Gary Mitchell. It's set for release May 17 of next year, and I would be very, very surprised if we didn't see a trailer for it before Christmas-- possibly attached to Paramount's upcoming action film Jack Reacher.

Here's one of the three frames from Star Trek Into Darkness screenshotted below. If you can learn anything else from it, by all means, share it with the group.