Thoughts On Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond.

Having severely neglected the contemporary cinema this summer I set about writing wrongs and caught a matinee screening of Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond yesterday. I enjoyed it a great deal.

Lin’s film is a pitch-perfect homage to the original Star Trek, and follows in the spirit of, rather than plays slave to, Gene Roddenberry’s iconic series. It bookends a trilogy of varying quality, with the first film, directed by J.J. Abrams, a wonderfully modern take on the property, but one followed up by a sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, too beholden to the path charted by the source material. In breaking free from what has gone before Lin has somehow actually crafted a work closer in tone and mood to the original run of films and television shows.

It’s not a perfect film by any means, with the action sequences are too long for one thing, but as a piece of summer entertainment it’s a lighthearted and entertaining beacon in an otherwise miserable summer. The film’s emotional standing is surprisingly affecting too, with the film’s production punctuated by the death of two key players in Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin (three if one includes Adam Yauch, whose music plays a major role in Star Trek Beyond in a sequence that calls back to a moment in the first film in this series). Their sad deaths looms largely over the film’s closing moments, though it’s never maudlin and always hopeful, very much rendering it in the key of Trek as per the intentions of its original creator.