‘Star Trek Beyond’ (2016) ***/*****
Boldly going back to what worked before
The Star Trek franchise has been around for a long time and has survived its fair share of ups and downs. More than once it produced a bad film but was still able to move on and regain fan interest afterward. The second film in this current, JJ Abrams-produced series of Star Trek films, Star Trek Into Darkness, was so bad that I wasn’t so sure this particular incarnation of Trek was going to be able to recover from it though. The cast Abrams put together continued to fit well into their roles, but the plot was nonsensical, it consisted largely of bland, generic action, and the film as a whole just didn’t feel like it had any of the qualities that made Star Trek a unique series. Into Darkness left you with the feeling that Hollywood had finally gotten its hooks fully into Star Trek and had bled it of all the life it had left.
Star Trek Beyond is a nice little recovery for the series though. There’s been a change in director this time around — from Abrams to Fast & Furious director Justin Lin — but it feels like the uptick in quality is more the result of the film also getting a new set of writers. Even Abrams’ first Star Trek movie, which was pretty successful overall, was kept from reaching its full potential by a series of increasingly large plot holes and a sense that the storytelling had been run through some sort of Generic Summer Movie Filter, and with Star Trek Into Darkness those problems became even more severe. It felt like the people writing these Star Trek movies up until this point didn’t care much about them, and weren’t putting much thought into them. This time around the film has been penned by certified geek Simon Pegg and another gentleman named Doug Jung though, and it’s clear that these guys not only have a lot of affection for Star Trek, but also that they’ve put a lot of thought into what these modern movies have been missing.
The biggest difference between Beyond and its predecessors is its story. This time around, when we catch up with the crew of the Enterprise, they’re actually out exploring uncharted space. They’re three years into their five year mission to boldly go where no one has gone before, our regular cast of characters, Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are bonded together closer than family, they’ve become a well-oiled space exploring machine, and they’re gearing up to head into an unexplored nebula that blocks all of their communications gear in order to search for a missing ship and her crew. Sounds dangerous, right? Right. As soon as the Enterprise is out of speaking range with the Federation of Planets, it gets attacked by a swarm of ships led by an angry and mysterious figure named Krall (Idris Elba), the ship gets destroyed, it crash lands on Krall’s planet, most of the red shirts get captured by Krall’s army, and our principals find themselves in a position of being scattered to the wind, without resources, and in need of a way to get back together, figure out who Krall is and what he wants, defeat him, and then maybe find a way to get back home. It’s a pretty tall order.
There’s really nothing special about the story Star Trek Beyond is telling. This is pretty basic space adventure stuff — the type of things we’ve seen in big Hollywood movies over and over again — but what makes it work is that it’s imbued with the spirit of curiosity, adventure, and exploration that was such an integral part of the original vision for what Star Trek is. The crew of the Enterprise believes in the peaceful society that they live in, they believe in their mission of spreading that peace across the galaxy, and when they come across some kind of problem, they fix it by putting their heads together and using their intelligence to come up with a solution. Sure, there are action sequences here, but they’re window dressing meant to jazz up science geeks doing problem solving. The crew of the Enterprise aren’t gun-toting badasses, they’re good, intelligent beings who represent the best of their species. In an attempt to make the franchise more exciting or more mainstream, it felt like we had lost that, but with Star Trek Beyond the stewards of the series have finally struck a nice balance.
The big picture is where this movie succeeds, but in its little details things get more dicey. Lin’s hyper-kinetic approach to action directing gets out of hand at times, to the point where you’ll have scenes where a million things are happening on the screen at once, the camera is constantly swinging around in circles trying to capture it all, the edits are coming fast and furious in order to hype up the energy even more, and eventually you just have no idea what you’re supposed to be looking at anymore. A lot of the action takes place in the darkened halls of downed starships, as well, which doesn’t help the visibility problems. In this era of the push-button projection multiplex, when you get a film that looks a little dark and blurry, it’s hard to tell if it’s the filmmaker’s fault or the fault of dim bulbs and incorrect lenses being used in the projection room, but it was my experience watching Star Trek Beyond nonetheless.
While the film tends to nail the main characters, both in the way they are written and in the way they’re performed by the current cast, it doesn’t quite stick the landing when it comes to the villain. First off, in Idris Elba you’ve got one of the most magnetic movie stars on the planet playing Krall, but the film makes the baffling decision to put him under a bunch of makeup and prosthetics, thus making him unrecognizable and limiting his ability to emote. Secondly, though there is an interesting twist to who Krall is and what his motivations are for attacking the Enterprise later in the film, they’re never quite able to get you completely on board with where he’s coming from. His actions and intentions are extreme, and it felt like the reason for him being pushed to such a hardline, terroristic stance should have been a bit more nuanced than the explanation we get. We’re told but not really shown who Krall is and why he’s dedicated to his current mission, but it felt like there were a couple missing scenes that would have further fleshed him out and made us actually sympathize with his position. With the inclusion of a great, memorable screen villain, Star Trek Beyond could have been an outstanding summer movie that everyone could watch and enjoy. As is, it’s kind of just a nice treat for fans of the Star Trek franchise, but an easy one to skip for everyone else.
