Star Trek Beyond

Dir: Justin Lin

2016

**

I'm a Trekkie but not a fan of this rebooted version of the franchise, I thought Star Trek was lazy and missed the point of the original idea and that Star Trek Into Darkness was an absolute travesty that only backed up my opinion that J.J. Abrams doesn't understand Gene Roddenberry's beautiful vision or indeed know what it is the fans really want. I don't buy that this version is for 'a new generation' either, that's just lazy PR speak for 'we're changing it because we don't know how to replicate the greatness of the original, so we'll turn it into a soulless action film'. This is the third film so I knew what to expect, they're still making these film because they know there are lots of people like me who will go and see their Star Trek film regardless, in the desperate hope that they will make something that resembles that of what we all fell in love with in the original. At the very least I thought it couldn't be as bad as the last one and it isn't. I thought the special effects were the best of the three so far, they are nothing short of phenomenal. In Star Trek Beyond the crew visit a starbase called Yorktown which is a giant sized bubble with its own internal atmosphere and cityscape and it looks fantastic. The grand finale which sees the USS Franklin fly in and around the starbase is visually stunning and rather exciting too. I thought Chris Pine was rather good this time round, finally nailing the Kirk character and William Shatner's mannerisms. Zoe Saldana's Uhura and Anton Yelchin's Chekov were given more screen-time this time round which I thought was well deserved and Sofia Boutella's Jaylah was a positive inclusion for a non-regular character. She kicked ass in fact. Unfortunately, that is pretty much all I enjoyed about the film. Chris Pine was a good Kirk but somehow Zachary Quinto's Spock wasn't as strong as it was in the first two films. Karl Urban's Dr. McCoy wasn't given any good scenes or lines, John Cho's Sulu had about five minutes of screen time and I still don't think Simon Pegg is right as Scotty. I still have no idea why Deep Roy's Keenser exists in the first place, let alone how the character made it to film number three. Idris Elba does his job well but his villainous character is pretty weak as bad-guys go and has one of the worst character development/back stories in a Star Trek film, ever. This was the first of the new films to really branch out on its own without referencing anything that had (or hadn't in this versions case) happened before. This was the Enterprise crew on their famous five year mission, this should have been Star Trek going back to the original but it really wasn't. It was reminiscent of a feature-length Star Trek episode but still nothing like and of its incarnations. When we saw the Enterprise burn up and crash in Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock it was a big deal, a heart-breaking scene. These days, the Enterprise crashes and burns every single film, surely Kirk and crew would have been sacked by now? Star Trek Beyond follows a lazy formula, it is Star Trekesque but still nothing really like it. It's a big dumb action film at the end of the day, simply described as 'fun' by most critics and younger viewers it seems. Star Trek was always much more than that. Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier is often mocked but at least it dealt with an interesting theory, the possibility of God, ethics, revolution, self-awareness and true friendship. The new Star Trek is nothing like it, it has no depth, and no soul and is just cheap imitation with lots of explosions. So desperate were Paramount to create something 'inclusive' as they put it, the original script was rejected for being 'too Star Treky' and they insisted the film be brought down to earth. Cue motorcycle stunts, Beastie Boys music and mind-numbing action. Don't get me wrong, I like all three of those things but Star Trek is not where I would generally go for that sort of thing. Star Trek has always been an intelligent analysis of humankind through the lives of fictional life-forms in a futuristic development, now it is just wobbly cameras, perfect hair and TNT. The story is completely forgettable, unoriginal and tiresomely simple. Artificial, charmless but nice to look at in places.