Movie Reaction: Star Trek Beyond

Formula: Star Trek + Star Trek: Insurrection

It's really hard to please old and new audiences at the same time. That's been the biggest hurdle of this rebooted Star Trek franchise. Many of the things that the hardcore fans love about Star Trek fly in the face of your standard blockbusters. That makes sense. It was a TV show first, after all, which rarely translates to film. In fact, the current franchise is an outlier in that it's the first time that the movies aren't using the cast from a TV series. They've had two movies to build up what previously took entire seasons. So, director Justin Lin and screenwriters Simon Pegg and Doug Jung have made Star Trek Beyond work the best way they could: by making an episodic movie.

Most blockbusters these days are obsessed with building a larger story. Instead of sequels, they have installments. Watching many of them is like running into an ellipses in mid sentence ("Iron Man saved the day until..."). Beyond, on the other hand, is just another adventure. It builds on the relationships established in the previous movies, but there's no end game that this is building toward. The movie is the movie. I loved that. They could make no more movies or they could make 20 more and it wouldn't really matter for this movie.

Beyond starts in the middle of the Enterprise's five year mission. Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew are getting restless. While they are constantly going on adventures, those adventures are all starting to feel the same. While on a break at the Federation base called Yorktown, an unmarked ship arrives with a lone survivor from an attack on a research ship. Kirk and the crew take the Enterprise to a remote planet, and, let's just say things don't go well. The crew is divided and stuck on this remote planet, trying to escape from a local warlord called Krall (Idris Elba, unrecognizable under pounds of makeup). They have to find a way to get back to Yorktown and put a stop to Krall.

It's not complex stuff. It sounds like any one of a dozen episodes of Star Trek and relies on more than a few contrivances. There's a few parts of the story that are arranged kind of clunky in order to reveal a twist or two at a better time. That left me confused in a couple places, thinking I'd missed something. It is what it is though. I'm fine with that. The important part is that the relationships are right.

Splitting a familiar group into less familiar pairings, as happens in Beyond, is hardly anything new, but when the characters are all well established, there's a lot of fun to it. The Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Bones (Karl Urban) buddy comedy is easily the best thing about the movie. I don't really remember their rapport in the previous installments, but it is on point throughout the movie. Kirk and Chekov (Anton Yelchin, RIP) have a boss-and-assistant feel to their scenes. Scotty (Pegg) ends up with a native of the planet, Jaylah (Sofia Boutelle), who nicely fills the exposition-dump/spirit-guide function. I would've liked a little more with Sulu (John Cho) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana), but I understand that with so many characters, it's tough to balance than all. Idris Elba felt a little wasted under that costume. He's a good villain for what is needed. Nothing about it needed someone of Elda's caliber though.

After all the secrecy surrounding JJ Abrams' movies (Especially the "I swear it's not Khan" of Into Darkness) it was nice how much Justin Lin let the movie breathe. Since the story isn't that involved, there's plenty of room to make this into the kind of action movie you'd expect from the director of Fast and Furious movies (and I mean that in a good way). There are spaceship battles, hand to hand combat, gun fights, and motorcycle runs. I don't see how anyone could get bored watching this. One music cue in particular is one of my favorite movie moments of the last year. It's silly and fun and cool and I ate it up.

So far, this summer has been about movies preparing me for what's coming up next or seeing if there's any ideas left for a dying property. Star Trek Beyond confidently side-steps that by showing what it can do right now and delivering an exciting and entertaining 2 hours. 

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend