Star Trek Beyond - Review Thread

It's good. I liked it. Trek fans should like it the most out of the three recent reboot films thus far, and while I certainly enjoyed myself and would recommend it, I think I personally prefer the other two.

I think because it lacks the "Abrams flair" that you usually get in the movies JJ directs. Say what you will about JJ Abrams and his first two Star Trek reboots; the guy knows how to craft a thrilling blockbuster.  For me, what stands out about the previous two Star Treks (as well as M:I 3 and The Force Awakens) is that JJ typically works to make his plots feel more tightly-structured and have other things running underneath the surface to make them more compelling than they would be in the hands of most other blockbuster directors.  Justin Lin's style, by comparison, is more generic and garden variety. Star Trek: Beyond is still an enjoyable movie, but there's nothing to his action sequences here -- other than the fact that they're mainly just fun -- to really make them stand out, unlike with Abrams.  This movie is more straightforward/grounded -- no pun intended -- than the preceeding two, but also kind of...ordinary in terms of action and plot.  This movie does most likely harken back to the classic Star Trek in terms of the way the plot is set up, and fans of that should appreciate it, but I'm clearly more partial to Abrams' sense of plotting.

The heart and soul of these new movies, though, remains the cast and the chemistry between all the characters and that's what really bolsters this movie.  There are a number of strong character moments spread throughout the film -- particularly with Bones and Spock -- and that's what really kept me invested.  Every main cast member in the Enterprise crew continues their great work, and I liked Sofia Boutella as Jaylah, but Idris Elba's Krull is pretty bland and uninteresting, as is his overall scheme.  I actually felt like Elba was kind of underutilized, in the same way as if he had been a Marvel villain. 

It may sound like I didn't think much of Star Trek: Beyond, but I did.  Really.  Again, it's good, but I still prefer Star Trek '09 and Into Darkness.

***/****

I re-watched the other two before I went to see this, so I feel confident in saying that I prefer those to this.  Then again, these are the only things Star Trek that I've seen, but I still feel the same way about Abrams' filmmaking/storytelling.

I DO intend on going back and watching the others.

My thinking exactly.

I think I liked it better than Into Darkness as well even though the endings seemed eerily similar. If it ain't broke don't fix it I guess.

Well for starters it's bullshit that we haven't had an all female crew of the Enterprise. It's 2016 for crying out loud!

A few years ago, I started a journey to watch and review every Star Trek film, most of which I was seeing for the first time. It was a very rewarding series which gave me a firmer grasp on one of pop culture’s most important titles and also introduced me to some really good films. That series also gave me a new perspective on the rebooted Trek universe, and specifically, why a lot of fans really don’t like these new movies. There’s a lot of reasons, but at the core it’s that the films don’t feel like Star Trek, they feel like summer action movies. The storylines aren’t as ambitious in their science-fiction or as politically sharp and the characters seem off too. In short, they are films that lean towards violent action than the intelligent and optimistic values Trek was built on. I still think the new films work pretty effectively as blockbusters, but my opinion of them has certainly dipped.

Most signs indicated that Star Trek Beyond would continue the trend of Trek films which don’t feel like Trek. Justin Lin was tapped as the director of the film, a troubling prospect given he is most known for his work on the Fast and Furious movies. No disrespect to those films, but that action heavy touch is not what most fans wanted from Star Trek. These fears seem more or less confirmed when the film’s bombastic trailer hit, promising a lot of flash but nothing substantial. There was however one glimmer of hope in the fact that Simon Pegg co-wrote the screenplay. Pegg is a pretty credible voice in the geek community and his screenplay collaborations with Edgar Wright always showed a strong mix of intelligence, heart, and humour.

The film opens nearly three years into the Starship Enterprise’s five year mission to seek new life in the frontier of space. Their work has been going steady, but Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) finds himself disillusioned, unsure of what he is actually accomplishing. However his contemplation is cut short when the alien Kalara (Lydia Wilson) informs Kirk that her crew have been taken as prisoners on a hostile planet. Kirk and his crew, including Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Sulu (John Cho), and Scotty (Simon Pegg) embark on a rescue mission. Unbeknownst to them however, the kidnapping is really a trap set by the creature Krall (Idris Elba), who seeks to acquire an ancient weapon aboard the Enterprise.

Though the plot description might not read as such, Star Trek Beyond is actually a pretty clear effort to make the series feel more like Star Trek than the previous films (particularly Into Darkness). The film may lack a dense science-fiction plot or strong political allegory, but the underlying theme of the film is about groups of people working together to achieve a common goal. That’s obviously a pretty simplistic theme, but it speaks to the inclusivity and optimism that lies at the heart of Star Trek. Perhaps more importantly, Kirk and Spock actually feel in character. Kirk is no longer portrayed as a reckless punk who should have no business commanding a ship and at no point does Spock violently beat someone while screaming emotionally. The two feel much truer this time around and their arcs, especially Kirk’s, are more substantial and interesting than in the previous films, even if they are fairly predictable.

In keeping with Star Trek Beyond’s more hopeful themes is the film’s noticeably lighter tone. The basic story here is (relatively) small scale and the film maintains a sense of fun throughout. There’s a lot of humour here, but it’s incorporated pretty naturally and is done almost exclusively through the character’s interactions with each other. That point is crucial as it means the film can keep a fun tone while still having some sense of menace. The villains do engage in some pretty evil stuff here and the stakes are felt. In short, Star Trek Beyond works as a light adventure, but never totally embraces the comedy in the way something like Guardians of the Galaxy does.

In that sense, the film also functions well as simply an exciting action film. The action ratio is about the same as it was in the Abrams films and Lin does a pretty good job staging the various shootouts, fights, chases, and space battles. For the most part, Lin also avoids making these set-pieces too big. Things are pretty restrained, though there are some groaners like why a starship would feature an old-fashioned motorcycle other than for a slightly contrived chase sequence and the use of popular music like the Beastie Boys, while more creative than I would have expected, still seemed pretty stupid. Generally speaking, Lin fits in the director’s chair pretty well here. He manages to maintain the same basic visual aesthetic while not feeling totally beholden to what J.J. Abrams did and the film is certainly put together professionally. I still don’t think the Star Trek films really need to be action movies, but as action films these reboot films continue to work pretty well.

Star Trek Beyond is a film that does a lot right, but it also stumbles in one of the most crucial areas; the plot. Yet again, we have a Star Trek film which revolves around a villain attempting to use a doomsday weapon out of a sense of hatred/vengeance. The Trek films have been stuck on this rut since the Next Generation movies and it’s become increasingly tiresome. To be fair, Lin, Pegg, and co-writer Doug Jung do offset this somewhat by focusing more on the character interactions than the storyline. That probably is where the real heart of the movie lies and a lot of those character beats do work. Additionally, there is a twist involving Krall that makes him more interesting than he initially seemed, even if his motives are still a little questionable. Still, I can’t help but roll my eyes at the repeated use of the same damn story over and over again, especially when you consider the variety of plots in the original series run. There was a story of exploration and humanity, a revenge tale which explored gradual acceptance of failure and mortality, a quest to save a lost friend, a comedic time travel story with heavy environmental messages, a journey into the unknown to find God, and a brilliant political parallel to the end of the Cold War. Not all of these movies were great, but at least they took risks and tried to tell new stories.

Is Star Trek Beyond the Trek film I wanted? Not really. The Trek films have been starved a good story for a long time and to see this franchise continue to go hungry is very disappointing. Having said that, this is certainly a step in the right direction. The characters and tone feel right, and its themes of togetherness (though very basic) are refreshing at a time when the world seems to be splintering further apart each day. Audiences looking for a summer blockbuster will also mostly be well-served by Beyond. The cast remains a lot of fun, the film is well paced, the production values high, and generally speaking this is a pretty enjoyable romp. In spite of the issues with the plot, this is an enjoyable film thanks to a lot of the details and some strong filmmaking. If this had greater substance, I’d be more than happy to embrace this fully. As it stands though, Star Trek Beyond remains a solid enough effort.

B-

Another thing I wanted to mention: I loved Michael Giacchino's scores for the first two Abrams reboots (in fact, I'm listening to the '09 one right now), but his Beyond score was kind of bland, to be honest.

To be fair he pretty much used the some music ques from the first movie in both sequels... I don't see how it can be bad?

For a moment there, I thought you were gonna try to defend the Beyond score, haha.  But Into Darkness has a lot of exciting action cues.

Saw it today, mostly liked it, will get around to a full review. Had a thought while watching though and wanted to throw it out there right away. Forgive me if this has been brought up earlier.

Star Trek Beyond(7/31/2016)

To say I was way less excited for Star Trek Beyond than I should have been for a goddamn Star Trek movie is a pretty big understatement. I say that as someone who has a pretty high tolerance for bad Star Trek. Like, as much as I like the old Star Trek TV series I’m kind of the first to admit that something like a third of the episodes of the various series kind of suck and half of the original cast and Next Generation movie adaptations (the odd ones) are comparatively weak. However, as inconsistent as Star Trek has been in the past it’s always felt like it was done in the right spirit and had a charm that carried it and that is the problem with the recent reboots of the franchise. J.J. Abram’s first Star Trek was extremely well received in 2009 but I wasn’t so impressed. I liked it but I didn’t think it was anything too special and I feel like its legacy has more or less borne that out. People generally don’t hate it but very few people look back on it as some kind of classic of the 2000s… it’s kind of been forgotten. Then there was its sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, a movie that wasn’t bad so much as it was brought down by some really bad ideas. It had the look and feel of a superior sequel but there were aspects of it that were just too stupid to be overlooked and forgiven. Then it was announced that J.J. Abrams would be leaving the franchise to helm some other science fiction series that was probably more in touch with his sensibilities, to which I was about ready to say “good riddance” but he was then replaced by Justin Lin, who was most famous for having directed four straight entries of the “The Fast and The Furious” franchise. Now, I enjoy the F&F movies to some degree and I do think Lin was good for that series, but nothing about that resume screams “this guy will bring the cerebral back to the series” and the trailers that followed seemed to suggest as much. As such I skipped the movie its opening weekend and waited a whole week to see it… which saying it doesn’t seem that punitive… but to have me being so nonchalant about seeing a Trek movie means a lot about how far my expectations have fallen.

Star Trek Beyond picks up a couple of years after the end of “Into Darkness” and the crew of the enterprise has finally started on their famous five year mission to boldly go where no one has gone before. We open with Kirk (Chris Pine) on a diplomatic mission to deliver a peace offering to a group of aliens who are not terribly receptive to it and ends up beaming back to his ship with the artifact and return to the Yorktown Space Station. Soon after they arrive a ship of unknown origin comes racing to the station broadcasting a mayday call sign. The alien woman on board explains that she is the last survivor of a mission on a planet hidden behind a nebula and that the rest of her crew is still there in need of saving. Because of its advanced navigational equipment the Enterprise is selected to embark with this woman on a rescue mission but soon finds that there’s more going on on this planet than meets the eye and that they are heading toward grave danger.

Star Trek Beyond has one major advantage over its two predecessor films: it has the origin story 100% out of the way. Kirk is the captain of the enterprise and he’s finally over his youthful arrogance and no longer acts like a cocky teenager. The film is no longer dwelling on the alternate universe thing established by the first film and it generally isn’t trying to be too clever by half this time around. In many ways this makes the film feel more like the original TV series than the other movies and can be roughly compared to one of the show’s standalone episodes where an away crew explores some crazy planet with some weird thing happening on the surface. This is not the worst approach to take all things considered and reminded me a bit of the “bigger than average TV episode” approach that worked well enough for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek: Insurrection. Given that this series kind of needed to step back and course correct I don’t mind the decision, but it does mean that there’s sort of a cap on how much could be accomplished by the movie.

The action scenes in this movie are… well most of them are very good but none of them are really GREAT. Justin Lin has set aside most of the crazy stunt work that he employed in the Fast and Furious series but has maintained his knack for solid blocking and choreography. There’s a very good scene early in the film which has the Enterprise at its most vulnerable as well as a pretty cool fight at the end. All of that is consistently fun but none of these are actions scenes for the ages that people will be talking about years from now. The movie is also saddled with some of the usual summer blockbuster action movie drawbacks as well. The villain’s motivations do not really make all that much sense for one thing and much of the film’s plot hinges on the characters chasing around an ill-defined McGuffin. What’s more the film’s meager attempts to engage in Star Trekian philosophizing kind of fall on their face. There’s a sort of debate established between Uhura and the villain about whether or not Starfleet’s unity makes it strong, with the villain arguing that their unity makes them weak. Interesting concept but one at odds with the rest of the film. This villain who seems to hate unity so much is actually in charge of an army that operates on a hive mind which is pretty much unity writ large and, without giving too much away, this unity emphatically does not make this army more strong.

So what does this installment say about the state of Star Trek and about its new director Justin Lin. It’s a little hard to compare this to the previous two Star Trek movies in that in some ways I think more highly of it simply because there are fewer things in it that piss me off. I don’t know, I don’t want to encourage franchise filmmakers to be less ambitious but it is nice to see one that is able to relax a little and isn’t desperately trying to surpass its predecessor in every way. It’s the kind of approach that I kind of wish the James Bond movies would start taking, that’s a series that is really at its best when it isn’t trying to upset the applecart. As for Justin Lin, he maybe benefits a little less from this approach. The movie is certainly well crafted, but we already knew he could capably craft a blockbuster. This would have been a perfect vehicle to show that there was more to Lin than simple craftsmanship and that he could craft a blockbuster that was capable of reaching a bit higher and I think he kind of squandered it. Still, this is coming out in what feels like a historically lame summer movie season and this isn’t the best of time to be too picky about our entertainments.

***1/2 out of Five