Star Trek Beyond

Director: Justin Lin

Year: 2016

Runtime: 120 minutes

Rating: 5/10

“Our captain will come for us. Mercy will be the last thing on his mind.”

The biggest surprise and disappointment of Star Trek: Beyond is how unexciting it is. It’s not boring, not bad, just competently made straightforward Hollywood CG spectacle.

The third installment in this newest series of Trek films, Beyond largely ignores its predecessor, and could work as a straight sequel to J. J. Abram’s 2009 reboot of the franchise. Beyond has a magnificent opening sequence that shows the dull, episodic nature of everyday life onboard The USS Enterprise, three years into their five-year mission. The sequence is funny, but, narrated by Kirk (Chris Pine) at the most world-weary we’ve ever seen him, there’s a thick sadness which hangs over it. This opening promises a film that’s funny yet emotionally truthful, but that’s not what follows. The groundwork laid for character development is quickly disregarded in favor of manic action scenes, and only given perfunctory nods as the film draws to a close.

After some obligatory zooming around space and stuff blowing up, the crew finds itself scattered across an alien planet whose leader wants them dead, with no means of contacting help. This allow screenwriters Simon Pegg and Doug Jung to pair up our heroes in new combinations for extended periods of time, but nothing interesting comes of this. Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Bone (Karl Urban), for instance, are such opposites they seem like a comedic goldmine when put together, but the execution of their scenes together is just profoundly lackluster.

Director Justin Lin seemed like an ideal choice to take over the reigns of the franchise from J. J. Abrams. In 2009, the same year Abram’s first Star Trek premiered, so did Lin’s first entry into the Fast and Furious (2001, Cohen) series. Lin’s first Fast & Furious movie was nothing special, but his two subsequent installments (Fast 5 and Furious 6) were. Their combination of caricatured masculinity, silly melodrama and spectacular action scenes made them aggressively entertaining and, at times, oddly moving. They proved Lin could work within an established franchise, stage and shoot action scenes, and handle a large ensemble cast; all necessary for the next Star Trek director after Abrams.

But making films are never an exact science, and something about this experiment simply failed. Beyond is shot and edited in a kinetic manner that looks like a natural extension of Abram’s style in the first two films, but it somehow lacks all the excitement here. Despite all the crazy, big, expensive action spectacle on display, this film never manages to wow you. Perhaps it’s because there’s so much CG here, whereas the Fast and Furious films had the occasional practical effect, or maybe it’s simply that Lin’s talent for farfetched action scenarios are better suited for an absurd franchise. There’re several nods to specific action moments from Lin’s Fast and Furious films in Beyond, for instance, both film’s has a sequence where our hero catapults himself through the air from a vehicle to save someone, but the moments just don’t land here. (Here’s the magnificent scene from Fast 6 – I’ll leave the Beyond one out for the sake of spoilers):

The cast is all great: everyone are either superhumanly good-looking or funny, and they all have great chemistry, but the franchise needs a script that recognizes that in Star Trek’s current iteration, its cast and characters are its strong suit. The film isn’t a disaster, just a disappointment after what felt like a surefire home run, with a match made in heaven between director and franchise.

 

Links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2660888/combined

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_beyond/

http://www.startrekmovie.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Beyond

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=startrek2016.htm