K-SCORE: 67
Director: Justin Lin
Writers: Simon Pegg, Doug Jung
Starring: Chris Pine, Simon Pegg, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“good for... people who really want to see characters falling”
“They should have been more careful with their ship,” said my mother about a third of the way through the film. I shook my head and couldn’t help but agree. Really, can I say it better? This is an incredibly frustrating film because they should have been more careful with their ship.
The complete destruction of the U.S.S. Enterprise is an apt metaphor for the sloppy plotting in this otherwise decent movie. We know Star Trek. The characters are good, in general, even if Uhura is awful. The concept is fantastic. The settings are spectacular, which is so wonderful in our modern era of tremendous visual effects. Even the dialogue had its moments of being snappy and funny, rarely that meaningful, but also rarely cringe-inducing. So why was so little attention paid to the overall direction of the story? It’s the most important part.
“gross negligence one moment causes some no-name crewmembers to be ejected into the void”
Star Trek Beyond has a really slow twenty-five minute opening where the characters essentially announce their boredom and feeling of purposelessness, and then once the essential conflict gets going, the film makes really fast leaps between explosive action scenes, pornographic displays of destruction, deus ex warp drives, or alien on human brawls. I frequently asked questions like, “I thought they were just captured; how did they get free?” or “How did those two meet up?” or “Where are they now and how did they get here?” The whole thing reeked of being a Hollywood Frankenstein’s monster script, various pieces grafted on by various people at various times until the final product only vaguely resembles a flawless original design. There’s no cohesion. And the choices they made with the plot that the audience can follow aren’t great to begin with. Playing music through the vacuum of space to destroy hordes of aliens that aren’t really aliens that at one point were capable of bringing down the whole Enterprise without a hitch? That’s just stupid. It’s stupid much like the youth-sucking former-starfleet captain villain is stupid. Barriers of physical space and time never make a difference to this story as the essential characters are never more than a few paces from each other. There are no ancillary characters, just cannon fodder / tactical liabilities. Make no mistake, the entirety of starfleet can be run by Spock, Kirk, Scotty, Chekov, Sulu, and McCoy, and consequently those people don’t feel that badly when their gross negligence one moment causes some no-name crewmembers to be ejected into the void or shredded by alien debris.
Star Trek Beyond isn’t terrible, but many of the systems ingrained in Hollywood’s brand of filmmaking make it ten times worse than it could have been were the project entrusted to a single devoted and talented storyteller. Scotty’s cheeky humor still works fairly well. Chris Pine barely pulls off a lazy brand of Kirk under the guise that he’s going through some existential crisis. Karl Urban might not know how geeky his doctor Leonard McCoy really is, but it’s not unpleasant to watch. And whoever is doing the visual effects work is a master of his or her craft. The starfleet city in deep space is absolutely beautiful. All of the action scenes where the camera pulls from one section of a ship or base to another are incredible. They do a fantastic job of capturing the epic feel of space combat in grander-than-Earth, gravity-bending environs.
Even that gets frustrating in the realm slipshod plotting. Why does everything have to be life or death, total annihilation or decisive and complete victory? I would be entertained enough to follow these characters in these places with this level of production quality even if all they were really doing was looking for a replacement quantum entangler drive that fits a B-7 drivebay so they can get off the quartz world of Ubax III… or whatever. Shenanigans along the way.
So yeah, they should have been more careful with their ship, because that’s at the heart of what we love about Star Trek. That the filmmakers feel they can destroy it in the third entry to their franchise makes me think they’re being irresponsible with material created by others. It also makes me just wish this was in an episodic format, you know like a television show.
Star Trek Beyond is a good watch for really dedicated fans, people who kind of like sci-fi but rarely actually think about it, and those who, for whatever reason, really want to see characters falling. They’re always falling. The Enterprise is falling towards the planet. They’re all falling within the ship. They’re all falling into their escape pods. The escape pods are falling into other ships. The other ships are falling into the planet. McCoy and Spock are falling within those other ships. Scotty’s falling when he gets out of his escape pod and almost falling off a cliff. Kirk and Chekov are falling down the suddenly vertical Enterprise disk. Jada’s falling towards Kirk who’s on a motorcycle that’s then falling and then they’re both falling onto the launch pad. Idris Elba is falling up! Star Trek Beyond What I Would Consider a Reasonable Amount of Falling.