Star Trek Beyond gets lost in space

Beyond is the third installment in the Star Trek reboot. Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek - Into Darkness (2013) were both good films. The success and quality of the restart stems, in part, from the clever time-travel slide of hand unveiled at the beginning of the first new Star Trek, which left us with all of the beloved characters from of the original but placed them at a new starting point to shoot off from. From that new vertex has come two good stories that have mixed the fresh with the familiar. The Star Trek series now lives in a slightly tangential universe from the one we experienced with Bill Shatner and crew. But the characters’ DNA is the same and J. Abrams and his writers used that concept beautifully in the first two films to weave our old friends through new tales within a slightly twisted Star Trek environment. Star Trek Beyond aims to follow the same path with a story that mirrors, in a distorted way, another time from the original Star Trek – a story of finding ones “first best destiny” amidst fear and doubt – a la The Wrath of Khan (1982). But alas, Beyond lacks the substance and heart of its parallel-predecessor – Beyond’s turning points get lost in a “fast and furious” blur. 

After three years of the “five-year-mission,” James Tiberius Kirk is wondering what it’s all about. He took the Federation gig on a dare. Now, three years in, and dealing with the more mundane tasks of exploring strange new worlds, Kirk is “lost” and on the brink of taking a desk job. Recall that the Shatner-version of Kirk was in a similar fix in the original Star Trek universe until Kahn showed up in the Botany Bay. But with the Kahn character used up by J. Abram’s in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), new director Justin Lin (Fast and the Furious) and a writing team that included Simon Pegg (who also plays Scotty) give us Krall, a lizardy villian who tricks Kirk into putting the Enterprise in harms way but also reignites the Captain’s juices as he fights to save her. If this sounds supremely familiar, it should – it was Kahn, recall, who masqueraded as a Federation star ship to rend the old Enterprise from a spectacled Shatner-Kirk back in 82. Krall is also searching for a super weapon reminiscent of Kahn’s quest for the “Genesis Probe.”But it’s not the familiarity that stymies Beyond – that’s expected with the new Trek universe – we welcome the parallelism and are tantalized wondering how it will be fashioned in each new film. No, it’s not the concept that is the problem, it’s the follow through – there is none.  

This was all foreshadowed of course. I mean, with the director of the Fast and the Furious mega-series and the author of the scripts for Hot Fuzz and Sean of the Dead at the helm (or conn), you can’t expect anything too profound – and this team certainly met my lowered expectations. The finding of Kirk’s best self, it turns out, is a very minor side story attached to a very forgettable core. Lin and his team are much more about the visual than the visceral. But his relentless action scenes trend from frantic to incomprehensible. They are long things, narrated by the crew’s rapid fire, nonsensical, MacGyver escape ideas. And poor Krall is a hot mess – his villainous motivations are feeble and the explanation for his existence – extremely questionable. Even the Kirk-Spock-Bones interplay, which I thought might be highlighted by Pegg’s comedic talents, seem strained, as if the writer has worked to hard to get them into the same elevator or transporter. It’s not that the buddy scenes are bad because there not – they’re easily the best part of the film. But they’re not enough to keep Star Trek Beyond from ranking third of three in the new Star Trek enterprise. 5.5 out of 10.