To boldly go where no movie has gone before? Well, considering this is the 13th Star Trek flick its going where the movies have been going for decades! Simon Pegg once said that every odd numbered Star Trek movie is shit, considering he cowrote this one lets see if his prophecy is self-fulfilling with Star Trek Beyond.
The third in the new series of Star Trek movies, this picks up a few years after the last one, where the crew of the Enterprise are three years into their 5 year mission. Kirk is getting sick of travelling deep space and wants to move to the admiralty (as he had in the very first, and arguably, very worst Star Trek flick) and Spock is considering resigning his commission to go help what survivors of the Vulcan race are left after the events of the first of the new Star Trek movies.
But of course, something comes up (otherwise this would be a movie about politics and administration and we already have the Star Wars movies from the 90’s for that). An alien woman asking for help for her crew stranded on the other side of a nebula which blocks all scanning and transmissions. And off goes The Enterprise like intergalactic boy scouts to do some good.
Very quickly we are treated to a big space-battle scene. Thousands of dart-shaped ships acting as swarm, smashing into the Enterprise from all directions! Some of these darts pierce the ship to release soldiers, others are just used to tear big holes in the hull. The Enterprise very quickly finds itself completely outmatched and over the prolonged scene we get to see it completely destroyed a piece at a time. Soon only a damaged saucer section is left and it goes crashing into the planet below (much like Star Trek: Generations).
The reason for all this? Some little disk thingy the bad guy wants, that ironically Kirk tried to give to a bunch of ugly little fraggers at the start of the movie that were too paranoid to accept it. After everything moves planetside the bad guy discovers he does not have it due to a switch and all the surviving Enterprise crew are either held in a detention camp or, if they are one of the stars, emerging from evacuation pods in the forest.
We are treated to some nice scenes between Spock and Bones during their struggle to find shelter for the seriously injured Spock, though they lack the magic, adversarial repartee that Kelly and Nimoy were always able to bring. We also come to know the one good alien in the movie, a blond, slightly scary, slightly sexy survivalist who Scotty brokers a friendship with. Over the film she becomes one of the few characters you actually come to care about – for an alien she comes across a lot more fragile yet strong and human than most of the actual human characters. Strangely, Kirk doesn’t try to shag her, it must have been an off day for him what with losing the Enterprise and all.
As the crew on the loose hatch a plan, we get to see the why the bad guy wanted the disk (which Kirk had hidden in a crewmates head. Considering it was Kirk and a female crew member this shows unusually tactful restraint on his part). It triggers a bio-weapon that completely destroys organic life. As weapons go, it’s just a little black cloud so not nearly as impressive as the black-hole generating red goop of the first of the new flicks. He plans to release it into a gigantic space station we saw in the film earlier and which is really one of the major feats of CGI in the movie – it looks fantastic as a brain-bending, gravity altering snow-globe in space.
So off the bad guy goes with his dart-ship armada to lay waste while the crew, now rescued by Kirk on a motorcycle, find an old starship and fly off to stop him. What we are treated to is the next big battle scene in the movie which on the one hand is awesome and the other hand has a lot of holes in it. The crew discover that all the darts share a link to stop them crashing into each other and it can be disrupted with loud enough noise if broadcasted close enough. So on goes a track by The Beastie Boys and they surf the space-wave of darts, them blowing up by the thousands to some bitchin tunes!
It sounds awesome, it looks awesome, but in the context of the movie it doesn’t make sense. None of the darts are ever seen to be drones, they all have pilots, so why didn’t they scatter from each other? Also, the ones stationary on the Space Stations hull also blow up – why? They are not crashing into anything and it’s not like the dart and Bones and Spock are flying blows up as well. And while there were thousands of darts before, there are MILLIONS now! Certainty a lot more than were seen leaving the planet earlier. But it makes for cool candy for the senses and we are talking about fictional space battles so I suppose one should not treat it too seriously.
As the battle with the main bad guy (naturally his ship survived while millions of others didn’t) moves into the space station we find out the truth about him. It was his ship on the planet that crashed there over a hundred years ago and through alien technology he and his crew found there they discover a way to live longer, though it mutates them and allows them to an extent to change their bodies. Now I liked this on the whole as I felt one of the things lacking in this movie up to that point was a backstory for the antagonist as well sufficient reasoning for him attacking the Federation. It turns out he was a Captain during wartime but when the wars finished and the Federation evolved into a peaceful society, he found himself a solider without a fight. Thus the bad guy in this movie, much like the Star Trek 2 and Star Trek Into Darkness is a human with extra powers. Kinda cool.
However as cool as this is it leaves more plot holes in the storyline. How did the crew of one small ship, over the course of not much over a century, grow into the millions? How were they able to construct so many of those ships? And if their longevity comes from sucking the lifeforce of other humanoids, how did they find enough aliens in this supposedly remote sector of space to do that without resorting to cannibalizing each other? Frankly, even in this fictional world, it just doesn’t make sense for this old captain to have been able to make such a force with such limited materials and manpower over that time period.
Anyway, the movie comes to its rather predictable conclusion, and reaching the 2 hour mark you feel well and truly ready for it to be done. Protagonist fights antagonist, Kirk sacrifices himself to save space station which results in bad guy getting eaten by own weapon, Kirk about to die but saved by Spock and Bones. For a pretty good movie, the ending was very by-the-numbers and you instinctively know what is going to happen before it does.
So despite the flaws mentioned, is Star Trek Beyond worth watching? Well, yes. The acting is good, the special effects are excellent, the battles are entertaining and if you are a Trekkie like me you can’t bypass one of these flicks. There are also for the Trek savvy lots of nice little Easter Eggs, such as Scotty saying that a ship was taken by a giant green hand (it happened in TOS – no really, it did!), Sulu having a daughter and his partner being male (Sulu had a daughter in Star Trek Generations and in real life George Takei who played him in the original series is a proud homosexual and proponent of gay marriage) and lots of other tiny little nods to other iterations of the franchise. There are also some nice homages to Leonard Nimoy who as most of you would know appeared in the first two new movies but died before this one. Whilst not delving too deep and not being too morose, both at the start and the end of the movie we are shown new Spock dealing with the death of the original Spock and what implications this has for the world.
So yeah, set your phasers to ‘relatively-fun’. It may go where other movies have gone before, but at least it does it with extra explosions and a bitchin soundtrack!