Star Trek: Beyond
Beyond what? A joke? That’s cheap, this is OK stuff, decent, fast paced entertainment that just doesn’t bear too close scrutiny. I’m late getting to it, I admit, because Star Trek never fired my phasers like it did some- Shatner as Kirk was smugly dislikeable even before the revelations about him actually being smugly displayable surfaced with the rash of ST autobiographies in the 90s, and Roddenbury’s vision of the Federation, whilst certainly something to aim at in a theoretical sense, always seemed like a bit of a happy-clappy cult to me. So, new Star Trek? Thanks, I’ll wait for a rental.
Anyhow, here it is, and it’s not bad. Not to say that it’s all good, suffering from a surfeit of plot holes and inconsistencies (Although not in the same league as Alien: Covenant), but at least it moves along at a frantic pace with action from a few minutes in and no forgetting that it’s here to entertain (Alien: Covenant…). One problem with these films is that, divergent histories and timelines aside, we know that this is an unkillable franchise and that the federation will prevail. In that respect, blowing the film up to two hours doesn’t alter the fact that our expectations are the same as watching an episode from a TV series.
So, essentially at the same time that everybody on the Enterprise is suffering from existential angst, Starfleet is suckered into sending the ship out on a faked rescue mission that sees the ship brought down by a swarm of single seat aggressor craft in a huge overuse of CGI. It also prompts the first WTF moment in that the Enterprise’s hull is repeatedly punctured but apparently seals itself to prevent massive instant decompression. Well, maybe. Anyhow, the ship is boarded by yer typical alien, i.e. standard bipedal bloke in a an armoured space suit, there’s a bit of action, the Enterprise crashes, the bridge crew are split up, the red shirts and extras are captured, and it turns out that the bad guy, Krall (Idris Elba) is a federation hating psycho in search of a weaponised McGuffin to wreak some kind of dastardly vengeance. There was a certain amount of dissatisfaction with this casting, some reviewers saying ‘It could have been anybody under the prosthetics’. Well, yes, but you can say that about any alien part that requires similar makeup, why should this be different? Elba is a big guy with a powerful physical presence and he uses this well, avoiding the Dr Evil campiness of so many Star Trek villains, and his body language, disjointed diction and delivery worked well for me, equally in the later (Spoiler here) scene where he is seen becoming unhinged in his video log. A waste of an actor? No, not unless there’s a reason I don’t know why he should always be recognisably Idris Elba. The only disappointment is that this film ends with a fist fight, as Star Trek so often does, and unless there’s something we don’t know about little Chris Pine (Such as him spending 11 years in the Shaolin monastery), I think we all know who would win. One thing, though, space is definitely American. The Federations giant floating cult compound is the Yorktown, and in three movies we’ve had two British and one Australian bad guy- give us a break guys- and why isn’t the future a lot more Chinese?
The other good performance under a mask is Sofia Boutella as Jaylah, an alien version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and physically inhabiting her role with complete conviction as in, say, Kingsman, or even as a mute presence of projected peace and serenity in Monsters: The Dark Continent. The rest of the cast work through their impersonations of the original cast, to varying degrees of success, Karl Urban nailing DeForest Kelly’s lugubriousness nicely, as always.
There was a certain amount of comment and discussion about the depiction of John Cho’s Sulu as gay. George Takei himself thought it was unnecessary, bringing attention to same sex relationships as though they were still to be regarded as unusual, or noteworthy when society had presumably developed over the next few hundred years. Cho himself has gone on record as stating that it was a tribute to Takei himself, out, content, and respected. Personally, I thought it was sweetly done- Sulu simply meets up with his partner and there daughter on the Yorktown, and they go off, casually happy and at ease in each other’s company. No comment one way or another, natural and human. Back with the film, it lurches from one set piece to another, with the bridge crew, as ever, doing the grunt work, fighting the alien soldiers (Drones, although whether mechanical or biological isn't explained.), zipping about on motorcycles, repairing a decades defunct spaceship in a couple of hours (The Federation really does build tough ships- this thing has been overgrown by forest for years, crashes through solid mountain peaks without a dent and still hits faster than light), working out that for all the sophistication of their opponents they blow up when The Beastie Boys are played at them, and crashing the salvaged Franklin into the Yorktown. The latter doesn’t result in the catastrophic damage that you would expect, and plays much like the similar seen from Into Darkness. That’s maybe the problem- so much of this is familiar, to one degree or another. It has plot holes, inconsistencies, but it entertains, except that at the end any of the imagination from the original is once again lots- sure, the original series looks hackneyed and low budget now, but we’ve had three movies of mad megalomaniacs with a grudge against the Federation, where are the giant space amoebae, the evil parallel dimension where everybody has a little Van Dyke beard, or the misunderstood subterranean creature accidentally killing mining colonists? Plus, how many times does Kirk get The Enterprise shot from under him before his superiors stop giving him ships?














