On Star Trek: Beyond
Finally saw Star Trek: Beyond last night and it is a total mess. It’s a very pretty mess, with some absolutely stunning cinematography and beautiful images, but it was not what I would call a coherent cinematic experience.
And yet, it was a fun mess, and for one reason:
The movie was on the side of its characters. Compare that to Star Trek Into 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, and the difference is immediately apparent. Into Darkness was on nobody’s side but the scriptwriter’s. He had a point to make, come hell or high water, and the characters’ histories, motivations, personalities, etc. be damned. The characters, such as they existed, were there to get us to strap ourselves into the crazy train of a storyline, and their presence as themselves was ultimately incidental. There was nothing there that Chekhov or Sulu or Uhura or even Bones and Kirk and Spock did - except that one horrible revision of the emotional climax of Wrath of Khan - that demanded that those characters be the ones doing it at the time.
With Beyond, however, for all its many flaws, the script - co-written by the guy who played Scotty - clearly love and supports the characters, and the characters are half of what makes Star Trek great. (The other half is the relentless insistence on flying straight into whatever weird energy field happens to be in front of the Enterprise at the time, consequences be damned). The script wanted each character to shine; it gave each one challenges, large and small, suited to their skills and personalities, and went out of its way to make them all look good. To make them all seem, for lack of a better word, loved.
So Chekhov got to be smart and good at his job. And Sulu got to be smart and good at his job, and showed a facility for command - a foreshadow of his alternate universe career path - when the time came. Scotty actually engineered stuff and made it go, and new character Taylah got depicted as smart and capable and interesting right off the bat. Bones did some actual clever doctoring, and Uhura kicked ass and figured out all the stuff a comms officer should figure out that no one else could or should. And Kirk felt like Kirk and Spock felt like Spock (especially since most of his and Uhura’s screen time wasn’t devoted to awkward romantic bickering), and most of all the bond between Kirk and Spock and Bones felt natural and worthy of celebration.
And so for that I will forgive the nonsensical plot, and the fact that half the fight scenes were shot in such murky darkness they looked like the end of Rollerball, and the fact that the bad guy somehow managed to launch roughly forty gazillion ships from an outpost that looked like it housed maybe a couple of hundred people max, and the weird “oh crap we have two minutes at the end of the movie to explain all the crap that doesn’t make sense” infodump about the bad guy (Idris Elba, who didn’t shout nearly as much as I was hoping for in a post-Pacific Rim performance) and, well, the hell with it.
It was a mess. But it was a fun one. And all things considered, I’ll take that.