Star Trek Beyond (2016)

I’ll admit to being something of a Star Trek novice, having only seen the most recent JJ Abrams reboots and one or two of the Picard-era films (the latter, when I was too young to comprehend fully that they weren’t Star Wars). It’s a glaring absence on my nerd-bingo card, one I’ll get around to rectifying one of these days. But for now I’m content with the sporadic relationship I have with Star Trek, mostly because the new franchise hasn’t disappointed yet: Star Trek Beyond is the hat trick for the series, an engaging and exciting romp.

Several years into their “five-year mission,” the crew of the Enterprise are feeling directionless. Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is looking for a way out of his purposeless command, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) are having a bit of a tiff over the former’s anxiety about mortality. An opportunity to mount a rescue mission into deep space rallies the Enterprise together, only to find them falling into the hands of the murderous and mysterious Krall (Idris Elba).

Despite my misgivings about the final act of Star Trek Into Darkness, I predicted that the next film would be “a real hoot,” and I’m glad to report that I was right. Even without JJ Abrams at the directorial helm this time (you may recall he was off directing a little film about forces awakening), Justin Lin proves adept at science fiction and keeping the momentum of the film going between action sequences and conversation pieces.

Indeed, the real success of the film is the chemistry between the cast. Of course, it’s been seven years in our world, and the cast really seem to have bonded in that time, approximating the tensions and dynamics of a deep-space voyage. Everyone continues the caliber of work they’ve done previously (save Simon Pegg, who pulls double-duty on screenplay but seems more isolated from the rest of the cast), but it’s Quinto’s interactions with Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy that steal the film wholesale. The juxtaposition of sassy physician with cold logic is something I don’t recall dominating the other two to this extent (Bones was memorably paired with Kirk as POV characters for Star Trek in 2009), but I’d watch a whole movie about these two.

I would have liked to see more of Idris Elba as the antagonist, and while that’s a sentence I usually say about most movies it’s especially apt in Star Trek Beyond because I remember having a distinct feeling near the beginning of the third act that I had no clue what his motivations were. It’s a step in the opposite direction from Into Darkness, where Kirk knew that John Harrison was evil because Old Spock told him so, and Krall’s motivations are abundantly clear by the end of the film in a way that ties together a number of disparate plot threads with surprising aplomb. I don’t quite know how I might have addressed this element without giving away the twist, other than to say Elba deserves more screen time, but it strikes me as a slight tension in the film.

All told, though, the greatest compliment I can pay Star Trek Beyond is to say that it isn’t a poor impression of Guardians of the Galaxy, much as the early trailers attempted to convince us. It is purely its own thing, the first wholly original plotline that doesn’t derive its narrative momentum from the concept of an alternate timeline. In this sense, Star Trek Beyond boldly goes where no Star Trek reboot has gone before, into fresh and original storytelling that is no longer beholden to what came before.

Star Trek Beyond is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action and violence,” which is exactly what it sounds like.