Star Trek Beyond review
Okay let’s do an update on my opinions of the last 2 Star Trek movies…
Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness are both fairly decent sci-fi summer blockbusters with solid action, great visuals, and a really great cast that are both sadly bogged down by a lot of really bad screen-writing tropes of the last decade or so that hold them back from being really good. I mean the first movie basically had to spend the entirety of its needlessly convoluted plot justifying why the movie can simultaneously be a reboot AND have Leonard Nimoy present. The second movie’s honestly just a mess altogether, but I’ll let it slide for now because I honestly haven’t seen it for 3 years. Keep in mind I’ve also never been able to get into a lot of Star Trek in general. I don’t have anything against the concepts or aesthetics or anything, but I was always more of a Star Wars guy and honestly just don’t have the time or the patience to wade through a lot of the old stuff.
Anyway, the new Star Trek is really good and you should totally go see it.
If there’s one reason I can pinpoint why Star Trek Beyond works better then the first two, its probably just because it decides to outright ignore all the convoluted world-building the first two movies kept getting bogged down in. There are still allusions here or there to the events of the previous movies, but everything’s refreshingly self contained. You can totally walk into this movie not having seen the first two and still have a great time.
Another key to Beyond’s success is that it distinctly feels like a Star Trek movie; much more so then its predecessors. I’m not saying J.J. Abrahms didn’t get Star Trek, I mean I’m clearly not him so what do I know, but I’m guessing what he really wanted to do all along was just do Star Wars. Meanwhile, here come’s Justin Lin of all people to show us all how its done.
The plot of the movie is very simple. Kirk and the crew of the enterprise get lured to a remote planet by new bad guy Krull, played by Idris Elba who’s probably having a very productive year all things considered, so that he can destroy the Enterprise and steal an important artifact they have in their possession. The plot’s pretty darn standard even for Star Trek, but it’s all in the execution.
Usually I’m not a big fan of “Let’s split all the characters up into groups for the second act” but here it works here if only for how well the Bones/Spock pairing ends up being. There’s also a new character in here named Jaylah played by Sofia Boutella aka that awesome henchwoman from Kingsmen. Jaylah is awesome, one of my favorite new characters of the year, and I’ll be sorely disappointed if they don’t include her in the next movie. The villain Krull is pretty standard villain stuff overall, but he does get some nice development right toward the end that helps to smooth it out.
And while I honestly do wanna level some legitimate criticism here about how the plot seems be explained on the fly a little too much or how the camera won’t stop framing things weirdly, the fact is that there’s so little tediousness to bog down the good this time around that was good to begin with shines through so much better.
The action is fantastically well directed, the dialogue is witty and fun, the emotional moments actually have some surprising weight to them even though they’re very spaced out, the acting’s fantastic, the cast all work well with each other, it’s often quite funny, and its just an overall great summer blockbuster in every sense! There’s not much else to say here people, this just works!
If I went into more detail here I’d probably spoil some of the good parts here. Let’s just leave it at this; Star Trek Beyond is a really fun ride, and in a year that’s honestly been kinda up and down, it makes this stand out all the more.
The Media Fire gives this movie 8.7/10
