There’s not much of a fresh mystery element to this story which we have become accustomed to with our Star Trek installments.
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Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty and co-wrote the script for Star Trek Beyond, got his start playing the dork-like Tim on the 1990s Brit TV series Spaced.
I am a huge fan of Pine and Quinto in these roles and they continue to make them their own in Star Trek Beyond – but without every forgetting what has gone before.
Three years into a five-year mission, the crew of the Enterprise stops for some downtime at an vast new space station. Yet, “Star Trek Beyond” manages to knock you for a bigger loop with just the sight of one man staring at a photograph. Feelings run deep stemming from the death previous year of original Spock Leonard Nimoy at 83 and for late actor Anton Yelchin, as the Russian navigator Chekov, who died last month at 27 in a tragic accident. Aside from some intra-crew drama, things are going well enough for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg) and the rest of the crew. The visionary director landed his dream gig directing Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which caused him to hand over the keys to the ship for Star Trek Beyond to Justin Lin who helped reinvigorate the Fast and Furious franchise. A supposed rescue mission turns out to be a ruse masterminded by the villainous Krall (Idris Elba, behind tons of makeup) to obtain an ancient artifact the Enterprise is carrying, which he plans to use to build a doomsday device. You’ll know it the moment you see it. Come to “Star Trek Beyond” for the pow; stay for the emotional wipeout. The back and forth between Spock and Bones is exceptionally sharp, while Jayla is the most welcome character addition the reboots have provided thus far and one of the strongest female characters in “Trek” history. In more earthbound terms, that should also bring some good news to its studio, Paramount, amid the corporate soap opera now surrounding it. “When the character was introduced in the original film he was coming through a horrendously traumatic and painful divorce and I didn’t know anything about that”. Krall destroys the Enterprise with his cool-looking swarming weapons (this is now the third Trek movie to feature the destruction of the Enterprise), stranding the crew on an abandoned planet, where most of the movie takes place. Though there are many thrilling heroics to follow, the action feels like a natural byproduct of the story and the dire straits in which the crew finds itself, as opposed to being shoehorned in to appeal to a wider audience.
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There’s no set release date just yet for the Star Trek Beyond DVD, but early estimates say the film will be out sometime in November 2016.
