With Star Wars now an annual event, Star Trek has to improve.
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If you are looking for some blockbuster action on the big screen this week, look no further than Star Trek Beyond. “But, with ‘Star Trek Beyond, ‘ Justin Lin takes the wheel and brings his fast-paced, full throttle, action touch that made ‘The Fast and the Furious” films so popular. (Is there a fan of the franchise over the age of 30 who ever would have thought they’d see Trek characters toe-tapping to the Beastie Boys?) There’s also plenty of humor to offset the traditional Trek stiffness. The sharp-tongued, heartwarming Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy was played by Deforest Kelley as a man in a state of constant exasperation, thanks to Mr. Spock’s emotionless logic. A graduate of York University, he likes creating stories just as much as writing movie reviews.
For a fantasy enthusiast and general movie lover like myself, “Star Trek Beyond” is not only a thrilling sci-fi space adventure, but it proves that sequels, and further installments of a movie series, can be just as good as the ones before it.
Holy depth perception! Star Trek Beyond is probably one of the best usages of spatial reasoning and the illusion of depth that I’ve seen all year. The third film in the rebooted iteration that placed younger versions of the Enterprise crew in an altered timeline from the TOS shows and first seven movies, it sees “Fast & Furious” franchise maestro Justin Lin taking the directorial com from “Star Trek” (2009) and “Into Darkness’ ” J.J. Abrams, who served as a “Beyond” producer while he directed (oh, the betrayal) “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. As Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto might say, it’s all about family.
William Shatner was at the helm of the Enterprise as the bold and intuitive James Tiberius Kirk.
Even more promising is the fact that both Chris Pine (Captain James T. Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Commander Spock) signed onto a fourth movie more than a year ago. They’ve been out there exploring the final frontier for a while now and it shows.
Overall this movie plays out exactly how you would think a “Star Trek” movie would, which isn’t a bad thing. But all that “episodic” exploration, as Kirk puts it, is starting to weigh on the good Captain. Spock meanwhile grapples with a personal dilemma: should he continue with Starfleet or join his people on New Vulcan to help rebuild his society? As he contemplates making some serious changes, he and his crew are tasked by the Federation with a rescue mission that only their spacecraft is equipped to handle.
When the Starship Enterprise is attacked, Kirk and the gang find themselves on the surface of yet another odd planet. Alliances are formed with the locals and characters get time to breathe.
“We’d say, ‘Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone comes out, and she finds these guys, ‘” recalls Pegg. The film makes giant, heaping efforts to ground itself in Gene Roddenberry’s philosophy, and it does so foremost through the way its staggering effects are designed and rendered. That led to “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” in 1979 and 12 more feature films counting this week’s release, “Star Trek Beyond”, not to mention one animated and six additional television series set in various quadrants and eras of the Trek universe, including a new one scheduled to hit CBS platforms in January of next year. The overall feel of the film that I touched on earlier, that of a classic episode of “Star Trek”, feels like a breath of fresh air in a world of films that are more concerned with world building than they are with basic storytelling. – End Spoilers – Thankfully these little nods never feel like the fan service from Into Darkness, which hammered viewers over the head with references to “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan – and only served to remind longtime fans of how much better the source material was.
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Plus, the filmmakers have saddled Krall with a strained motivation for his dastardly plan that-wouldn’t you know it?-runs perfectly counter to Kirk and his crew’s belief system.
