by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Star Trek
Beyond (note the absence of a
punctuation mark in the title), third in the sequence of Star Trek movies in J. J. Abrams’ “reboot” of the franchise
with the Star Trek film in 2009. This time
Abrams yielded the directorial reins to Justin Lin, whose main credits to this
point had been some of the Fast and Furious movies — which probably explains why Star Trek
Beyond looks so much like a Fast
and Furious movie, only with starships
instead of cars. The opening scene, which in some ways is the most entertaining
part of the movie, deals with Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) of the
starship Enterprise being
sent on a mission of peace to a planet where the dominant life form is an
articulate but malevolent sort of badger, about two feet tall when they stand
erect (they can shift back and forth from bipedal to quadripedal motion), who
turn on him when he tries to present them with a priceless artifact as a peace
offering and say they won’t accept an item the Federation stole from someone
else. Kirk radios a distress signal to the Enterprise and they beam him up — and take a couple of the
badgers with him. But that’s not the main intrigue: the main intrigue is that
they receive a distress call from another starship that was sent to explore a
particular nebula — only it’s a trap: they’re lured into orbit around a planet
from which they’re attacked by a swarm of unstoppable machines that strike in
groups like bees (which of course becomes their nickname), which literally tear
the Enterprise to pieces in space.
It
turns out in this version of the Star Trek mythos that the central “saucer” part of the Enterprise’s design can be flown in space even without the
long rear nacelles attached — in Gene Roddenberry’s original conception the
nacelles contained the ship’s matter-antimatter reactors and the engines they
powered, but apparently this isn’t the first time later Star Trek adapters have enabled the saucer to fly without
the nacelles — and this is also another one of the maddening reversals of the Star
Trek universe in which the
starships routinely fly through atmospheres even though in Roddenberry’s
original guide for Star Trek writers he stressed that the ship “never lands on a planet.” The whole
point was that the Enterprise and its sister starships were built in space and constructed to fly
through space, not either to leave a planet’s atmosphere or gravity or (even
worse) to re-enter one and burn up on the way back, since, being intended only for inter-space flight, it didn’t have a re-entry
heat shield. (I guess having re-seen Apollo 13 just recently had me thinking a lot about the need
for heat shields for a spacecraft re-entering an atmosphere.) Though Abrams
relinquished the directorial reins, he remained on as one of the innumberable
producers on the film and most of his team from the previous episodes in the
“reboot” remained — the writers were Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, with uncredited
assists from Roberto Orci (who at one point was set to direct as well), Patrick
McKay and John D. Payne, and they kept such unwelcome Abrams revisions as the
ongoing love affair between Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana, who seems far less
comfortable in this role than she did in the brilliant James Cameron fantasy Avatar) and Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto). Despite the
“saucer separation” and Kirk’s attempt to escape the trap, the Enterprise falls into the planet and the entire crew, except
for the series principals, are kidnapped by the assailants, who are led by a
man named Krall (Idris Elba) who apparently gets off on forcing down starships,
kidnapping their crews and torturing them to death one by one. (One wonders if
the character name “Krall” was a tribute to the film Forbidden Planet, in which the extinct indigenous inhabitants of
the planet Altair-4 were called “Krell.”)
The principals — Kirk, Spock, Uhura,
Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin, who died at 27
in a freak car accident shortly after the film was finished — after that and
the death of Fast and Furious franchise star Paul Walker, maybe it’s not such a good idea for people
who make movies for Justin Lin to drive or ride around in cars!) and engineer
Montgomery “Scottie” Scott (played by co-writer Simon Pegg) — get separated on
the planet’s surface, and Scott encounters Jaylah (Sofia Boutella, who turns in
the best acting job in the film — maybe in part because she’s playing a newly
minted character and therefore we have no one from past Star Trek TV shows or movies to compare her to). Jaylah asks
Scott to fix something — and the “something” turns out to be a fully
operational starship, the U.S.S. Franklin — representing an earlier generation of Starfleet technology than the Enterprise — and eventually the principals unite and, with
Jaylah’s reluctantly given help, get the Franklin to lift off the planet’s surface and fly through
space to stop Krall’s next planned attack, against the Starfleet space station Yorktown. Despite their out-of-date technology, the Franklin is able to defeat Krall’s attackers by sneaking on
to their control ship and essentially hacking into the computer that’s
controlling them and programming them to act together like real bees. It also turns out that
Krall is really Balthazar Edison, a renegade Starfleet commander who was
trained to be a warrior and found that when the United Federation of Planets
was formed he was expected to become a peacemaker — a transition he was
incapable of and didn’t believe in anyway — so he decided to attack the
Federation and Starfleet because he believes that it is struggle, not
coexistence, that defines and secures the future of humanity. (After the
outcome of this year’s Presidential election, in which a candidate whose whole
appeal was to heighten the divides of America beat one who said we’re “Stronger
Together,” this is a very timely Zeitgeist
position.)
At the end Kirk turns down
a proffered promotion to vice-admiral in Starfleet when he realizes it’d be
just a desk job, and a new version of the Enterprise is shown under construction at Yorktown with the implication that once it’s completed Kirk
and the rest of our familiar crew members will fly her. Star Trek Beyond is a perfectly acceptable action-adventure movie —
despite some lapses, like the mask-like heads worn by the actors playing aliens
— but it’s much more problematical as a Star Trek movie. The basic issue is that presenting this
story as part of the Star Trek franchise means that the characterizations and situations are
inevitably going to be compared to what Roddenberry and his writers worked out
back in the 1960’s — and the actors in it are inevitably going to be compared
to the magnificent cast Roddenberry put together. None of the players in this movie are as strong as the
1960’s originals, though Zachary Quinto comes close (and would probably come
even closer if he could play the proper version of Spock, the one who was ruled
by Vulcan logic and wouldn’t have dreamed of cruising Earth women) and Chris Pine is the next best (though at
least part of that is he’s copied all too many of William Shatner’s obnoxious mannerisms
— there’s even a scene on the included “gag reel” in which one of the actors
says to him after he blows a particular line reading, “That’s so Shatner!”). Star Trek Beyond is a perfectly acceptable movie (though
disappointing after the two earlier entries in the “reboot,” which perhaps
because Abrams directed them personally are both better than this) but not
really Star Trek — despite the odd tributes
paid to Leonard Nimoy. Apparently J. J. Abrams and his team weren’t about to
let Nimoy’s death serve as an excuse to keep him out of this movie — early on
the current Spock is shown receiving an ID card with Nimoy’s photo on it as
“Ambassador Spock,” and at the end he’s presented with a group photo of the
original Star Trek TV cast — and Charles said
there’s probably enough “wild” footage of Nimoy out there they can keep
inserting him into future Star Trek movies, Ed Wood-style!
