Surprise! Star Trek Beyond, the latest Trek film and the third with the reboot cast, is a pretty great film. One of the, dare I say, best Star Trek movies? I think so. I’d say this is easily better than the messy and muddled Into Darkness and even better than the pretty darn good reboot from 2009. Yes, it’s still Trek by way of an action/adventure-first stance but the action/adventure is a hell of a lot of fun and pretty exciting.
What I meant by “Surprise!” is that this movie had some very iffy trailers and they didn’t do the usual marketing push. The original trailer was being shown long enough into the run-up to the flick that it almost felt like Paramount had given up on it. And somehow I missed the second trailer… so also a lot of it was a storytelling surprise to me too. Something to be said for not having every story beat ruined.
This is a great looking movie and introduces some new creative visuals that aren’t just rehashed from old shows and movies. Especially interesting was a new starbase that’s a real visual treat and highly inventive. I wish they spent more time there. The planet a lot oft the film takes place doesn’t feel like a small set with extensions – it has cool little touches to make it feel like a real place. I really liked the look and obvious money that went into the production.
Also, the cast is really working well and there’s more time given to people who aren’t Kirk and Spock. Spock and Bones have a lot of fun scenes together, Uhura, Checkov, and Sulu get some action (not a lot but more than the other movies, if I remember right), and Scotty gets more screen time too (no surprise since the actor co-wrote the script). There are some new character who are good too, especially the warrior woman with the painted face played by a new actor named Sofia Boutella. She’s really pretty great. The villain, as played by Idris Elba, is interesting in that he stars out generic and gets more interesting as the film goes on.
Which leads into whether this is just a slam-bang action film… and it’s not. There are themes here and the story is a bit of a mystery that leads up to something that confronts the very idea of the Star Trek universe. It’s not as deep as I’d like it but that also leads to a small problem with the film.
It feels like there’s a longer cut of this movie out there. The setup feels a little rushed and the part of the galaxy (which includes the aforementioned space station and a nebulous nebula) feels like it could have been better setup given some of the things said later in the movie. This feeling isn’t on a Batman v Superman level of a movie so chopped up its barely a movie or a Ghosbusters 2016 where you can tell there are missing scenes. But there’s certainly some world building and character development that probably exists that we didn’t get to see.
Action-wise, since this is largely an action flick, it’s good. There’s plenty of space and phaser and fist-based action and most of it’s really solid. It sometimes gets a little close and shaky-cam but it’s a low level of shaky-cam. The continued use of gravity as a player in the action (floors become walls) is used even better here – plus the use of gravity on the space station is really cool. I’d say the early space battle is pretty great (one of the best of the series) but the one near the end feels like it has too much swarm-ship DNA that seems to be weirdly taking over a lot of movies. Ender’s Game, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Jupiter Ascending have all done it for better or worse (mostly worse). It’s as thought the FX guys have upgraded their particle graphics toys and are insistent upon using it.
Also, and this ties a little into the action, the use of the Beastie Boys song in the trailer should have been avoided since its use in this movie would have been a lot better as a surprise. On the other hand, there’s a pretty great use of an other “oldies” or “classical” hip-hop song.
So, yeah, unless I’m just completely delusional, we have a pretty great Star Trek movie on our hands, one that’s up there with some of the best. It’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s pretty thrilling. I liked how the cast was used and I really hope they bring back the female warrior character for a future movie. I really enjoyed this one.
I dunno guys, I think the new cast has reversed the even-number Treks being good thing. Now it looks like the even ones are bad and the odd ones are good. The world has flip turned upside down!
Score: 88