Star Trek Beyond: Tired But Acceptable

When I tell you that Star Trek Beyond has more in common with Max and Ruby than it does with most other multi-million-dollar science fiction sequels, I'm only partially joking. It is technically a sequel, but its dubious-at-best connections to the previous movie continue a trend that is becoming a little tired. If your franchise film doesn't recognize what came before it and doesn't care about what comes after, why should we? This is where my Nick Jr comparison applies, and thankfully, Beyond and the rest of its reboot trilogy possess other strengths that make up for its increasingly obvious flaws. It is par-for-the-course franchise filmmaking, nothing more and mercifully nothing less. 

This movie's refreshed stakes necessitate a whole new batch of exposition, so hang with me here. The Enterprise and its crew face their third new threat in three movies when a distress call from a strange woman named Kalara lures them into an ambush by the warlord Krall and his swarms of locust-like warships. After Kirk and the few survivors of the Enterprise scatter across the forest planet of Altamid, they stumble upon Jaylah, a stripe-faced scavenger with a love for the Beastie Boys and nothing but bad blood with Krall. While he isn't the most complex villain of all time, Krall has a history with the Federation and Starfleet and a hope to put everyone who pledges allegiance to them in the line of fire. This is a new story with new dangers, and even though everything that happens in it is technically of vital importance to everyone involved, the larger goals of Beyond somehow ring hollow. 

That being said, this isn't a bad movie. The acting is solid, the fan service is fun and restrained, and it doesn't commit any unmistakably horrible sins. However, this safety is ironically sinful in its own right, as Beyond never puts its neck on the line. It is technically part of a trilogy, but the loose connections between these movies are starting to reach their limits after being repeated for a third time. Knowing these characters aren't part of one bigger story gives them a level of artificial safety evocative of episodic television, and that's not a good reason to go to the movies. We know Kirk will survive. We know Spock will survive. It's much like watching a high-budget Nickelodeon show where all of the stakes and crises reset with every new episode. 

As for the film's emotional core, it's a paper tiger compared to the occasional brilliance of the previous movies. Krall is a forgettable villain in the service of a forgettable movie that either doesn't know better or doesn't want to try. It's a little infuriating to see the same story for the third time in a row, one that doesn't meaningfully expand on the interesting concepts raised in Into Darkness. Krall and the story he was supposed to dominate and wield with real authority lack any distinctive strengths. This movie doesn't even expand on its predecessor in any meaningful way, going down the rabbit hole again for the sake of something new, this time without the wonderful acting chops of Benedict Cumberbatch. 

The worst thing about this movie is that it doesn't have any major flaws, though it doesn't make any major missteps throughout its runtime either, and actually works in some commendable ways, too. Apart from Earth, Altamid is the standout environment of this new trilogy, crafted entirely from real environments and a couple of real sets without much, if any, assistance from CGI. This movie feels a little more real because it is. The forests are lusher, and the caves deeper and darker. If Into Darkness struggled with weightlessness, then this one fixes those problems, at least to an extent. 

There are also some nice uses of setup and payoff in this movie, with Kirk and Jaylah figuring out how to use the technology of friends and foes alike to their advantage with simple but precise schemes that prove the filmmakers put some thought into their movie. Some of this ends up turning into hopelessly campy blockbuster-making that blasts Public Enemy at obscene volumes, but to be fair to a movie like this, that's perfectly in-character. And one last time, we got to see the heroes of the Federation in action. The villains may change from movie to movie, but as always, Kirk and his band of misfits are the main attraction. The bittersweet pill to swallow is that the cast of Beyond does a spectacular job of making a mediocre movie feel perfectly watchable. 

Star Trek Beyond rarely tries anything new, but it takes a major strength of this franchise, the emotional diversity and likability of the Enterprise's crew, and repeats it. A 7/10 is the equivalent of a C grade, and that's why I'm giving this movie a pass: it flies on the wings of the good-hearted people it's about, despite a lackluster villain and an inescapable sense of fatigue. I remember watching this movie without any context from its prequels on a cruise when I was 14, and it didn't lose me then, so even if it drops the ball as a follow-up, the upside is that you won’t be grasping for expositional straws if you choose not to watch the movies that came before it. It doesn't work as a sequel, but it's not trying to. It reaches for low-hanging fruit and picks it without a problem.

After underperforming at the box office, Beyond never received another sequel. I was neither disappointed nor surprised. On its own, it's a completely fine movie, but in the context of a media franchise, one can only ignore the other movies sharing space with it for so long. This movie runs out of breath after a short, safe sprint that almost completely ignores the continuation of its own trilogy before slipping into obscurity. At least the road there features some pleasant sightseeing.

Star Trek Beyond - 7/10

Revelation 9:3-11