By Brett Blake 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of STAR TREK, so it’s only appropriate that we have STAR TREK BEYOND, the 13th feature film in the series, playing in cinemas this year. Following 2013’s STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - a good sci-fi action movie, but a terrible TREK movie - the question walking into BEYOND was this: can we get a movie that satisfies both as an adventure and also as something identifiable as STAR TREK? The answer in BEYOND’s case is a resounding yes, for director Justin Lin and writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung have crafted a massively entertaining ride, one which thrills with its action, engages with its characters, and has a positive, optimistic underlying message. The movie opens with the starship Enterprise deep into its five year mission to explore uncharted space. After a brief stopover at the impressive Starbase Yorktown, the Enterprise investigates a report of a wrecked ship on a planet in a nearby nebula; the Enterprise is then ambushed by a deadly swarm of alien ships, which cripple the Enterprise and force the crew to abandon ship on the nearby planet. With many of the crew taken hostage by a sinister alien force led by the mysterious Krall (Idris Elba), Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) must find a way to reunite his officers and rescue the stranded crew from an increasingly hostile environment before Krall’s nefarious plans take effect. Luckily, an alien named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), who has also been stranded on the planet by Krall, has the means to potentially help the Enterprise crew avert total disaster. What writers Pegg (who, of course, also plays Scotty in the film) and Jung have done here is to create a storyline that is relatively more contained than the last couple TREK films have been. In a certain sense, the stakes are smaller here than in those movies, but that’s actually okay, because the focus is squarely on the characters this time out, even as the action is still present in full-force and often properly thrilling (the big attack on the Enterprise in the story’s fist act is an incredible - and lengthy - setpiece, one that is tense and frenetic, and right up there with the best sequences of sustained action in the entire franchise). Others have said that the movie feels like an episode of The Original Series, and it’s easy to see why; this is a standalone story, disconnected from any major ongoing plot threads, and it involves the crew on a strange, new world. The cinematic scope may be far greater than anything achieved by The Original Series, but that spirit is very much present, and in a very good way. More than any STAR TREK film since 1991’s THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, STAR TREK BEYOND gets the characters right. Incredibly right. It nails the dynamics, the friendships, the camaraderie. You believe these people enjoy being together, you believe they care both about their mission aboard the Enterprise and about each other. There are literally dozens of fantastic characters beats scattered throughout this tale, moments of interaction that are completely charming and which also serve to underline the story’s major themes. The screenplay also has some fun in the ways it splinters the main cast into smaller groups - we have Kirk and Chekov (the late Anton Yelchin) together for much of the running time, just as Bones (Karl Urban, in the performance of the film) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) find themselves constantly linked throughout the narrative, which allows their bickering-laden friendship to really get its due. Sulu (John Cho) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) spend much of the story at the villainous Krall’s command center, and they are our window into what Krall’s increasingly-unsettling scheme entails. And Scotty (Simon Pegg), for his part, finds himself in the company of Jaylah, and the course of his relationship with this new character is surprisingly effective. All of these characters are just fun to be around, and that goes a long, long way towards making the movie as consistently entertaining as it is. As with the great episodes of The Original Series, BEYOND also has a message, though not one that is beaten over the heads of the audience, but which rather comes organically from the arcs of both Kirk and Krall - the importance of unity and community. We find Kirk in this film undergoing a real change, and dealing with mature and fundamentally human emotions, as he questions whether he wants to continue to be the captain of a starship. Ultimately, the movie posits that disparate people coming together to surmount difficult challenges is an important and admirable thing, and it’s a nice message in our increasingly fractured and divisive times. This element is particularly effective when filtered through the backstory of Krall, the villain of the tale. While his (surprisingly sympathetic) backstory is one I can’t divulge here, it does spring from an understandable place, and one which dovetails very nicely into the primary theme of the story. Elba is buried under significant makeup for the role, but when the time comes for him to sell the character’s inner turmoil and motivation, he’s more than up to the challenge, and he makes Krall an imposing - but also understandable - figure. Returning from the previous two installments is composer Michael Giacchino, and he contributes his best score yet for the series, one that has a somewhat lighter touch than his darker (but also very good) work for the last two movies. He implements a couple of major new themes, but also puts his main STAR TREK theme through its paces, breaking it into fragmentary motifs with which he has some fun. His action writing this time out is extremely strong, and lends the sequences a propulsive - yet still fundamentally melodic - underpinning. It’s one of 2016’s best scores. I don’t know if I’ve done an adequate job of conveying just how enjoyable a time STAR TREK BEYOND is, but it really is. This is bright and colorful sci-fi action with characters that are constantly captivating, and with action that will satisfy those looking for a little bit of mayhem. Most importantly, though, the movie hasn’t had to sacrifice the classic STAR TREK flavor in order to accomplish those things, and the end result is the best TREK film since 1991, and one of the best blockbusters of 2016.
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