Idris Elba wears prosthetics and talks in a thick accent about a MacGuffin that can destroy the Federation, and in the process of getting his hands on it he proves yet again that the U.S.S. Enterprise is the universe's most disposable starship.
And the one with the most preposterously un-killable leadership team.
The long and short of Star Trek Beyond is that within the first half hour the core crew is once more left defenseless on a planet with only a hot alien woman in well designed black and white face make-up and generous helpings of convenient science babble to save their shipmates and the Federation.
If that's a threadbare synopsis, it comes off the back of a threadbare narrative. I said it last time we were here, all this version 2.0 stuff that was once so revitalised is now stripped of its vigour and near-indistinguishable from the increasingly sub-par TNG efforts, except for the fact that those films were populated with characters that still retained some fan identification.
No effort has been expended in giving this crew anything beyond a passing familiarity to the mannerisms of their version 1.0 predecessors. Simon Pegg's script, which he wrote after the departure of the rebooted franchise's previous flagbearers Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (who still has an under-the-covers credit on this one), wants for personality and actual import in the scheme of the series. Nothing here impacts beyond the immediate actions of the crew. Faint wafts of unity vs. disunity messaging (which could have dove-tailed nicely into America's current political woes) fail to congeal into anything of import.
On a purely entertainment level, ring-in director Justin LIn (he of The Fast and the Furious fame) keeps the franchise intact but only in a generic action film fashion. With no emotional motives to connect with in the film's down time, the frequent set pieces get monotonous. Even signature moments that should get the crowd cheering (a certain clever music cue for instance) had me sitting, arms firmly crossed, thinking 'this should be doing more to me than it is.'
They've got the formula, just not the magic ingredient.
Paramount needs to take a long hard look at what they are wanting to achieve with Trek. They are in very real danger of driving it into the obscurity that almost silenced it in the last century. Enough with the self-contained stories that would barely warrant a double episode back in the day. Enough with the fatuous action. Enough with the hardly-villains.
Put some ideas back into this thing.
★★☆
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