tippy2k2 tells you what to think; Star Trek Beyond

[tippy2k2]

Listen all y'all it's a Sabotage

I was never into Star Trek growing up. While it is almost certainly something I would love, for whatever reason, it just never happened for me. I have, however, seen all the reboot Star Trek films and have thought that they were all OK. Does Beyond go....beyond that? Ha haaaaaa, I'm clever!

Now that your sides have stopped aching from all the laughter, the film starts off with Captain James T Kirk (Chris Pine) having a negotiation with a race of monstrous looking creatures. He is attempting to broker peace between the monster creatures and another race we never see but hilarity ensues in a misunderstanding and then the film just kind of goes downhill from there.

The crew is given a new mission; another ship has gone into a Nebula and only one person has come back from it, saying that the ship is stranded and they need help. As the ship best equipped at the edge of known space, it's up to the Enterprise to save the day! Unfortunately that does not go very well once they get into the Nebula...

All of your favorite Star Trek characters are here and get screen time and something to do. The problem though with having this many characters to follow is that there is not enough time to make everyone's story interesting and worth following. The party kind of splits off into pairs: Kirk and Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Dr McCoy (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and Scotty (Simon Pegg) and newcomer Jaylah (Sofia Boutella). Out of these pairings, Scotty and Jaylah are the only ones who really advance the story while Spock and Dr McCoy are kind of funny; everyone else is just a waste of screen time but have to be there since it wouldn't be a Star Trek movie without them.

No one is really bad in the movie but there are no standouts for acting either. Much like the movie itself, it's serviceable. The fight scenes are chaotic and shaky so you can't tell what the heck is going on. The space fights are a bit better in terms of camera work but some absolutely baffling logic destroys any credibility that they had (if you don't plan on seeing the film, Google the last space fight because it's one of the silliest battles ever put to film). Luckily by that point, I wasn't all that invested so it kind of worked in a weird way as it was so silly that I couldn't help but be entertained by it.

Ultimately, you just have to ask yourself one question; Did I like Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness? If you answered yes, I imagine that you will like this film as well, though I also imagine you'll think it's the weakest of the modern trilogy. If you answered no, this movie did nothing to convince you otherwise.

6.5; It's an OK film and unfortunately, there's not much else to say about it. It's just mediocre in every way. Although it does have one of the most ridiculous ending fights ever so it got a few bonus points for that...

Last Review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.940055-tippy2k2-tells-you-what-to-think-Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot]

 

[Hawki]

Terrible puns aside, I pretty much agree with all of this, including that I do indeed consider Beyond to be the weakest of the most recent films. One thing you brought up that I didn't on the other thread is the camera work. On one hand, I noticed how often that the camera sort of does a 360 degree (or less, but still a lot) rotation, which seems to be Lin's own lens flare. But I will agree that a lot of the close quarters fighting felt chaotic, and not in a good way. The one key exception was when Jaylah fights Krall's flunky.

Ironically, one of Kirk's earliest lines in his log is that being in deep space is starting to feel "episodic." While I smirked at that, along with his "I tore my shirt again" line, that pretty much sums up this film. It's an episode. A decent, overall entertaining episode, but an episode nonetheless. Still, I guess that's kind of a good thing, since the Star Trek films get sequels based on their own merits, rather than blatant sequel bait (looking at you, Resurgence).

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I feel I must protest, both as a life long Trek fan and as a the son of a man who was a background character in 3 different DS9 episodes!

As a movie, in a Jim Sterling completely separate from all emotions and outside knowledge, Beyond was decent. Only decent. 50 at best. Maybe as a Fast and Furious in Space it gets a 55-60.

As a Trek movie? Holy fuck me raw did it fail. As characters the cast did admirably. Spock and McCoy banter was the highlight beyond a doubt, but everyone preformed the script well enough.

But the script is terrible.

Now I'm not about to say Star Trek is some sacrosanct tots serious series, but everything was driven. There was a sense of Galaxy building, however silly. Beyond was a simple waste. Its an alternate universe, right? A set up for a hundred thousand new takes on old stories. Borg. Klingon. Whatever.
So what do we get? A evil captain for hundreds of years before the time-change, the assumption being that Trek Prime has Idris Elba and his Space Bees. But that's not a thing. And even Elba says in his logs the space bees were simple mining droids left behind by the previous planet's inhabitants. Yet he never thought to send them for help. Simply left them alone for 20+ years until angst compelled him.
Likewise the entire crew of the Franklin couldn't get it operational over decades. But Scotty and an untrained alien who's native language is not English got the ship operational in like 5 hours.
And the big bad? Turns out its wibbly wobbly space goo that...I dunno, eats people. Or melts them. Or like does too much disco dancing. Who knows?! But whatever it does, its soooo evil that one race, and only one, developed it, never used it, put it away, and a human hundreds of years later found...what, a completely unrelated black magic wand that lets him absorb the life force of other life forms to prolong life at the cost of apparently random face makeup, and a means of translating space words, which will eventually fall into the hands of Rancor puppies?

Woof.

What should have happened is the space bee droids were developed after the Franklin crashed. And during their drilling to find mineral to keep the Frankiln's engines, thus power, operational, they find IT. You know what I mean. The Ultimate Weapon. The Doomsday Machine.
How cool would that have been? A planet core eating giant machine, hell pent on destroying every planet nearby. And that would mean the Franklin would be the Ship that would be forced down its gullet to destroy it, thus killing Ibris with his own ship. Fuck it, have Elba's First Officer be the bad guy, leaving Elba to be both Jim's idol and a man who nobly sacrifices himself to destroy the machine.

It works on so many levels, and is better than any space bee Beastie Boy scene.

Also the relationship between Spock and Kirk is terrible.

A waste of a movie.