Before we get started, I’m not a Trekkie. I took a passing interest when I was a nerdy
teenager and now that I’m a nerdy 30-something my tastes have changed and Star
Trek for me requires an a awful lot of commitment to really get into. There’s just so much of it, and a lot of it
is silly, so my interest extends pretty much to the films and knowing what a
Klingon is. That said, I always
appreciated how progressive the show was: set in a post-Capitalist society, on
a non-military vessel, and featuring a Russian, a Japanese, and a black woman
in positions of relative authority, Gene Roddenberry was feeding us some
delicious propaganda!
The re-booted and ret-conned film series (thanks, time
travel!) has given us new faces on familiar characters and with the current
crew now firmly established by the able hands of JJ Abrams, Beyond can plunge us straight into the
action without too much exposition. Fast and Furious director (and lifelong
Trekkie) Justin Lin rightly sets his stall quickly with oddball aliens, an
ancient weapon/MacGuffin and a mission all established within the first 15
minutes or so. It’s the start the film
needs, as if the creative team is trying to kickstart the series and regain
some fan faith after some (fairly unjustified, in my opinion) backlash from
2013’s Into Darkness.
Spectacle-wise, we get an impressive Halo/Larry Niven/Iain M
Banks-on-crack space station, and a well-rendered barren alien planet, but one
of the best things a Star Trek film can do is out-gun the Enterprise. The 2009 reboot had a Romulan warship, Into Darkness had a huge, tooled-up Federation
warship. Beyond goes one better, all but destroying the Enterprise early
on. Weapon of choice: a swarm of hive
ships. This has been done recently, with
Independence Day: Resurgence and Big Hero Six both using the idea, but it
looks great here and it’s effective in raising the stakes and the peril early
on.
Smart move no. 2 is pairing the shipless crew off into groups
to maximise character banter. If this
type of film is done wrong, they can come off as po-faced and fan-serving, losing
that key ingredient of fun. No such
qualms here as Zachary Quinto’s Spock
and Karl Urban’s Bones go full Odd Couple,
Chris Pine’s Kirk and the late Anton Yelchin’s Checkov have pleasing action
beats, and Simon Pegg’s Scotty bounces off Sofia Boutella’s deadly local. It’s a smart move, particularly resisting the
urge to allow Kirk to pull the alien lass, and giving Bones something to do
this time out. Spock’s delivery of the
word “bullshit” is priceless. It’s moves
like this that make Beyond loads of
fun, and don’t allow seriousness anywhere near proceedings.
Plot-wise, I worked out the
identity of Idris Elba’s Krall really early on (and I’m really bad at doing that), and his evil scheme (not dissimilar to
that of The Rock) lays on the subtext
quite thick but offers genuine threat, even if details are borrowed from the highly
naff Star Trek Insurrection. There’s some techno-babble thrown about, which
is kind of annoying when it’s used as a narrative Get-Out-Of-Jail-card, and the
film trips on this but never really falls over.
This is par for the course with Star
Trek and doesn’t really get in the way, but comes close. Of the new characters, Elba tries manfully to
raise a limited villain above snarling evil.
He’s better than, say, Christopher Eccleston in The Dark World but he doesn’t really get to chew the scenery like
Cumberbatch in the last film. Boutella
gets a surprising number of laughs and is hard as nails. Admirably, she isn’t
just used for sex appeal, but like Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, doesn’t have a great
deal to do.
Whether Beyond will please die hard Trek fans remains to be seen, and ultimately,
this doesn’t matter. I’m not one of them
and it gave me plenty to smile about.
There is some genuine emotion, particularly when giving some closure to Leonard
Nimoy, and in the closeness of the crew.
The film also has the balls to do something spectacularly silly in the
final conflict. Given how it’s already
established a light tone, this moment (you’ll know it when you see it) is a
stretch but ultimately earned. If you’ve
bought into it enough to get through the first hour, the gambit in question shouldn’t
force you to suspend disbelief too much; after all, Justin Lin is the man who
turned Fast and Furious from naff car
porn to billion dollar beloved car porn (I’ll have it on record that I’m not a
fan), so he’s earned the right to try something ballsy.
Where the series goes from here is
anyone’s guess. With good chemistry,
freedom from decades of canon, and a restored sense of fun, there really is
potential here. While I’m sure
executives and the creative team will want to at least have a go at serving
long-serving fans, they’ll likely be more concerned that it pulls in the
numbers and makes the average punter happy.
With a $60m opening weekend and a happy punter in this reviewer, they’re
boldly going about it in the right way.
Oh, and the subtext (working together is better than unilateral military
force) makes for a nice unintentional Brexit metaphor, with Elba’s villain even
looking a bit like Teresa May.
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