Star Trek Beyond

Where Some Men & Women Have Gone Before

You want these films to be good, but as with all series of movies that go into episodic sequels, the third film is prone to wearing out the welcome. And so welcome to a third film in a re-booted series after the original series films went six films (seven if you count 'Generations' where they killed Shatner-Kirk), which course came after 3 seasons72 episodes of television. We know more about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu and Chekhov than these characters themselves do.

It's therefore a lot harder to squeeze out new stuff with these tired old characters, even if the actors have been cast anew 2 films ago. The challenge is on.

Spoiler alert as usual. There will be many.




What's Good About It

The production design and CGI work is superb. The music is a little hysterical with its non-stop emotional cues but hangs together okay. It looks and sounds really glossy, which is nice. The actions  sequences are big and exciting, the stunts superlative, and even the screen graphics on their instrument panels look wonderful.

The action is rollicking, which is the new established house style of these updated Star Trek films, which means there's much less time spent on the cerebral bits where the crew try and figure things out. If you don't think too deeply about it, then it's good clean entertainment but of course you're supposed to think about stuff with Star Trek, so maybe the action is too much eye candy. But that's complaining about too rich, right?

I had trouble getting my better half to watch this thing because it's an entrenched Sci Fi franchise that she has little interest in, but without knowing much of anything about it beyond the basics of who the characters were supposed to be, she actually liked it. So it must be working as a basic space opera action number. What follows is me nitpicking as a part-time, some-time, Trekkie.

What's Bad About It

The story is incoherent. And it's also a film that goes from one Star Trek trope to the next without much self-reflection. The motivation of the villain Kraal is kind of confused, and that would be because he's not really an alien, he's a human who first got shipwrecked, then driven insane, and then decided to suck the life out of other beings to be immortal, but managed to build a grudge against the Federation. Hence, in the final shake out it turns out that the crew hadn't turned up anywhere where no man had been before; didn't really meet a new nemesis, but somebody from their own world who went rogue; and then they never really recovered anything new. That's really not the Star Trek ethos.

It's also a bit easy that the swarm of ships (which we don't really know how Kraal got this technology or building capacity) can be compromised so easily by playing a bit of Beastie Boys at them through radio. Of course, it is a really cool track, but that's really not sufficient to make it a deus ex machina, is it?

One way of looking at this film is that the Star Trek franchise is in deep crisis. They won't admit it but if they're letting Simon Pegg write a script and Justin Lin is directing one of these films, they're in deeper shit than the second movie let on. This screed is not really against Simon Pegg as such, but more the fact that letting a fan write a big movie has its problems. Also, letting an action director without much subtlety in working character interaction is a recipe for disaster, and well, this film qualifies as at least a dog's breakfast.

What's Interesting About It

They attempt to work in a bit of intrinsic character conflict with Captain Kirk. Kirk, in this incarnation is a bit jaded with his 5 year mission, just over 3years into the big trek. If this were any other space captain and milieu, it would be okay. Except this is James T. Kirk. We've seen all the moments of intrinsic conflict imaginable with this character and being jaded with being the captain of the Enterprise is not one of those things. It's the kind of inconsistency that creeps in because the franchise has already run out of things to do with these characters.

Similarly with Mr. Spock, he is somewhat in doubt about his career in Starfleet and feels like he has to go procreate with other Vulcans. That this could even begin to be more important than being a science officer in Starfleet flies in the face of everything that's come before. Spock as Vulcan might have bigger issues. Like, the 'Ponfar' where he has to go home to Vulcan and mate every 7 years like some space salmon with pointy ears. Or that he has yet to attain the 'Kohlinar' the doctorate degree in pure logic they hand out on Vulcan - and even when the original Spock attained the 'Kohlinar', he went right back to the Federation.

The writers are making slip-ups because they can't keep it all straight. But worse still, the gigantic mass of what we do know about these characters should be precluding certain kinds of stories.

The Enterprise Goes Down, Again

They keep doing this in the movies for dramatic effect, but they keep blowing up the Enterprise. It started with 'The Search for Spock'. Then, they did again with the Next Gen Enterprise in 'Generations'. And now for dramatic effect, they blow it up in the movie and frankly it's getting to be old hat.  Blowing up the Enterprise serves to put the captain and crew planet-side which allows for all the action on the surface of the alien planet, and that's well and good, but apart from the fact that it allows for the film to be an action piece, it doesn't really do much - and that makes it bad writing.

The first time the Enterprise got blown up on thing screen it was a big moment; the second time it was a bit of a retread that felt tired; doing it again here is just lazy. Yet this has always been the challenge of the Trek screenwriter: how to get the crew amidst the adventure on planet out of the ship, and raise their personal stakes in what happens dirt-side. The classic thing they would do was to make the transporter unworkable for whatever reasons for the duration of the episode. Scotty's job was to tell Captain Kirk "she canna do it."

It is therefore a pretty lame deus ex machina to have a spaceship ready for the crew to get off the planet, having lost their ship. Just how ridiculous a scenario this is, can be illustrated by substituting the situation on to an earlier age. Imagine, Captain Cook and his crew are marooned on an island where an evil empire is building a fleet to invade England. But Captain Cook manages to find an abandoned ship that has been there for 100years, and sets sail with it to beat the evil threat. Right. If it strains incredulity with sailing ships, it probably should strain incredulity with space ships.

The "Mr. Sulu Is Gay" Thing

George Takei played the original Mr Sulu. Since then he has come out and become an advocate for gay rights in the USA. So in tribute they ret-conned the character into being gay. I don't know how depressing this literalism is. As a kid I liked Mr. Sulu because 1) I am non-specific Asian and 2) he was part of Star Trek's diversity push. The mystery of his name covered so much together with the obvious Japanese-ness of George Takei's own heritage. The name Sulu is derived from an island in the Philippines where Gene Roddenberry served. The derivation of the first name Ikaru is even more mysterious. Yet there he was, somewhere in the future representing asian people in a very general way. It was important that Sulu wasn' specifically Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese or whatever.

Most importantly, together with Nichelle Nichols, George Takei himself represented non-white people getting a proper shot in a world of white people. Including Takei and Nichols lent tremendous power to Star Trek's moral authority - and back in the 1960s this was really important. Race politics was bringing fiercely in the background of 1960s from whence these characters come.

There's even a story about how Nichols wanted to quit Star Trek because all she got to do was open hailing frequencies but none other than Martin Luther King told her she was doing an important job, and that he was a fan of the show because she was there. I know exactly how he felt about that. The diversity of having Nichols and Takei and even Chekhov with the Russian name and Polish accent was incredibly important. (and it's nice to know a great a man as Dr. Martin Luther King was a part-time, some-time Trekkie).

George Takei himself has expressed not liking this development. Yes it was handled subtly and it normalised the LGBTQ life of the new Mr. Sulu, except it dumped an extra bit of diversity text on the  character who was already doing a fine job. It got to the part of where diversity exists in the developed world. As it is in the current Star Trek universe, Spock - an alien - is having a relationship with a black woman; and Sulu, the asian guy is also carrying the mantle for gay people. If anything the other white guys remain pretty cis-gendered and carry no baggage whatsoever. Kirk is a hetero-white-male (and it would be hard to change that), and so are Scotty and Bones - but there's never been any real reason Scotty or Bones couldn't have been gay. By Making Sulu be gay, they've made their universe so the half of it is aliens and coloured people and LGBTQ people doing all of their weird 'Other' thing, and then there's a separate heroic population of heterosexual-white-males who hold positions of authority. It's a bit ... you know... self-serving for a white writer to be doing that.

I get why George Takei was uncomfortable with it; it's because it sells out Sulu in the eyes of the asian population while lumping him with the LGBTQ badge that wasn't exactly called for. Takei didn't think he was playing a gay person all those years. That LGBTQ thing belongs to Takei and his own personal history, and it wasn't for the writers with which to endow Sulu. They should have asked him, and he would have said, don't. I think George Takei would have liked that opportunity to explain why it was a bad idea.