"There are numerous examples where terrorism has successfully promoted political change. Is it therefore not fair to say that terrorism is acceptable when all options for peaceful settlement have been foreclosed?" - Commander Data
"We killed 20% of the population of Korea. 20 killed, everyday for 1100 days." - USAF General Curtis Lemay.
Directed by Justin Lin, "Star Trek: Beyond" opens with one of its better scenes. Here Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine) of the United Federation of Planets attempts to broker a peace treaty with comically tiny aliens.
Unfortunately, because no "Star Trek" movie can go two inches without ripping off Nicholas Meyer's "Wrath of Khan", Lin then gives us a familiar scene in which Kirk and his buddy, Doctor McCoy (an overacting Karl Urban), discuss "birthdays" and "getting old". Because Kirk looks like a teenager, because we barely know him, because we've seen better similar scenes in "Khan", and because we've never watched Pine's Kirk meaningfully grapple with regrets or the passage of time, this sequence feels exactly like what it is: a hack writer's attempt at pathos. The film was written by Simon Pegg.
We're then introduced to Lieutenant Uhura and Commander Spock. They're having a rocky "romantic relationship"; a series of formulaic domestic disputes which the filmmakers mistake for "depth" and "substance". To hide the fact that she's been reduced to a nagging housewife, Uhura occasionally "subversively" kicks butt and "rescues men". But counter-clichés are still clichés.
Kirk and his spaceship, the U.S.S Enterprise, then arrive at Starbase Yorktown. Emblematic of Federation values - cooperation, sharing, caring etc - Yorktown serves as a meeting place for different species. But where previous Trek bases looked elegant or functional, Yorktown looks like eye-candy for morons: unnecessarily busy, vulnerable and over-designed. The Enterprise docks with it, in a sequence which unintentionally flaunts much needlessly dangerous engineering.
Kirk is then tasked with investigating a nebulae. Here the Enterprise is ambushed (why doesn't it warp away?) by thousands of vicious mining vessels; they decimate and destroy the Enterprise. Lin and Pegg offer the ship's destruction as a "big emotional moment", but it's not. This rebooted franchise has never treated the Enterprise as anything other than fodder for ridiculously powerful enemies. Unlike its previous incarnations, this Enterprise has no character, is not a home, never feels like an extension of its captain, and has never been something its crew could rely upon.
And so our heroes escape to an alien planet. Here we're introduced to Krall (Idris Elba), an evil Starfleet officer who crashed on the planet hundreds of years ago. Krall blames the Federation for his abandonment. Yes, another vengeful super-villain.
Things get stupider: Krall found a fountain of youth and an army of a gazillion mining drones. This fountain of youth allows Krall to "suck the life-force out of living beings" because apparently all modern super-villains must be contractually able to "steal your energy". More stupid is Krall's fleet of mining drones; instead of using them to fly home, Krall stays on this planet and embarks upon a 100 year quest to find an alien Mcguffin which Kirk randomly finds and which turns out to be an alien weapon. Krall wants to use this weapon to destroy the Yorktown, despite the fact that his drone fleet is much more powerful.
Things get stupider. Because all adventures need a random local chick to help point the way, Kirk runs into Jaylah, an alien girl who lives in the cloaked wreckage of Krall's old spaceship. Why can't Krall find this ship? Doesn't he know where he landed his own ship? Doesn't its sudden disappeared throw up red flags?
The film ends with the usual dogfights and fisticuffs. Throw in some ticking time-bombs, the Beastie Boys, much ignored property damage and a series of cliffhangers which would be easily avoided if our heroes simply used their transportation devices - and why are they still using spaceships? This franchise has made it clear that transporters can beam human beings across entire solar systems! - and you have one unimaginative climax.
The film's final scenes see our crew inheriting another Enterprise, a moment which highlights how disposable and hasty everything in this franchise is. We also learn that Kirk turned down a promotion - he inexplicably jumps from kid to Captain to Vice Admiral in the blink of an eye - because he "enjoys being an explorer" and "hanging out with his buddies". But what this franchise says it's about and actually shows are completely at odds: we've never seen Kirk do anything other than engage in slaughter, carnage and mayhem. He's James Bond in space.
And like Bond, "Star Trek: Beyond" is political in the worst ways. Here is a film in which an angry black terrorist decides to blow up a "bastion of democratic and co-operative values" because he "hates our freedoms" and "refuses to get with the times". In other words, like all mainstream Hollywood terrorists, Krall is an utterly irrational strawman without a coherent motive. He must thus be destroyed by our enlightened, multi-ethnic, tolerant, multi-coloured white boys, who apparently can't solve anything without themselves resorting to gigantic levels of violence and carnage. The film's politics might make sense in the context of its supposedly Utopian future - Star Trek is, after all, the product of 1960s hippies - but is mostly superficial and dangerous when overlain upon our real world. Ours is, after all, a world which deifies democracy, co-operation, multiculturalism, trans-nationalism, tolerance and the binding of all nations under a "common market", all for the purpose of ransacking nations and ecosystems, fostering class divisions, scapegoating, finding cheap labour and pushing down wages. Most major acts of barbarism over the past century have been hypocritically done in the name of the very values "Beyond" deifies. A better film would examine this.
2/10 – Highly illogical.
"We killed 20% of the population of Korea. 20 killed, everyday for 1100 days." - USAF General Curtis Lemay.
Directed by Justin Lin, "Star Trek: Beyond" opens with one of its better scenes. Here Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine) of the United Federation of Planets attempts to broker a peace treaty with comically tiny aliens.
Unfortunately, because no "Star Trek" movie can go two inches without ripping off Nicholas Meyer's "Wrath of Khan", Lin then gives us a familiar scene in which Kirk and his buddy, Doctor McCoy (an overacting Karl Urban), discuss "birthdays" and "getting old". Because Kirk looks like a teenager, because we barely know him, because we've seen better similar scenes in "Khan", and because we've never watched Pine's Kirk meaningfully grapple with regrets or the passage of time, this sequence feels exactly like what it is: a hack writer's attempt at pathos. The film was written by Simon Pegg.
We're then introduced to Lieutenant Uhura and Commander Spock. They're having a rocky "romantic relationship"; a series of formulaic domestic disputes which the filmmakers mistake for "depth" and "substance". To hide the fact that she's been reduced to a nagging housewife, Uhura occasionally "subversively" kicks butt and "rescues men". But counter-clichés are still clichés.
Kirk and his spaceship, the U.S.S Enterprise, then arrive at Starbase Yorktown. Emblematic of Federation values - cooperation, sharing, caring etc - Yorktown serves as a meeting place for different species. But where previous Trek bases looked elegant or functional, Yorktown looks like eye-candy for morons: unnecessarily busy, vulnerable and over-designed. The Enterprise docks with it, in a sequence which unintentionally flaunts much needlessly dangerous engineering.
Kirk is then tasked with investigating a nebulae. Here the Enterprise is ambushed (why doesn't it warp away?) by thousands of vicious mining vessels; they decimate and destroy the Enterprise. Lin and Pegg offer the ship's destruction as a "big emotional moment", but it's not. This rebooted franchise has never treated the Enterprise as anything other than fodder for ridiculously powerful enemies. Unlike its previous incarnations, this Enterprise has no character, is not a home, never feels like an extension of its captain, and has never been something its crew could rely upon.
And so our heroes escape to an alien planet. Here we're introduced to Krall (Idris Elba), an evil Starfleet officer who crashed on the planet hundreds of years ago. Krall blames the Federation for his abandonment. Yes, another vengeful super-villain.
Things get stupider: Krall found a fountain of youth and an army of a gazillion mining drones. This fountain of youth allows Krall to "suck the life-force out of living beings" because apparently all modern super-villains must be contractually able to "steal your energy". More stupid is Krall's fleet of mining drones; instead of using them to fly home, Krall stays on this planet and embarks upon a 100 year quest to find an alien Mcguffin which Kirk randomly finds and which turns out to be an alien weapon. Krall wants to use this weapon to destroy the Yorktown, despite the fact that his drone fleet is much more powerful.
Things get stupider. Because all adventures need a random local chick to help point the way, Kirk runs into Jaylah, an alien girl who lives in the cloaked wreckage of Krall's old spaceship. Why can't Krall find this ship? Doesn't he know where he landed his own ship? Doesn't its sudden disappeared throw up red flags?
The film ends with the usual dogfights and fisticuffs. Throw in some ticking time-bombs, the Beastie Boys, much ignored property damage and a series of cliffhangers which would be easily avoided if our heroes simply used their transportation devices - and why are they still using spaceships? This franchise has made it clear that transporters can beam human beings across entire solar systems! - and you have one unimaginative climax.
The film's final scenes see our crew inheriting another Enterprise, a moment which highlights how disposable and hasty everything in this franchise is. We also learn that Kirk turned down a promotion - he inexplicably jumps from kid to Captain to Vice Admiral in the blink of an eye - because he "enjoys being an explorer" and "hanging out with his buddies". But what this franchise says it's about and actually shows are completely at odds: we've never seen Kirk do anything other than engage in slaughter, carnage and mayhem. He's James Bond in space.
And like Bond, "Star Trek: Beyond" is political in the worst ways. Here is a film in which an angry black terrorist decides to blow up a "bastion of democratic and co-operative values" because he "hates our freedoms" and "refuses to get with the times". In other words, like all mainstream Hollywood terrorists, Krall is an utterly irrational strawman without a coherent motive. He must thus be destroyed by our enlightened, multi-ethnic, tolerant, multi-coloured white boys, who apparently can't solve anything without themselves resorting to gigantic levels of violence and carnage. The film's politics might make sense in the context of its supposedly Utopian future - Star Trek is, after all, the product of 1960s hippies - but is mostly superficial and dangerous when overlain upon our real world. Ours is, after all, a world which deifies democracy, co-operation, multiculturalism, trans-nationalism, tolerance and the binding of all nations under a "common market", all for the purpose of ransacking nations and ecosystems, fostering class divisions, scapegoating, finding cheap labour and pushing down wages. Most major acts of barbarism over the past century have been hypocritically done in the name of the very values "Beyond" deifies. A better film would examine this.
2/10 – Highly illogical.