Star Trek Beyond

Director: Justin Lin

Screenplay: Simon Pegg & Doug Jung (based on Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry)

Stars: Chris Pine (Captain James T. Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Commander Spock), Karl Urban (Lieutenant Commander Leonard McCoy, MD), Zoe Saldana (Lieutenant Nyota Uhura), Simon Pegg (Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott), John Cho (Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu), Anton Yelchin (Ensign Pavel Chekov), Idris Elba (Krall), Sofia Boutella (Jaylah), Joe Taslim (Manas), Lydia Wilson (Kalara), Deep Roy (Keenser), Harpreet Sandhu (USSE Bridge Crew), Melissa Roxburgh (Ensign Syl)

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Year of Release: 2016

Country: U.S.

Star Trek Beyond is the first film in the millennial rebooted series not to be directed by J.J. Abrams, and you can immediately feel the difference. Having jumped ship for the new Star Wars franchise, Abrams left the director’s chair open to Justin Lin, who has spent the last decade directing Fast & Furious sequels, one of which (2011’s Fast Five) counts as one of the best entries in the franchise. In each of those films Lin moved his action aesthetic further and further away from the laws of physics, which makes his move toward an action movie set in space a natural extension of his increasingly cartoonish proclivities. Outer space, with its lack of gravity and endless expanses, offers him an entirely new canvas for objects moving very, very fast in and around giant explosions, although the entire middle section of Star Trek Beyond is firmly grounded on an Earth-like planet. You can almost feel Lin chomping at the bit to get the action back to a ginormous space station with multiple fields of gravity.

Lin’s takeover of the Star Trek universe isn’t necessarily better than Abrams’s two films, Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)—the latter of which is roundly despised by a vocal chorus of Trek fans for reasons that still escape me—but it certainly feels different, and sometimes a change of pace is a nice thing. Interestingly, that is precisely how the film, which was penned by Simon Pegg (who plays the ship’s engineer Scotty) and Doug Jung, begins, with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise boldly going where no man has gone before—for the 966th day of a five-year mission. The crew is starting to feel the weight of time and the sameness of routine, particularly Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), who is so desperate for a change of pace that he is considering a promotion to admiral, which will raise his stock but keep him grounded for the rest of his career (this plot point and the fact that it is his birthday both recall 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which remains a perennial touchstone for the franchise). Kirk’s first officer, the half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto), is also considering a change of career to ambassador, possibly because his relationship with communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is at an end. Meanwhile, McCoy (Karl Urban), the on-board doctor, is just as grumpy and irascible as ever, while we learn that chief navigator Sulu (John Cho) has a husband and Chekov (the late Anton Yelchin) prefers Scotch to vodka.

The Enterprise crew gets their change of pace after docking at Yorktown, an enormous Federation space station, where they are given the assignment of flying through a distant nebula to find a lost ship. Turns out the whole mission is a ruse designed to lure them into a massive trap sprung by Krall (Idris Elba), a decidedly bitter alien hell-bent on getting his mitts on the Abronath, a piece of an ancient weapon that Kirk has in his possession. While Krall is a fairly rote Star Trek villain—a humanoid like so many from the ’60s television show, just much better designed and articulated—he commands what turns out to be the film’s most unique and enthralling visual conceit, an army of thousands and thousands of small, single-pilot ships that mass and swarm like angry bees and are capable of cutting through just about anything, including the Enterprise, which is literally sawed into pieces in the middle of space and sent crashing and burning to the surface of the craggy planet that Krall calls home. Also calling this planet home is Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), a white-faced alien who is the sole survivor of another group that was lured into Krall’s trap. She has been making her home in the abandoned U.S.S. Franklin, an outdated Federation ship that went missing a century earlier. The crew of the Enterprise is split up, with a good chunk of them being captured while other small groups are scattered about, trying to figure out how they can escape Krall’s clutches and stop him before he gets back to Yorktown with his newly created device o’ destruction.

Granted, the plot is a lot of familiar boilerplate, but what Star Trek Beyond lacks in originality and daring, it makes up for with sheer energy and enthusiasm. Lin sometimes stages the action with too much frenetic intensity, resulting in blurs of violence that we have to simply accept and move on. At other times, though, he puts together scenes that provide a real rush, such as Kirk’s use of a motorcycle to create an Evel Knievel-like diversion and the aforementioned destruction of the Enterprise, which is done with a brutal sense of majesty that is undercut only by the fact that we’ve seen it happen before (in both 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and 1994’s Star Trek: Generations).

This being their third outing together, the cast has settled into their roles nicely, with Pine and Quinto’s Kirk and Spock suggesting a deep-seated camaraderie that needs few words, while Spock and Urban’s McCoy continue their humorously entrenched sense of conflict. The effects are big, but for the most part the film avoids that tiresome cliché of mass destruction, although a third-act action sequence that finds various ships ripping in and around the massive buildings inside Yorktown (which recall like the landscape-bending dream sequence in Christopher Nolan’s Inception) constantly toys with it. In many ways, Star Trek Beyond is a more modest film than its immediate predecessors, with ambitions that don’t go much farther than using familiar characters and situations to show the audience a rollicking good time. That it may ultimately be remembered as the Star Trek movie in which the Enterprise crew saves the day with some help from the Beastie Boys may not be at all a bad thing.

Star Trek Beyond Blu-Ray 3D + Blu-Ray + DVD + Digital HD

Aspect Ratio	2.39:1
Audio	English Dolby Atmos English Descriptive Audio 5.1 surround Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround Portuguese Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
Subtitles	English, French, Spanish, Portuguese
Supplements	Deleted Scenes “Beyond the Darkness” featurette “Enterprise Takedown” featurette “Divided and Conquered” featurette “A Warped Sense of Revenge” featurette “Trekking in the Desert” featurette “Exploring Strange New Worlds” featurette “New Life, New Civilizations” featurette “To Live Long and Prosper” featurette “For Leonard and Anton” featurette Gag reel
Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment
SRP	$49.99
Release Date	November 1, 2016

VIDEO & AUDIO
Star Trek Beyond looks excellent in its 1080p/AVC-encoded Blu-ray presentation. The film was shot in 4K on the Arri Alexa XT, and the result is beautifully, intensely detailed presentation that allows you to see everything from the smallest details on the costumes to text on various computer screens. At times there is almost an overload of visual information, and multiple viewings will certainly reward those who keep a sharp eye. Colors are largely muted, with a preponderance of steely blues and grays, although there are flashes of intense primary colors that are well managed. Black levels and contrast are spot-on. The film’s 3D presentation, despite being a postproduction conversion job, is really quiet excellent, with consistently impressive depth into the frame, even though there are only a few instances of things popping out the frame. The scenes in space tend to work the best, with the infinite black vacuum giving the various ships and space stations a real sense of floating grandeur. The scenes inside Yorktown, especially its introduction, are also duly impressive in adding a real sense of space and depth. The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is duly impressive, as well, with incredibly immersion in the intense action sequences. The sound is clean and expertly rendered in terms of spatial placement, making for an even more engaging experience.
SUPPLEMENTS
The supplements aren’t at all disappointing, but there’s nothing particularly outstanding, either. Rather, we get what amounts to just under an hour of featurettes that give a decent, but not particularly deep or nuanced, look at the film’s production. “Beyond the Darkness” (10 min.) is the longest of the featurettes, and it focuses primarily on producer J.J. Abrams, director Justin Lin, and co-writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung discussing the film’s origins and intentions. After that, we have “Enterprise Takedown” (4 min.), which details the creation of the famous ship’s destruction; “Divided and Conquered” (8 min.), which looks at the development of the characters in the film; “A Warped Sense of Revenge” (5 min.), which focuses on Krall and Idris Elba’s approach to the character; “Trekking in the Desert” (3 min.), which looks briefly at the film’s location work in Dubai; “Exploring Strange New Worlds” (6 min.), in which Lin takes us on a tour of the film’s physical sets; “New Life, New Civilizations” (8 min.), which allows the special effects designers to talk about the work that went into creating the 50 different alien species we see on screen (which is apparently more than the previous two films combined); “To Live Long and Prosper” (8 min.), which situates the film within Star Trek’s 50-year history; and “For Leonard and Anton” (5 min.), a brief tribute to actors Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin, the former of whom died while the script was being written and the latter of whom died just before its release (the featurette was clearly shot before Yelchin’s untimely death because no one talks about it in an interview). Finally, the disc includes two brief deleted scenes and a gag reel.

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

Overall Rating: (3)