Star Trek Beyond Review

This year sees Star Trek celebrate its 50^th birthday, timed with that celebration is the third installment of the JJ Abrams helmed Star Trek reboots, in this latest outing however Captain Abrams has relieved his role aboard the Starship Enterprise and overseen Justin Lin in the driving seat.

Co-written by Scotty himself Simon Pegg, Star Trek Beyond sees the crew of the Enterprise now actually exploring the final frontier. After some shore leave on the beautifully designed spherical glass ball Starbase called Yorktown, they are tasked with assisting a stranded ship that lies beyond an asteroid belt. Once through, the Enterprise is attacked by Idris Elba’s big bad Krall and though mostly evacuated to safety the crew are now left stranded on the planet below.

After the solid jumping off point of Abrams first, and the slightly squiffy venture of Star Trek Into Darkness which, Benedict Cumberbatch chewing the scenery aside, seemed to more or less forget what Star Trek is about, it’s refreshing here to see it back on track. What is most prevalent in Simon Pegg and Doug Jung's script is the love and respect for the history of Star Trek. There are dutiful nods to the sad passing of Leonard Nimoy, but the ultimate reverence they’ve paid to the original series is to uphold the principles of what made it so great.

Once stranded on the planet the film makes the decision to break the crew up into fun double acts, with Kirk and Chekov ending up one place, Sulu and Uhura held captive, Spock and Bones in another place and Scotty making a new friend in the form of the brilliantly feisty and charming resident alien Jayla. The time spent with the crew apart means the film can explore the characters more closely, the most enjoyable of which being the relationship between Bones and Spock, which gets the closest to the bickering relationship between the two formed in the original series. It also feels like every character gets at least one moment, particularly Sulu, reminding us that whilst its Kirk who sits in the captain’s chair, it’s really Sulu who does the hot shot piloting.

As with nearly every sci-fi action film ever made there are obviously giant leaps in logic which, if the film slows down long enough for you to put any thought into you could spot black holes in from a mile away, fortunately the moment the film feels as though it might slow down it immediately ramps back up to warp speed. Though Idris Elba’s Krall is a better villain than these films have received in the past, his motives behind his actions seem a little bit repetitive of Nero and Khan from the first two, and in all the whizzing fun it rushes a big revelation towards the end without ever really fleshing it out.

The overriding feeling experienced during this film is that it’s fun, and it has no pretensions of being anything more, yes it doesn’t have the substance that other Star Trek films have had in the past, but Justin Lin is a director who knows how to create spectacle, and destroying a swarm of enemy ships to the tune of the Beastie Boys is probably one of Star Treks funnest moments, and that’s saying something because there’s 50 years worth of them now. (4 Stars)