Cinematic Releases: Star Trek Beyond - Reviewed

Lin picks up where Abrams left off and dumps us in the middle of the galaxy. 




If you're not a fan of the Abrams movies, you're going to hate this review. If you ARE a fan of the Abrams movies, you're also going to hate this review. 

In the case of Star Trek Beyond, the third time isn't a charm. In fact, it's such a boisterous mess of uninvolved plot lines and repetitive nonsense borrowed from other Trek movies, that fans are going to abandon all hope that we ever get another proper movie in this franchise. Beyond is a clone job of Abrams first movie and Into Darkness, shamelessly turned into a science fiction bit of political commentary that feels unnecessary and spineless. Gene Roddenberry would be ashamed of this tripe. Star Trek Beyond is the doldrums of too much too fast and a small amount of respect for their original source material.  

After JJ Abrams exit, the always loyal fandom had high hopes that maybe we'd get a return to form with a sequel that would give us back the galaxy exploration and thematic elements of the original cast movies and television series. This couldn't be more distant from the truth with Beyond. This is a soulless expedition with a cast that's already become bored playing these characters. I'll be honest, I'm a fan of the two Star Trek movies that Abrams directed. While they're not highly intelligent by any means, they still had a heart. They're adventurous escapist fun. They gave us a great new rendition of Khan and reintroduced us to the series. On that note, Star Trek Beyond is a barren and cheap looking caricature that has no soul and will further the hate towards this franchise. 



Captain, it is not logical to make a movie that sucks this bad. 


From the first few minutes of Beyond, something is missing. There is no pulse. There's little continuity. There's no context by which we can sympathize with these characters anymore. The death of Leonard Nimoy's Ambassador Spock is touched on but bears no weight. The Enterprise is destroyed again and it feels old hat (Not a spoiler. It's in the trailer). While it's easy to see how well the main players can interconnect with each other and have some type of emotional bond after their last two journeys together, everything feels truncated and dull. Even the visual elements this time around are horrendous looking in numerous spots. The motorcycle scenario which has been shown off all over the trailers is one of the absolute worst looking CGI scenes of the summer. Kirk looks one hundred percent animated as we're rushed through an absolutely brainless scene that truly feels like 2 Trek 2 Furious. 

In all honestly, bringing Justin Lin in to this series was one of the worst mistakes they've ever made. These films need hard sci-fi elements that can only be handled by a proper genre director. Begging, borrowing, and stealing scenes from nearly all the other formative Star Trek movies, Beyond sits idly below the worst of the original cast movies and the bottom rung of the Next Generation flicks. There is just nothing to like here. It's an exercise in showing off how easy it is to paste together a meandering script with an underdeveloped villain while trying to feed the fans some bullshit that they're going back to the way Trek used to be. 


You see that up there. That's Roddenberry's dream of the future.
Justin Lin just crapped all over it. Thanks, yo.



To further the case that this movie is exactly what we feared, the use of more modern music like the Beastie Boy's Sabotage and Public Enemy's Fight the Power takes the viewers out of the experience and only amplifies my case that this Star Trek Beyond is a total nightmare.  If you waste the talents Idris Elba like this, you deserve to be banished to some distant uninhabitable planet. Seriously. I honestly don't know how they thought this was an acceptable follow up. This bored me to tears. 

From what I've read, other people are finding something to connect with in Beyond. So, I'll digress. Bash at will. This just wasn't my cup of tea. 



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Score


-CG