And it's the kind of welcome touch that director Justin Lin, the "Fast & Furious" veteran who takes over for J.J. It's all expressed with just a few arms tenderly draped across shoulders. The scene in question turns out to be a mere moment, lightly handled, showing Sulu greeting his same-sex partner and their daughter after a long mission.
The balance is a delicate one, as seen in the pre-release debate around this film revealing Sulu (John Cho but formerly played by LGBT icon George Takei) as gay. "Star Trek Beyond," like most of the rebooted properties flying around our movie theaters, delights in nostalgically resurrecting iconic characters and tweaking them anew. What bold explorations into the farthest reaches of the galaxy hold for Spock no one knows. And not just a little snicker, either, but a belly-full one. In the latest, "Star Trek Beyond," he laughs. Still, that – and a handful of dicey plot holes – aside, this is all fun all the time, a dizzying carnival of wisecracks, fisticuffs, explosions, chases and truly eye-popping effects.In the previous "Star Trek" installment, Spock cried. The film’s Achilles heel – again – is its villain: Idris Elba gives it his all as lizard-faced psycho Krall, but deep down he’s just another muscly warrior with an irrational grudge. And it helps that ‘Fast & Furious’ veteran Justin Lin is a better straight-up action director than JJ Abrams ever was: the battle scenes roar like thunder, and a late sequence in a gravity-defying starbase is astonishing. A tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy is genuinely moving – though there’s only a post-film dedication to Anton Yelchin, aka Chekov, whose tragic death was too recent.īut the dominant mood is giddy and jubilant: not since the original crew stepped down have we felt such a vivid sense of adventure and comradeship.
This time around it’s Kirk (Chris Pine) and Scott (Simon Pegg) who do most of the heroic heavy lifting – co-writer Pegg has noticeaby beefed up his own role – while Spock (Zachary Quinto) keeps it suitably cerebral, wrapped up in fears for the future of his race and grief at the death of his older self. Of course there’s a tad more to it than that, as the Enterprise’s investigation into a mysterious shipwreck leads to a spectacular confrontation with a swarm of drones, and leaves the crew marooned and scattered on a rocky, treacherous world.
More than any franchise entry since 1998’s (admittedly ropey) ‘Star Trek Insurrection’, it feels like a classic TV episode: the crew of the Enterprise head to a mysterious planet, they get into a spot of bother and Captain Kirk punches an alien. So it’s a genuine pleasure to report that ‘Star Trek Beyond’ is not ambitious in the slightest – unless you count the filmmakers’ absolute commitment to making audiences grin, whoop, and bounce up and down in their seats. It was later – just a little unfairly – voted the worst Trek movie ever by some of the series’s most hardcore fans. The previous ‘Star Trek’ movie, 2013’s ‘Into Darkness’, was packed with it: a sprawling epic full of new worlds, violent consequences and hefty emotional moments.
Too much ambition can be a dangerous thing.