Here’s a big idea for a Star Trek movie: Make it feel like a midseason episode of a Star Trek TV show. That’s the thinking behind the first act of Beyond, which finds Kirk and co. in year three of a five-year mission. For the first time in the film franchise, the rhythms of life onboard don’t feel unnecessarily magnified; the crew has an easy rapport, their missions have an intriguing regularity, and things are beginning to feel a bit, well, episodic. They visit the Yorktown space colony, one of the niftiest future-locations in any space movie this decade. Director Justin Lin has better action chops than any previous Trek director, and it shows in the first Enterprise assault, a clever hive-mind attack that cuts the Enterprise off at the head. Then the crew crash-lands – and the film crashes with it, descending into a muddled second act. New baddie Krall is all-but-ruined by a curious plot decision that forces Idris Elba to play “vaguely-defined evil” until nearly the end of the film. Beyond wants to ask tough questions about the franchise – but it settles for all the easy answers, descending into precisely the kind of referentiality that everyone loathed in Star Trek Into Darkness.