When Star Trek Beyond was announced with Justin Lin in the director’s chair, the fandom immediately voiced their concerns that the new film would be nothing more than Fast and Furious In Space. Star Trek fandom has been a tricky piece of the nerd culture puzzle for decades, and even more so with the emergence of the J. J. Abrams helmed reboot that inspired legions of new fans with its Star Wars-inspired action and pacing (I contend that the first Star Trek reboot is still the best J. J. Abrams Star Wars movie). But that same action-oriented sensibility turned off advocates of the original series who felt that the true spirit of Star Trek had been lost in all the action and bombast.

And so Star Trek Beyond tried to split the difference. Simon Pegg helped pen a script he assured fans hewed closer to the more cerebral tone of the television series, and as the film’s release approached, the buzz started to grow that this was going to be our first “real” Trek film of the new series.

This is the part of the review where I admit that I am not a Trekkie. I’ve seen all the films at least once, and bits and pieces of the various television shows, but I was never particularly bothered by the action oriented tone of the J. J. Abrams reboot (though I was bothered by the absolute abortion of storytelling in Into Darkness). But even so, I had always assumed I understood where the diehard Trekkies were coming from.

Star Trek was a thinking man’s show. It had to be, because when it first aired you couldn’t afford to wow viewers with special effects on a television budget. Science fiction has always been about exploring possibilities, about exploring the human condition from an unconventional vantage point, letting us be surprised by our own reflections, warping the mirror just enough to let us see ourselves as we really are. And Star Trek in particular was about pushing societal boundaries, envisioning a future world where the barriers of gender and race did not exist.

So going into Beyond I assumed we would see more of that than had been present in the previous films in the series.

Let me be clear: Star Trek Beyond is not a thinking man’s movie. There are no deep, heady science fiction ideas to be found here, no tinted windows looking into our own souls. Nor does it do anything much to push societal boundaries beyond a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene that reveals the rebooted Sulu is gay.

True, Beyond does have moments that mimic the original show insofar as they have characters paired off by plot convenience, stumbling around an alien planet that looks suspiciously like a rock quarry, but often these scenes don’t serve any narrative purpose, padding out the middle of the film until the crew can get back into space and be awesome again.

Uhura and Sulu get the short straw in the movie’s grab bag of paired off characters. They have very little to do other than reacting to the villain’s confusing machinations, including a scene where he sucks the life out of two random bystanders, a moment that I imagine was meant to induce shock and horror, but somehow just seems confusing. Kirk and Chekov do a little better with some great banter and fun action moments, and Spock and Bones bickering at each other like an old married couple gets more than a few laughs even if it does very little to progress the story.

Easily the cream of the crop though are Scotty and newcomer to the franchise, Jaylah, an alien fugitive played with a perfect mix of strength and adorable naivete by Sofia Boutella.

Jaylah is stranded, surviving alone after having seen her family killed by Krull. She’s strong, but not invincible, psychologically scarred after having seen her father die. Despite having survived so long on her own, she’s hesitant to help Scotty and the rest of the crew rescue Krull’s captives. But she overcomes her fear, conquers her demons, and basically steals the movie in the process.

She’s the kind of female character Hollywood has been trying to conjure up for years now. She doesn’t have to yell about how she doesn’t need her hand held, because she’s too busy rescuing Scotty from danger. She doesn’t know everything, she isn’t perfect, but she is strong and beautiful and real.

But none of this is why you should go and see Star Trek Beyond.

You should go see Star Trek Beyond because, at its best, it’s exactly what everyone worried it would be when they first announced that Justin Lin was directing.

Star Trek Beyond is absolutely Fast and Furious in Space.

This is the part where I’m going to have to go into spoilers. I’m going to have to tell you how Kirk and the crew beat the bad guys.

Stop reading here if you don’t want to know.

But I have to talk about this.

Is is just us cool kids left?

Great.

So here’s what they do:

They get real close to the bad guys.

Then they turn up their radio real loud.

Then they play music at them.

Then the bad guys explode.

Oh, and not just any music. They play that song from the trailer that everyone hated. You know, the one that everyone complained didn’t fit the tone of Star Trek?

This is the best scene in the movie. It is stupid and dumb and if I hadn’t been in a room full of other adults I would have gotten up and danced when it happened, because it was basically the best thing of all the things ever.

It put a big dumb smile on my big dumb face, and that is exactly the kind of film-making what Justin Lin excels at. The man has a genius for popcorn cinema, a brilliance for making “dumb” movies. Throughout the film you can see him trying so hard to direct the kind of movie the fans wanted to see. But by the end of it all it’s like he can’t contain himself, and his action sensibilities explode onto the screen with all the bombast that turned the Fast and Furious films into a blockbuster phenomenon.

Maybe he doesn’t fit in the Star Trek box. And maybe J. J. Abrams didn’t either. But when both of them gave up on that and made boxes of their own the results were at the very least enjoyable.

So next time they make a Star Trek movie, squawk all you want about the purity of the franchise. I’ll be over here hoping that whoever they get to direct can find a way to make it their own.



Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw .

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