Star Trek: Beyond

Synopsis: Two years into their five-year mission, the starship Enterprise responds to a distress call in an uncharted nebula where they are attacked by the lizard-like villain, Krall (Idris Elba), who’s looking for an ancient artefact held on board. The crew fight back but the damaged starship crash lands on a mysterious planet where they soon discover that Krall derives his energy by sucking the life out of his victims. Separated from each other, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mister Chekov (Anton Yelchin) team up with Scotty (Simon Pegg) and stranded alien, Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), to concoct a plan to save Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho) and the rest of the crew while Bones (Karl Urban) tries to help an injured Spock (Zachary Quinto).

With a dozen feature films and five separate television series (plus a sixth starting next year) the Enterprise’s original five-year mission, as imaged by creator Gene Roddenberry, has now expanded by a factor of ten. In the world of warp cores, transporters, phasers set to stun and the occasional slipping into a parallel dimension, that kind of thing is probably to be expected. This latest outing, whilst number thirteen in the overall count, is the third instalment of the JJ Abrams era of Star Trek that began in 2009 with the modestly titled Star Trek, a very clever and successful reboot of the original brand. Sadly, for all the promise that film had, the excitement (well, for some of us at least) did not sustain itself into the second instalment, Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013). But with a change of director (Abrams is still in the producer’s seat) the third chapter redeems itself somewhat. To steal a line from another reviewer (referring to another franchise some years ago) this one is either the second best or the second worst in the series.

One of the things that Star Trek has done since the beginning is to break through the diversity barriers that resign some other genre films and TV series to the narrow lens of being populated mostly by good looking white guys and supported by pretty, young females in largely perfunctory roles. The regular cast of characters in the original series (the same characters in the latest films) were surprisingly culturally diverse and, in a radical idea for mid-60s commercial television, included Uhura - a black, female senior officer. Legend has it that Star Trek was also the show where the first interracial kiss on US TV took place between Kirk and Uhura (although some say it was between Nancy Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jnr on another show a few months earlier).

In Star Trek:Beyond the diversity of the crew is further expanded when during shore-leave Sulu, who has been missing his daughter, rushes to a family embrace with his little girl and his male partner. What’s most effective about this small moment is that for the rest of the film, without labouring the point, we’re primed to view Sulu’s action scenes as the heroics of a gay man. It’s a neat bit of character development mixed with social commentary.

The rest of the film, though, runs its course in not unexpected ways (how many times do we need to see the Enterprise destroyed and rebuilt?) and, whilst the fast-paced cutting and choppy camera work (a feature of Lin’s previous work on the Fast and Furious franchise) is exciting and entertaining, it struggles to elevate the film beyond (sorry about that) the shackles of its antecedents. Yes, the new cast is terrific at delivering its witty style of high-octane but slightly tongue-in-cheek action (especially Urban and Quinto as the niggling Bones and Spock) and there’s a lovely emotional connection to the original series and first six films, no doubt heightened by the passing of Leonard Nimoy (the original Spock) and the tragic death of Anton Yelchin (Chekov), but if the Abrams franchise really wants to make its mark on the Star Trek universe then maybe it’s time to let go of the past and boldly go where none of the films has gone before.

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