Beyond Caring?
Star Trek: Beyond / directed by Justin Lin
Oh, in what a diabolical bind the new Star Trek movies have placed the true Trekkie fan — one more than glancingly akin to the conundrum explored in depth in The Tholian Web (Season 3, Episode 9)! Who among us has not felt his or her heart quicken at the prospect of rejoining the original Enterprise crew on fresh adventures, all enhanced by the wonders of 21st century special effects? The allure of big budget fan fiction exerts a strong gravity pull; yet, not so secretly we wonder, is the source of this gravity a healthy star, or a light-sucking black hole?
The third installment of the re-boot, Star Trek: Beyond, is a perfect summation of the conundrum. It has bits and pieces of good humor, and a fair amount of excitement: but haunting it all is the sense that this film exists not as something that builds on and celebrates the original Star Trek, but instead lives a parasitical, decontextualized relationship to its precursor (uncannily akin to the soul-sucking ways of the movie’s villain!).
But you can’t say we weren’t already on yellow alert. The first of the new films was good trippy fun, a high-adrenaline re-think of the original series that consciously carved out its own rationale for its different approach. But the second film, Star Trek: Into Darkness, reached for inspiration in the canonical Kirk-Khan storyline, trying to siphon emotional depth from the original series and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan without bringing much of its own substance to the party. And now Beyond mines the premise of the original series as a whole - the promise and perils of a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, etc.
The opening scene is a playful homage to the original, as Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) tries to broker a peace between two civilizations in conflict. Acting the role of diplomat to a race of fearsome-faced creatures, discussions break down when the creatures jump down from their high perch to attack him; only we realize that we’ve been fooled by perspective, and that the scary creatures are actually pint sized, though still fierce, like Spielbergian gremlins. Kirk tussles with the adorable horde, managing to rip his shirt in the process and getting whisked away via transporter at the last minute.
But as they head to a space station for a bit of R&R, Captain Kirk reveals that he’s suffering from existential malaise. After three plus years of exploring the galaxy, he is becoming. . . bored. The infinity of discoveries has begun to wear on him. Is the universe all there is? He even contemplates taking a shore job, or at least, a stationary position as admiral of the space station. Fortunately, Kirk soon gets his biggest adventure yet, as the Enterprise is lured into a trap and he has to figure out how to function when all seems lost.
As with the previous two re-boots, there are numerous amusing allusions and call-outs to the original series, encompassing both the persnickety Spock (Zachary Quinto) -McCoy (Karl Urban) relationship and welcome variations on a theme, like Lt. Uhuru’s (Zoe Saldana) enhanced, initiative-taking role and Lt. Sulu’s (John Cho) on-screen gay family. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a real kick out of Urban’s portrayal of McCoy and Simon Pegg’s ridiculous and likeable Scotty. But throughout, I couldn’t help wondering why this movie exists, beyond the goal of making money, when its strip-mining of what came before far exceeds what it adds to the Star Trek universe.
The adventures that befall the crew in the film’s final two-thirds aren’t even always the stuff of sci-fi - Captain Kirk riding a motorcycle continues a long, strange tradition of Star Trek films including low-level technologies that seem totally silly and out of place - and beyond this, we are left with the sense of a pastiche of a story, rather than a story that takes itself and its themes seriously. The bad guy turns out to be a Star Fleet officer gone bad, offering a counterpoint to Kirk’s crisis of faith, but the dialectic is deeply superficial (if you might excuse the paradox): the film doesn’t seem interested in exploring the question in any detail, when that could have given the film a much stronger reason for being. What really jars is the reduction of a wonky, idealistic show like Star Trek to pure popcorn entertainment: it may be time to beam us all up from this blunder of a re-boot.
