As I sit down to write this "review" of Beyond I'm listening to the soundtrack for the first time on Spotify, and I think the sentiments it's evoking are basically the same for the movie. It has all the traits of the new films but adds in far more Trek "flavoring" which seems very familiar to fans and should satisfy them even more. Far from making it more like Guardians of the Galaxy, the movie went the opposite direction, making it for fans..something I wasn't really originally expecting but may also be effecting it's box office.
The 6 original films had a certain "feel", the Next Generation films had one film that felt somewhat like the older films, then 3 with their own tone. The JJ era began with a retro-TOS reawakening of the Roddenberry mission statement from the "Bible": action-adventure, but with a big budget, huge scale that couldn't have even been imagined with STTMP. Star Trek had come of age. No longer was it the bastard stepchild of the studio which was the product of complex cost-to-profit ratios that made the movies feel like glossier tv episodes. No one can say that the first two movies do not have differences beyond all the callbacks to TOS however. In the roughly 2 hour run-time, the entire world of Trek we saw in 100s of episodes has to be distilled down to 4 hours of film. That's the entire backdrop of this universe. It's ripe for all sorts of nit-picking just outside of the story. As such, the movies took awhile to get more quiet and intimate...to have our characters pair off, talk with each other more and really work as a team. So despite two great films in this new "trilogy", with the two over-arching themes being Kirk's development and Spock's trials and tribulations, the films were simply two very well made stand-alones. Beyond brings them both together.
The development of Kirk is happening just as I predicted it: We have the brash, immature Kirk in ST09; the more seasoned but still petulant Kirk who acts on impulse in STID, who makes mistakes but learned from them at the end of the movie; to finally the more developed Kirk who would appear to us to be Kirk from the TV show. This is the exact impression I get from Kirk in Beyond. For all intents and purposes, he starts out in Beyond as the diplomat from certain TOS episodes, negotiating a treaty. As with STID, we have a mission...and exploration again! His scenes with Bones recall similar soul searching from other movies and Tv episodes..he has gotten past the excitement of exploration and now, despite the technology and volume on a huge starship, he is feeling the oppression of being alone in deep space and encountering numerous dangers that take a toll on one's mindset: a theme that runs parallel to the other captain from Beyond: Balthazar Edison. This recognition near the end of the movie dramatically serves to strengthen our empathy with another captain who has gone rogue, but really is just a step or two away from the captains we identify with. Pine is now uncannily TOS Kirk.
Spock's story is less relevant to the film overall, but provides us with further character development as well as memorializing an icon of pop culture. That this film took time to both have a scene on Yorktown and also later in the film is to it's great credit. Justin Lin's direction emphasizing Spock's "aloneness" as he came to grips woth Spock's death is terrific. Quinto's Spock has a relevatory moment towards the end ofthe film as he realizes he doesn't want to leave the Enterprise for New Vulcan. It's one of his best acting moments.
Other characters are well served and contribute to the plot moving forward but the real fun is watching them work together, this has really become a family and it appears the off-camera "team" gets along way better than the original actors. This comes across well. Of obvious note, McCoy gets more screen time here and is the heart and soul of many a scene.
Jaylah is a welcome addition to the characters, and it's nice to see another female character take center stage. She's a renaissance woman! Engineer, ninja, tattoo artist, music fan.
The plot here is not complex..it IS a revenge story so again with these things, it's the telling that's more important than the details. Is it any more or less compelling than Khan? Nero? Shinzon? Khan lost an empire and a wife. Nero, an entire world. Shinzon was emo. Krall couldn't adapt to a new way of life. He existed at the time of a great paradigm shift from a regional space culture with Earth centrism, to an interplanetary UN(ironically these points are more relevant than ever with devisive conservative movements all over the world trying to break up factions of human beings. The message of unity in this movie is so refreshing and a metaphor for the UFP!). He seemed to go along with it all, but when his ship crashed, and no one came to help him and his crew, he went off the deep end. His mind twisted by alien tech, lonliness and philosophical differences. Despite being able to leave at some point, his twisted mind led him to stay and plot against the UFP.
Unlike some reactions to the film, I think this background to an "alien" character actually helps the film. When I saw Idris' face, I knew there would be more depth to the madness. To my surprise, Krall was in many more scenes of the film than expected, contrary to reports he disappeared in parts of the film..he is there throughout and very much an acting presence.
Another thing I like about Krall and the Swarm..I'm just so happy it's not Klingons or Romulans and that both their appearance and tech are totally different. The attack on the Enterprise was much longer than I anticipated and a much better set-piece sequence than even the commercials let on. Never have we seen movement through and around the ship with such detail..crewman running through corridors seen from outisde, panning, sweeping shots of relative positions of what is occurring. Yes we've seen ship destruction before, but again how was it accomplished? Surely this is better than any similar scenes we've seen before.
So we have terrific character work, a good message and a good "villain". Does it pay off? Well there is a "MacGuffin". That's not a dirty word, and of course the popularizer of the term: Alfred Hitchcock, used them more than a few times. It serves well enough to provide character motives for the rescue mission and for everyone meeting up at Yorktown at the climax.
As someone pointed out on Twitter, Beyond is the first time there is a plot where a black man has been defeated by white rappers. Oddly enough, in my review of "The Swarm" on the Voyager forum, I declared simply jamming the frequency between Swarm ships was too easy a resolution to the puzzle, and of course they used the same solution here, but this time with VHF 20th century classics. This is one of the weaker points of the movie though the result is an epic chain reaction. There probably is very little science behind ships bursting into flames from sound waves unless it somehow affected the mechanism used to generate them as they shut off abruptly.
The final scenes in Yorktown were more compelling. Krall's fighter chase was thrilling with some of the most spectacular visuals in Trek history, and the scenes of the fight and chase in lower gravity were something closer to what I would have liked for Kirk's death in Generations if the fight had boiled down to fisticuffs as it did.
Miscellany:
Justin Lin was a great choice for director. By comparison, the outisde "action" director Stuart Baird really infused very little style or nuance into Nemesis despite making the best looking film since STTMP. He is no one trick pony.
The "look" of the movie was darker and more muted but still had a technological glow to it. We had some of the best scenes of Starfleet and Federation world building ever. The cinematography was probably the best of any ST movie.
Despite a different FX company, the movie continued and probably exceeded the very real looking, solid CGI work that we saw in Into Darkness. I might give a slight edge to the spaceship work of ILM, but everything else was probably better.
The "Easter eggs" were fantastic, and definitely increased my enjoyment of the film because of the 50th anniversary. My favorite was possibly the nod to "Corbomite Maneuver" and the unexpected byproducts of exploration..complete surprise of the scale of a situation.
The aforementioned soundtrack. It's simply the best one since the 1980s. Nostalgia fuel.
The 1701-A! Similar, but different. They chose a good way to show us. I liked this scene way better than the end of STIV, which disappointed me.
My only decision...I rated it an "A" on the poll, but I feel it's on parallel with ST09 in overall quality, so I had to decide if it will replace that as my number 1 film in Star Trek history. At this time I'm going to put it there, though I'll make a more concrete decision after I see it in the theater again.
1. STB
2. ST09
3. STID
4. STII
5. STFC
6. STIV
7. STNEM
8. STIII
9. STVI
10. STINS
11. STTMP
12. STGEN
13. STV
