Watch CBS News

Movie Review: 'Star Trek Beyond'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Maybe 13 is just an unlucky number.

Or maybe it's just too big a number.

Whatever it is where the Star Trek movies are concerned, the 13th big-screen entry is among the weakest in the history of the franchise, which has otherwise lived long and prospered ever since the television series debuted fifty years ago.

It's not that Star Trek Beyond is abominable or embarrassing, which it isn't.

It's that the quality level of the dozen science fiction thrillers that preceded it, spread out over nearly forty years and with multiple casts, has remained impressively high enough to expose the latest entry's limitations.

And they are extensive in a film that certainly does not go boldly where no film has gone before.

Let's put it this way: "beyond" it is not.

 

2
(2 stars out of 4)

 

Especially when compared to the film's immediate predecessor, Star Trek Into Darkness, directed by J.J. Abrams, which was brilliantly layered and riveting, perhaps the highlight of the entire series.

But those phasers that we set to "stun" during that stunning achievement have come back down to earth because Star Trek Beyond, by comparison – the third installment in the most recent rebooted series -- is very much on the pedestrian side.

In it, the USS Enterprise crew is, as always, exploring the farthest reaches of uncharted space, where they encounter a formidable new enemy, a predatory reptile named Krall, played by Idris Elba, who has his reasons for hating the United Federation of Planets that the Enterprise represents and objects to their expansion, and who is intent on bring them down.

Led by Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Science Officer Spock, the crew – including Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy, Zoe Saldana as Lieutenant Unhura, the late Anton Yelchin as Ensign Chekov, John Cho as Lieutenant Sulu, and Smon Pegg as Chief Engineer Scott – find themselves, halfway into their five-year mission, attacked by a wave of aliens and forced to abandon ship, an unprecedented action that strands them on an unknown planet with no obvious means of rescue.

With Abrams serving as one of the film's producers, the directorial reins have been handed to Justin Lin, best known as the director of three movies in the Fast and Furious franchise of action thrillers: Fast & Furious, Fast Five, and Fast & Furious 6.

And therein may lie the problem.

Because although the Fast and Furious flicks are nothing to be ashamed of, they are pretty much pure action, whereas it's not the action that has distinguished the character-driven Star Trek films but the relationships among the familiar characters and the futuristic philosophical ideas that characterized the just-below-the-surface subtext.

But Star Trek Beyond, scripted by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, operates at warp speed throughout and is dominated by ho-hum action to a counterproductive degree.

It would certainly pass muster as an episode of the television series, but it comes up short as a feature film.

We're grateful any time the narrative slows down and allows the characters to interact and discuss, but it doesn't happen nearly often enough.

And we look forward to a surprise or a twist or a variation of some kind – and they don't come either.

The characters couldn't be more lived-in, but their circumstances fail to take us into what should feel like new territory.

This doesn't necessarily signal the end of the storied franchise, but it does indicate that if there is to be at least one more movie, a shift in narrative priorities might be in order.

So beam me up to 2 stars out of 4 and hope that if there is to be another enterprise for the Enterprise, it's one that goes beyond Star Trek Beyond.

More Bill Wine Movie Reviews

CBS Philly Entertainment News

Area Movie Events

View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.