Do you like my interior decorating, Mr. Scott?
Continuing an unfortunate recent trend in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek Beyond (2016) is a movie full of vivid scenes and some mild intercharacter chemistry, but lacking in one of the most important characteristics of the original series: consideration of interesting moral questions. As the original USS Enterprise is destroyed by a mysterious enemy that seems to know more about Star Fleet than the average bear, the bad guy implies his attack will be for the best for the races that make up the Federation. This forms the basis of the closest the story comes to an interesting moral question: does peace and prosperity improve a species, or does pain and toil and struggle?
Unfortunately, this is not a question of prime importance for most audiences, although of course one can always find an individual who might disagree with the broad consensus that peace and prosperity leads to more improvement in sentient, civilized species. Generally, the horror of war tends to set back civilization in its quest for progress, for freedom from famine and epidemic, or so goes the popular opinion, and this movie does not present material that would seriously dispute this view.
The balance of the movie presents how the Enterprise crew reacts to the bad guy’s acquisition of the critical part of a superweapon from them. Regrettably, the bad guy’s motivation is, as noted, rather dubious, and the supporting material, at least as presented in the movie, either incoherent or worse. I mean, I was paying attention and I couldn’t make out if the bad guy was extraordinarily long-lived because of his association with the superweapon or, well, maybe he was related to Dr. Who.
But it’s a fun visual treat, and Mr. Scott’s new interest had some striking makeup. If you like Star Trek, or possibly if you like James Bond (as I found myself thinking some of the scenes in this one are reminiscent of some of the crazier, yet traditional, action scenes in the 007 series), you’ll probably like this, but wonder at what seems to be missing. I mean, besides the silliness of Mr. Spock romancing Lt. Uhura.
