So it’s official: in space, everyone can hear you scream. Apart from a few brief lectures on the relative merits of unity (good) and conflict (bad), the story skirts past lulls and doldrums, unveils a sprightly new heroine named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), and lays out the set pieces, in Kirk’s words, “the old-fashioned way.” The best of these arrives when Kirk and his team engage Krall’s fleet not with quantum torpedoes but with a cranked-up blast of the Beastie Boys. Written by Doug Jung and Simon Pegg, who stars once more as Scotty, and directed by Justin Lin, “Star Trek Beyond” refuses to be sidetracked by solemnity-the besetting sin of some previous installments.
Did Kirk ever dream that he would slide down the outside of the Enterprise as it keels over, firing his phaser upward at the bridge? He is dwarfed by the immensity of his craft, which itself is reduced to a mere sliver, near the beginning of the film, when it docks at Yorkville-a planet-size base that hangs in the heavens like a Christmas bauble, with inverted boulevards and skyscrapers curving around inside. Such is the surprise that is sprung by the latest film: it’s not just a blast but, at moments, a thing of beauty, alive to the comic awesomeness of being lost in space. What I like most about Krall is his squadron of attack ships-spiky little critters that swarm through the interstellar vacuum like starlings, cavorting and swaying this way and that. In Krall’s case, it is the Abronath, which is not a Scottish fishing town but the key, as so often, to ultimate power. Krall is one of those acquisitive fellows, like Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings,” whose happiness will not be complete until he gets his mitts on a particular doodad. There is no reason that a major character couldn’t be shaped like a lamprey, visible only in infrared, or a cloud of noble gas, but I suppose casting agents might object. The villain of the piece is Krall (Idris Elba), who, like the majority of life-forms in the “Star Trek” universe, just happens to be a biped of roughly human stature, with a good working grasp of colloquial English. Even now, a trace of the eager rube still clings to him, and his idea of a helpful stunt, at a critical point in the film, is to mount an old motorcycle, light-years from Earth, and gun it straight at the enemy. Earlier, Kirk had described the mission as “straightforward,” but then, though indubitably the bravest of commanders, he was never really the brightest. To be honest, the whole darn crew seems frayed, so it’s something of a blessing-or, at any rate, a bonding exercise-when the Enterprise, traversing a distant nebula to rescue a stranded vessel, is peppered and pulled apart. That she might ever tire of making out with a Vulcan sounds illogical, but the heart has its reasons, even in zero gravity. Kirk is mulling over a promotion, to a grander but flightless role, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) has career plans of his own, possibly connected to the cooling of his relationship with Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana). At the start of the film, on his nine hundred and sixty-sixth day in deep space, he quietly confesses that “things have started to feel episodic.” We’re with you, Jim, especially those of us who are now sitting down to our thirteenth “Star Trek” movie. On the other hand, it does give Kirk a dose of pep and purpose. Even agnostics, unmoved by the remorseless reboots of the “Star Trek” franchise, may find themselves mourning the loss.
Kirk (Chris Pine), safe in his ejection pod, gazing through the windshield at the flaming corpse of his beloved ship, which plunges down toward the crags of an unwelcoming planet. There’s a wonderful shot of Captain James T. In short, everybody’s favorite spacecraft has just turned into one big galactic Frisbee. First of all, its main thrusters are sheared off, which must-though I’m no expert-spell trouble for the warp drive, and then the tubular body drops away, leaving only the central saucer.
Barely half an hour has passed in “Star Trek Beyond,” and the USS Enterprise is already getting a haircut.