Review: 'Star Trek Beyond' brings a fast and furious aesthetic to a familiar franchise
To any connoisseur of the original “Star Trek” television series, the sight of Capt. James T. Kirk in a torn shirt will feel as familiar as family. The character had a bad habit of ruining gold uniform tunics in his frequent fights.
So when Chris Pine, who plays Kirk in the current series of rebooted movies, says, “I ripped my shirt, again,” after his peace offering to a delegation of aliens goes awry, the in-joke, which opens “Star Trek Beyond,” hits on all cylinders: aliens; good intentions thwarted; violent conflict; and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of winking, self-aware humor.
The cutaway, which shows Kirk staring into a closet hung with several identical replacement tops, is priceless.
What follows is an action-packed, fun and funny thrill ride into a cinematic nebula that may be uncharted for the crew of the starship Enterprise, but that will be comfortably recognizable for diehard Trekkers and those who only beamed on board once producer J.J. Abrams took over the helm with the 2009 film. Abrams, who directed the first two new “Star Trek” films, has relinquished the captain's chair to director Justin Lin of the “Fast and Furious” franchise.
The Enterprise crew is quickly lured into a cataclysmic ambush by a new villain named Krall (Idris Elba, all but buried beneath a Halloween mask of hideous prosthetics), on a planet where their only hope is a solitary alien resistance fighter. The rebel, Jaylah — played by French-Algerian actress Sofia Boutella under a patina of black-and-white face paint — is a welcome female addition to the predominantly male cast.
Hiding out in the hulk of an abandoned Starfleet ship, Jaylah has taught herself broken English, presumably from listening to rap tunes that were left there by the long-dead crew. One key stratagem of the Enterprise crew against Krall involves weaponizing a recording of the Beastie Boys' “Sabotage” — “classical music,” as Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) calls it, in this 23rd-century world.
The imaginative, rump-shaking use of diegetic sound gives Chief Engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg) the opportunity to shout, over the film's near-constant din, “I've just got to reconfigure the VHF output into a multiphasic sweep!”
Occasionally, there are things that don't make sense, even with a mind charitably predisposed toward the elasticity of science fiction. Case in point: When Krall's forces first attack the Enterprise, the enemy fighters repeatedly puncture the Enterprise's hull. Strangely, there is no loss to the ship's artificial atmosphere.
But “Star Trek Beyond” is a proud addition to a canon that even the ghost of creator Gene Roddenberry would appreciate. It may not boldly go where no “Star Trek” film has gone before, but it gets there at warp speed, and with a full tank of fresh ideas.
Michael O'Sullivan is a Washington Post writer.
