Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek Beyond begins with a diplo­mat­ic mis­sion gone com­i­cal­ly wrong. Cap­tain James Kirk (Chris Pine) appears bear­ing a gift – a rel­ic of an ancient weapon – in a cham­ber full of aliens. Yet his hosts mis­un­der­stand the Federation’s ges­ture. Why a weapon? they won­der. If its not actu­al­ly yours, you must have stolen it. Obvi­ous­ly the Fed­er­a­tion wants to mur­der us in our sleep, and even to eat us.

Then the alien leader rolls down from his seat above to attack Kirk and this for­bid­ding-look­ing crea­ture, so far shot at low angle to empha­sise his threat­en­ing stature, turns out to be not much big­ger than a cat. A lit­tle scratched but still stand­ing, Kirk is beamed up. After replac­ing his torn Starfleet uni­form with a new one from a clothes rack that holds many, he moves on, with a drink and a resigned sigh, to his next operation.

All this is to intro­duce to us a Kirk who is los­ing his bear­ings. Hav­ing joined Starfleet to prove him­self the equal of his late father George, he has lost sight of who James is. Hav­ing tra­versed deep space for years in the USS Enter­prise, ​“things”, Kirk sug­gests (in a cutesy ref­er­ence to the franchise’s orig­i­nal sta­tus as a TV series) ​“have start­ed to feel a lit­tle episod­ic.” Indeed, his anx­i­ety about being adrift with­out direc­tion is shared by Star Trek itself which, two movies into the lat­est fran­chise reboot, has seen its cap­tain JJ Abrams pro­mot­ed to the Star Wars helm.

What’s more, if Kirk is hav­ing some­thing of an exis­ten­tial cri­sis, Spock (Zachary Quin­to) too is feel­ing unmoored by the recent death of Admi­ral Spock (Leonard Nimoy, who played him, also died recent­ly). Both Kirk and Spock, stal­warts of the Start Trek team, are con­tem­plat­ing retir­ing from their duties aboard the Enter­prise. With­out some kind of rad­i­cal shake­up, every­thing, it seems, is falling apart. Not long after the begin­ning of the film, that is pre­cise­ly what will hap­pen to the Enter­prise itself, torn to shreds by attack­ing craft.

Before we get ahead of our­selves, though, it is impor­tant to sort through that pro­logue with the aliens and the gift. For while laugh­ing at aliens and their prim­i­tive ways, and even their small size, might seem, well, alien to Star Trek’s usu­al spir­it of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and inclu­siv­i­ty (includ­ing, here, an ever-so-casu­al­ly gay Sulu), in fact that open­ing sequence will come in for some revi­sion, as it turns out that the aliens were in fact ask­ing all the right ques­tions – in a film where it will also emerge that the most dan­ger­ous aliens are human.

That ancient weapon frag­ment is in fact the macguf­fin that fuels the ensu­ing plot, a WMD that the crea­tures hid­den in an unchart­ed neb­u­la have been seek­ing for many years. In pur­suit of it, their ruth­less leader Krall (Idris Elba) destroys Kirk’s ship and cap­tures his crew, and those still on the run on his plan­et of the vam­pires must regroup and use some very old tech against him, with help from strand­ed kick-ass alien Jay­lah (Sofia Boutel­la) and her recov­ered col­lec­tion of ​‘clas­sic’ hip hop tracks – as well as a vin­tage motorbike.

In oth­er words, to rein­vig­o­rate the franchise’s sense of pur­pose, new recruit Justin Lin takes things back to their roots and core val­ues, and also injects some of the dynam­ic action that he has honed on mul­ti­ple Fast and Furi­ous sequels. There may be a lot of fight­ing, but here, as in the orig­i­nal TV shows and films, the empha­sis is on ensem­ble team­work, peace mis­sions, the sav­ing (as opposed to tak­ing) of life, and adven­tur­ous feats of der­ring-do, all told with a GSOH (Pegg co-wrote the script).

Here Krall is not only a Colonel Kurtz fig­ure whom the crew find with­out ever hav­ing realised he was miss­ing, but also, as some­one who has tru­ly lost him­self, a dark mir­ror to the Kirk shown at the begin­ning of the film. In fac­ing Krall, Kirk can remem­ber who he was, and is – and the res­cued fran­chise can once more con­tin­ue to bold­ly go where no man (although the female char­ac­ters are equal­ly if not more capa­ble here) has gone before, back to the future with its mojo well and tru­ly restored.

Since Star Trek Beyond wrapped, Anton Yelchin (who played Chekov) has, like Nimoy, died. The film is ded­i­cat­ed to both of them in the clos­ing cred­its. But before that, a very sub­tle piece of edit­ing also hon­ours Yelchin as an ​‘absent friend’. Mean­while, mor­tal­i­ty is one of the film’s more promi­nent motifs, along­side friend­ship and sol­i­dar­i­ty. This new old crew can still do all those things well.