Star Trek Beyond Is StarTrek-cellent

It's a trying and sometimes fascinating time to be a Star Trek fan these days. There's certainly lots of media awareness for the third film in the new "Kelvin Timeline" series of films — partially because of the tragic death of Anton Yelchin (the new film series' Pavel Chekov) and the controversy over the near-subliminal revelation of longtime helmsman Hikaru Sulu as a gay man (more specifically, a married gay man with a daughter) — this in addition to the standard Hollywood hype that orchestrates the marketing of tentpole films for summer audiences like military engagements (though hopefully with less bloodshed). And looming in the distance is a new television series, handled by Bryan Fuller, who took the uneven film and literary property that is Hannibal Lecter and turned it into one of the best and most innovative shows of the past decade.

For the purposes of this article, we're focusing mainly on Star Trek Beyond, the new film, though there may be some references to the previous two films in this cinematic trilogy (2009's Star Trek and 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness). There are two huge changes between the previous entries in the KT series — one, new director Justin Lin (who made the best films in the Fast and Furious series), and two, new writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. The former, in addition to acting as beloved and curmudgeonly engineer Montgomery Scott, also co-wrote The Cornetto Trilogy with Edgar Wright, which is what we like to call a promising development.

Those previous two films were directed by J.J. Abrams, who did a good enough job turning from Trek to Wars when Lucasfilm scooped him up to make last year's The Force Awakens. He's still around as a producer on this one, and his knack for pacing is certainly present — but thankfully, his insistence on not engaging with 40-something years of previous universe-building is absent. And then there are writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who professed to be fans of Trek and yet still made the staggeringly uneven Star Trek Into Darkness into a 9/11 Truther film with Klingons. So that's a huge behind-the-scenes shakeup. The Lin/Pegg/Jung Trek wastes no time whatsoever in letting the viewer know that there is a deep and sincere love of Trek serving as the engine that drives the whole, ahem, enterprise.

So this isn't exactly going to be a traditional review of Star Trek Beyond. It's the third in an ongoing series of dissections that aims to get at the contemporary heart of Star Trek and how these new films explore, embrace and refute that. If you'd like to catch up beforehand, read this bit on 2009's Star Trek, and this story on 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness.

Now, pour yourself a Warpcore Breach and get ready for some Deep Trekkery, if you dare, because we're not even 10 minutes in before STB offers up something both visually and ideologically overwhelming — the Yorktown, a starbase that floats in space like its own planet. The 2009 Trek had that spectacular sequence that allowed the viewer to really see the Vulcan city of ShiKahr, with its buildings and structures hewn into gargantuan cliffs and mountains. The way that STB unveils the Yorktown is like that sequence on an exponentially more involved scale — buildings, bodies of water, private and public spaces, all emanating in all directions from nodes and spokes.

It's Space Dubai (where much of the film was shot) in that it's a dazzling example of visionary architects reshaping untenable space into something beautiful but aware of its own tenuous nature, as if at any moment the wild will reclaim its space and disperse all evidence that it ever existed. The Yorktown is such an incredible leap forward in terms of fusing those millions and millions of effects dollars with Gene Roddenberry's idealistic universe that it makes a Trekkie's heart swell with pride.

It feels as though a guiding principle behind this new film was space — not just the extraplanetary medium in which our characters are having their adventures and explorations, but the physical environments in which these stories occur. Lin has a gift for allowing us to see how these corridors and chambers and decks fit together — it does immeasurable good for the film, as we cease to think of these environments as disparate locations, instead taking them as complex and interconnected systems. The film makes giant, heaping efforts to ground itself in Gene Roddenberry's philosophy, and it does so foremost through the way its staggering effects are designed and rendered. It's a nervy principle, and one that pays off extensively for hardcore Trek fans.

It's very weird when you try to parse it, because STB openly takes its narrative structure from original series episodes, but its thematic elements feel most like Trek's inaugural movie, 1979's still-unequaled Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the obsession with finalities represented in terms of disassembling and destabilization, as opposed to explosions; Spock's evolution and reconciliation regarding his many dualities; the way past perspectives can contain the seeds of contemporary destruction through no intentional action; and how all sorts of passions can be rekindled by exposure to the unexpected). Seeing as how the vast majority of Trek films desperately ape the boilerplate of Wrath of Khan, Beyond feels all the more refreshing for eschewing such an approach.

Chris Pine may very well be better than Shatner at this point.

Gone is the wink-wink future-bro sexism of Kurtzman and Orci's screenplays; in its place is a dry amusement at the concerns of traditional gender roles, and how they impact a society that has moved beyond fratty foolishness. No longer do characters' relationships seem like land acquisitions. Further, there is a real and conscious decision to embrace IDIC on a visual level previously absent from this series of films. It's a delight for anyone who had given up on the new Trek getting in touch with its founding principles, and that delight most certainly includes the Enterprise crew members I've taken to calling Lieutenant Feratu and Ensign Facehuggerhead.

That's not to say that Beyond is a flawless achievement. There's a plot point that's meant to pay tribute to a moderately controversial aspect of the 2009 Trek that instead feels like a Killer Tomatoes shout-out. Some of the action scenes are cut far too quickly for their own good, kneecapping a lot of that magnificent design. As with Into Darkness, the limitations of transporter technology are vague and subject to whatever the script needs to provide the ideal amount of conflict at any given moment. And Idris Elba, cast as villain Krall, does the most he can with a strangely underwritten role.

There are periodic indications that there used to be a lot more in this film, before the four credited editors shaped it into its current two-hour runtime. Hopefully, home media releases might restore some of said hypothetical material, because there is a profound resistance to sloppiness in the majority of this effort — a resistance that makes those moments of inescapable sloppiness all the more frustrating. Pretty much everything dealing with Krall, his right-hand duo and the alien vampire tech feels like the victim of a particularly brutal edit.

But to anyone who had resigned themselves to focusing only on the positive aspects of the Kelvin timeline version of Trek, Star Trek Beyond is both a reassuring hug and a hefty belt of Saurian brandy. Dedicated to both Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin, it is a film that happily gives you millions and millions of dollars worth of dazzle, but also hits the viewer with decades of complex feelings with the reveal of one still image. Properly executed flash was never a problem for the new Trek, but with Beyond, finally there is heart and hope, deep at its center.