Star Trek: Beyond

Friday 22nd July 00:00 Leigh

Having just returned from my London trip to Star Wars Celebration, I thought it would only be fitting to step into enemy territory.  Being a film fan (as I am sure you can no fully appreciate), my love of everything film regardless of genre, franchise or finance, I am not a die-hard Star Wars fan who thinks that everything Federation is sub-par.  Take the prequels, they are terrible films in my opinion (Revenge of the Sith being as close to reasonable as the whole prequel trilogy can muster) and films like Wrath of Khan, Nemesis and First Contact definitely put the Star Wars films to shame.

The recent “alternate dimension” versions from Bad Robot have been a little uninspired for me though, yes they look amazing and they are well acted, but they always leave me feeling a little under-satisfied.

Choosing to watch just the newest part of a special trilogy screening at Cineworld Leigh, primarily because there is a 5 hour parking restriction on their car park which has stung me in the past for double cinema trips and also because I was happy to miss the first part of the new triumvirate.  I had watched Into Darkness at home on Netflix a few hours earlier and just after midnight the title card appeared for the next installment of Kirk's journey, this time directed by the Fast and Furious Justin Lin

One thing I did notice was the lack of audience members.  Not comparing apples and oranges, but both Wars and Trek are common rivals for each other.  The midnight screening of The Force Awakens was buzzing, when the Logo hit the screen there was a raucous cheer, with Beyond there were 30 people sporadically gathered and the atmosphere was far from electric.  Possibly because they had sat for 5 hours already in the company of Kirk and his colleagues.

ST:Beyond was slow and cold again for me, the high amount of exposition and bad guy monologues felt very 70’s in style, it felt like nothing had moved forward with the films in the last 30 years.  I agree that The Force Awakens is the exact same story as the original New Hope, but it had moved on in years.  Another distracting factor was Scotty, he is Simon Pegg doing a hybrid Scottish accent, it was distracting and hard to view him as anyone else.  Bones, Ahura, Spock, Kirk and the rest of the crew all seemed to put the effort in, but nothing really felt epic or grand just mediocre.

The finale was a left over set piece from Guardians of the Galaxy, a b-roll if you may.  It seemed very obvious to me that the production team had watched Guardians and thought “how cool would that be with the Enterprise?”, lackluster is my opinion.

Not as bad as “The Voyage Home”, but far from the top tier