What Do The Reviews Have To Say About 'Star Trek: Beyond' Movie?
Spock, Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew is back in theaters with Star Trek Beyond. Does it keep up with the first two films in the rebooted series? Here's what the reviews are saying.
It's Fun!
What a load of fun. Sometimes in the white-hot center of summer, all we're looking for is a whiz-bang sci-fi adventure saga featuring a host of familiar and beloved characters.
It's gonzo silliness, but when a director has this much fun, it's hard for his audience not to.
And It Harkens Back To The Original TV Series
[I]t's got a likable retro vibe: The fact that Kirk and his crew spend a good part of the film stranded, without recourse, gives "Star Trek Beyond" a wide-eyed, slightly clunky analog stasis that takes us right back to the spirit of the TV series. Like the show, it lets us share quality time with cast members who now seem like old friends.
[Variety]
"Beyond" is quite familiar, with a structure that marries modern blockbuster form to a plot outline that could easily be at home in the 1960s original series.
[The Wrap]
Although It Lacks The Original Series' Depth
Beyond is more fun than deep. It's lightweight, zero-gravity Trek that is, for the most part, devoid of the sort of Big Ideas and knotty existential questions that creator Gene Roddenberry specialized in. You could argue that the philosophical, political, and sociological subtext is what always set his universe (and its big- and small-screen iterations) apart from other tech-heavy space adventures. Maybe that's why Beyond feels slightly insubstantial.
Spectacular as it looks, this is a $150 million blockbuster about nothing.
The Spock/Bones Relationship Is A Highlight
Even better, Bones (Karl Urban) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) spend a good deal of the film isolated together, and both actors have so completely settled into their skins, and they play the characters with such precision, both emotionally and comedically, that it feels like they can't go wrong. Everything they do together is gold. It not only pays off 50 years of groundwork laid by the show and the films, but it also finally fully pays off the chemistry that Urban and Quinto have together.
[HitFix]
The bantering relationship between Karl Urban (as Dr "Bones" McCoy) and Quinto is, as ever, very enjoyable. At one stage, McCoy dismisses something Spock says as "horseshit". Quinto demonstrates great comic timing in the pause he deploys before his dignified reply: "I fail to see how excrement of any kind plays a part." Maybe this is the real bromance, actually.
And Rising Star Sofia Boutella Steals The Show
The movie's best scenes feature Scotty and an alien named Jaylah — a star turn for Sofia Boutella, who played the baddie in Kingsman: The Secret Service who bisected people with her blade-legs, and who'll soon be seen in the title role of The Mummy. Boutella has a good, sharp, surly face with an improbably delicate cleft chin. Her features register even under a pound of white makeup slashed with black lightning bolts.
Boutella is amazing as this new heroine with quasi-tribal facial features and a pragmatic demeanor.
TL;DR
It should have been called "Star Trek Within" in honor of its determination to color inside the lines, obeying the ironclad conventions of brand and genre. Which is not, in itself, a bad thing. Not every wheel needs reinventing, and one of the abiding pleasures of "Star Trek," in its old and newer iterations, lies in its balance of stubborn consistency and canny inventiveness.
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