This is a long blog post. It also contains spoilers. Read at your own risk. It's very long. I'm big on character development.
I just saw
Star Trek Beyond, and I cannot believe that I wasted $9.25 on a ticket to see it.
Ghostbusters (2016) was so much better. I'm saying that because I prefer films that have characters I can identify with, and I couldn't identify with most of the male characters from
Star Trek Beyond.
Slight tangent to give a shout out to Ghostbusters: I loved
Ghostbusters because Paul Feig and Katie Dippold really brought the women in
Ghostbusters to life; they made them smart, funny, and independent people who proved they weren't afraid to kick butt and become heros. The special effects in this movie were phenomenal. Also, there were a lot of fabulous cameos in
Ghostbusters. Leslie Jones's character was probably my favorite in the movie- Patty brought a wealth of knowledge about New York City that the other three women could have used a lot more of,. I wished they had made her a more formally educated person like Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, and Melissa McCarthy's characters were, and I wish the writers had given her more lines; nevertheless, watching Jones's character conquer her fear- from screaming in terror as she was being chased by a possessed mannequin to slapping the heck out of the ghost inside Melissa McCarthy, screaming "LET THE POWER OF PATTY COMPEL YOU!" -was such an awesome thing to watch. I could go on, but suffice to say that I like strong, funny women in my movies.
Star Trek Beyond had fantastic visual effects and the plot devices were fun. That being said, for a movie from a franchise that was supposed to celebrate diversity and cooperation,
Star Trek Beyond didn't have strong female roles, and the writing wasn't great. I loved the 2009
Star Trek and I somewhat dug
Star Trek Into Darkness, but I was hoping that Justin Lin could rescue the franchise from the ratings of
Into Darkness. In my opinion, the trailer for
Star Trek Beyond set the movie up for something way different than what it actually was.
Parts I thought were good:
Music as a plot device. That use of music was gold- it was so hilariously dumb that it worked perfectly. And the song choice, (SPOILER ALERT) "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys, was a perfect. That song choice hearkened back to the young James T. Kirk in the 2009
Star Trek, and I loved the subtlety with which the Chris Pine's character acknowledged this memory. I wish Rihanna's song "Sledgehammer" was in the middle of the movie and not just the end credits because it was a really epic and dramatic song. I didn't notice the score as much as I did in the past two
Star Trek movies, but it worked.
Sentimentality in the plot. What Justin Lin really did well with as the director was choosing moments for sentimentality. The plot definitely celebrated a return to old-school technology that reminded me of
Star Trek VI: Bringing the Whales Home (in which in a comical twist, the crew of the Enterprise had to go back in time to 1984, the actual year the film was released, and import a whale into the future). It felt a little bit like
Guardians of the Galaxy. There was an old motorcycle, an old ship, Beastie Boys songs considered "classical music," references to what our parents were like and if we were living up to them... There was also a funny moment where Bones had nicked Chekov's whisky and they were like "He's Russian, I thought he'd like vodka." A For Effort.
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| #allthefeels #RIP |
The film was dedicated to Anton Yelchin (all the feels) and Leonard Nimoy (so many feels). The plot took the time to honor Leonard Nimoy, which was endearing. Spock finds out early on that Ambassador Spock had passed away while the Enterprise was venturing through space as part of it's 5-year mission. After that, Spock ever so briefly shows that he has been considering his own mortality again, as well as that of his species. It was nice that they commemorated Leonard Nimoy with this movie, but I qualify that they could have gone much farther with it- the question, what is it like to know that you've died, and now there's only one of
you left, was not explored and wasn't even asked. There was simply Bones's response, "I can't imagine what that must be like for you." And no one in the movie tried to.
The youthful crew of the Enterprise. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the extras that made up the crew of the Enterprise were all young-looking people. I liked this because being a diplomat in space totally fits for young people- they want to explore and do something important and meaningful, which is what Star Fleet is all about. Old people in space are backwards and old-fashioned, as evidenced by the villain of this movie, Krall. Plus, it was cool to see Anton Yelchin and John Wu's characters play bigger, better roles in this movie. They weren't belittled like they had been at other times in the recent franchise.
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| He was under the age of 30. |
Stunts. I don't have much to say about them except that they were amazing and must have taken tons of coordination in order to pull off on camera. Dang, that was cool.
Special effects. This movie really showcased the special effects and CGI talents with entirely computer-animated sequences of the rebuilding of the Enterprise. No wonder there were over 200* people credited for special effects and visual effects in the end credits!
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| All CGI |
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| Yorktown ( AKA the "Life Star") |
Fun Facts about the film:
*Effects credits. Note that I stopped counting how many after 100, but you can go on IMDb
and count them if you want. There were so many, and that number I threw
out doesn't even include special effects makeup artists.
More numbers. If you count
the producers, writers, and directors, there are
1035 people who worked
behind the scenes to make Star Trek Beyond (2016) happen,
compared to 2056 for Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
and 1355 for Star Trek (2009).
For a little perspective, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) was made with a crew of 1952 people.
Ghostbusters (2016) was made with 1151 crew members.
Warcraft (2016) had 1292 crew members.
The Legend of Tarzan (2016) had 1341 crew members.
Captain America: Civil War (2016) had 1974 crew members.
Jason Bourne (2016) had a mere 870.
Note that these are all big-budget, big studio films that had a lot of stunts and special effects built into them. Movies that don't have a lot of stunts or special effects, even if still in the studio circuit, typically only have 20-80 crew members attached.
J.J. Abrams still made this movie. That's right! J.J. Abrams is the top producer on this film. His production company, Bad Robot, was the first one whose animation logo played across the screen when the movie started. (Fun fact within a fun fact: Bad Robot's office is located in Santa Monica, California.) Although he did not direct the film and did not have as much of a hand in it artistically - director Justin Lin made most of the creative decisions - as the one in financial control of the film, Abrams still had a substantial say in how this movie turned out.
Parts I had problems with:
The women's characters. How many women in this movie had prominent speaking roles? Three. There was Zoë Saldana as Uhura, Sofia Boutella as Jaylah, and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Commodore Paris (she had a couple of insightful little monologues at the beginning and the end of the film). Four if you count the woman who's alien voice was dubbed over by a British woman's voice, but she didn't say much, and I don't know what her character's name actually was. The women in this movie, compared to the last two in the latest
Star Trek franchise, were not given much personality to work with.
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| Sofia Boutella as Jaylah |
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| Powerful pose |
Jaylah was badass, for sure; she was a skilled fighter and had some great high kicks, and she was really resourceful. Those traps she set with some sort of instant carbonite, her homemade cloaking devices, and her holographic trickery were incredibly clever and showed some real experience and intelligence. She saved Scotty's butt! But I wanted more from her. I wanted what I saw in the movie trailers. Once all of Scotty's little Star Fleet buddies got together, Jaylah meekly hung to the side, and
she was the one who had been living inside the space ship for who knows how long--wouldn't you think that if
she was the one who lived in the ship,
she might know a lot more about it than five men who had just crash-landed onto this planet?
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| Jaylah lives here. You're not entitled to that chair, Kirk. |
It became really obvious, in that moment where the main crew all found each other again, just how male-dominated this movie was. They were all trying to figure out what to do and how to save the crew of the Enterprise on their own, not realizing until later than they should have that hey, this young woman who had lived on the planet for a while could help them both find and rescue their companions. There was an annoying scene of mansplaining where Scotty was trying to figure out how to plug something in without shorting the circuit and was like "no I can do it I don't need your help" and Uhura was all like "Scotty, stop and let Jaylah do it," but he wasn't listening so finally Jaylah shoved Scotty aside and plugged the thing in correctly. "There. Easy." So easy a woman could do it. The misogyny was so frustrating; why did they write so much of it into the film?
Uhura was also badass but not as much as she was in the last
Star Trek. Remember how Uhura is a xenolinguist? Remember how she speaks and understands alien languages like Klingon and Romulin? Why didn't she get another chance to showcase her translating talents in this movie? There were amply opportunities, like when the foreign scientist fleeing to the Yorktown base (which is the transparent, humanitarian version of a Death Star) ever said anything, or when the aliens with Krall ever said anything...she translated a computer screen once, and that's it. Aside from her skills as a linguist, Uhura was pretty awesome in that she was the one who saved Kirk and the rest of the crew by sacrificing herself, separating the part of the ship she and Krall were in from the rest.
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| Uhura just sacrificed herself for the crew. #hero |
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| Kreepy Krally |
I wish, though, that she didn't have to say "Captain Kirk will save
us" or "Spock, you're here to rescue me" and the fact that they had to
point out that Spock gave Uhura a tracking device without her knowing
it. If she had known she was wearing a tracking device, I would have
felt more confident in her because by knowing something the enemy
didn't, she would have been in on the plan to rescue the crew. She was
intelligent and clever- escaping from the prison cell to do a little
recon was probably her idea, not Sulu's- but ultimately was forced to
depend on her male crewmates instead of being given the chance to show
that she could hold her own among them.
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| Since we're breaking up, do you want your tracking device back? |
The rest of the writing. The writing was disappointing. I wish it wasn't, but it
was. The initial scene's banter was so silly, I felt like it
had to have come out of the Marvel universe--it didn't set up well for me, as an audience member, to take the rest of the plot seriously. Simon Pegg and Doug Jung were the writers of this script, and I noticed that Simon Pegg got the first title card as a cast member in the end credits, though he wasn't
the star of the show. No wonder Scotty was one of the most resourceful, best written, and most patronizing characters of the crew of the Enterprise! "Come on, Lassie, we need you to be brave." He had a very middle-aged-white-man attitude, Simon Pegg's character very obviously noticing the difference between his age and Sofia Boutella's. Although Scotty meant well and wanted to support Jaylah, he could have given her a lot more respect and credit for everything that she'd already achieved. And less patronizing. And "My God," can't Bones shake it up a little with the catch phrases?
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| My God! |
In addition to the character development, like
Star Trek Into Darkness, there were a couple of plot holes and places where the characters' motivations were very unclear. Why was Star Fleet so trusting of the scientist studying the nebula? Why didn't the Enterprise try to fly away instead of opening fire on the fleet of ships? Why didn't they ever explain why Krall thought that unity makes you weak and not strong? What was the weapon actually capable of doing? Why did Krall want to destroy Star Fleet so badly? (His motivation was as vague as Khan's in
Star Trek Into Darkness). It was sometimes amusing that Chekov and Sulu got so technical about their thoughts on the ship, like it could have come out of a dry British comedy. Chekov and Kirk are in the saucer of the ship and Chekov is like, "I can turn on this light and check the computer real quick, Captain, but I don't think we can fly this ship anymore." Well, you don't say! It's not like it just got broken into pieces and crash-landed on a planet or anything.
The Take Away:
The take away from all this is that I wanted this movie to be good, especially because it was directed by someone new, but it wasn't.
I wanted it to live up to the trailer, and the plot was nothing like what the trailer promised. As someone who currently watches trailers for a living (Just Kidding, I'm not getting paid), I know that trailers are supposed to get you to watch the movie, not tell you what it's about, but...it was so messy. I felt that the writing fell flat in a lot of parts, and while the special effects were out of this world and the stunts beautifully choreographed, I missed a lot of the character depth that I enjoyed with the 2009
Star Trek. Caring people for sure- Kirk was never going to leave anyone behind -but there wasn't much room for story. This movie felt like it was about a bunch of bros trying to do their job and save their other bros while loving how good of bros they were.
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| #bros + Uhura |
If you want to debate anything I said, or claim that I misrepresented the specific details on one of the scenes I mentioned, then feel free to pay for me to see the movie again, because it's not worth another $10 of
my money.
