No alienation
ANOTHER VISIT FROM AN OLD FRIEND Trekkies will rejoice, but it’s time for better scripts.
tar Trek Beyond is yet another chapter in the seemingly neverending science fiction series. It is like a beloved friend who revisits you to recount some more tall tales to which you listen with your mouth open, knowing that your friends (in other words the heroes) will come through unscathed. You have heard many improbable tales from the same source before.
Somewhere inside you the movie geek wants more though. Not necessarily more of the same, which is what this film delivers (true to its TV roots) but something new and exciting, something to talk about that you remember before you pay for your parking ticket, and that this film does not have.
Not that it is necessarily a bad thing. Being recipe-driven and with its eyes on the box office, the franchise doesn’t try to win over new admirers, but wants to satisfy the existing ones, giving them what they want without alienating them. In this the film succeeds.
The problem is that the title “Beyond” promises something more, something that has not been explored before, and especially in the able hands of Fast and Furious director Justin Lin, one wanted just that little bit more.
“Beyond” in this case implies that the USS Enterprise is going beyond the borders of space known to man. There it encounters a distress call from a creature who looks like alien on Botox. So the beloved spaceship lands on the hostile surface of an alien planet, only to realise, too late, that this was a trap.
So far, so Alien. But instead of monsters with death dripping from their jaws, they encounter Kroll in the impressive form of Idris Elba, and just to see the fight
Cast:
Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana Justin Lin 10-12 PG V
Director: Classification:
between him and Captain Kirk (the ever reliable Chris Pine) is kind of worth an admission ticket. Add to that the unlikely blooming relationship between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and you have enough ingredients to navigate this franchise to another successful weekend at the box office.
Trekkies may yell with delight, especially at the impressive future cities and the interior of the space ship, or they might think: the next Star Trek episode must provide a bit more than the same adventures in a different computer-generated guise.