Why Star Trek Beyond Remains Special
A decade later, this Trek proves you don’t have to go big to be bold.
The first trailer for Star Trek Beyond revealed that the USS Enterprise — Captain Kirk's iconic starship — gets destroyed. It's the type of plot development that you might think would be a somber, seminal moment in Trek history, but part of what makes Beyond so fun is that the destruction of the Enterprise is not, actually, that big a deal.
Following 2009's successful rebooted origin story that navigated complicated alternate timelines and a dreadful sequel that's too beholden to the legacy of Trek's most iconic villain to have time to be good or coherent in its own right, Star Trek Beyond succeeds because of how low-key it is. Rather than try to be the next epic chapter of a saga worthy of the big screen, Beyond feels more like a really good episode of Star Trek. It's the gang going on another adventure, and it turns out you don't need much more than that.
To be fair, it's not as if there are no stakes in Beyond, which hit American theaters on July 22, 2016. The destruction of the Enterprise comes early in the film, as Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk is getting burnt out on his exploration of the final frontier. Responding to a distress call not too far away from Yorktown, a Starfleet base, the Enterprise is suddenly attacked by a swarm of drones that tear the ship to pieces, stranding the crew on a hostile planet. Once there, they encounter a villain (played by Idris Elba) who has a connection with Starfleet's history. Can Kirk and his crew find a way off the planet so they can stop the destruction of Yorktown? Can Kirk overcome his ennui?? Is this the last we will ever see of the Starship Enterprise??? (Yes, yes, and no.)
It's a more than meaty enough premise for a feature film that provides plenty of opportunities for action set pieces the likes of which the small screen can't afford, even in the streaming era. Yet compared to the '09 Trek's origin story or Into Darkness getting Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Kelvin timeline's version of Khan (after trying and failing to lie about who he was really playing throughout the promotional cycle), "the Enterprise crew needs to get off a planet and stop a bad guy" is not a hyped-up plot. It's not hard to imagine a world where the third movie in this series introduces The Borg or Q to the Kelvin timeline, or one that has them dealing with a new threat that's bigger than anything Star Trek has ever come up with before. Beyond isn't that.
Instead of having high stakes for the sake of having high stakes, Beyond's premise allows fans of these movies to hang out with these characters they've come to love. The main effect of the Enterprise's destruction is that it strands the crew on this alien planet in interesting combinations. There had already been two movies driven primarily by the Kirk-Spock relationship (not to mention decades of past Trek content). But Spock and Bones? That's not a pairing that's gotten as much play, and it's very fun to watch Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban play off one another. Every member of the crew gets a chance to shine (including Chekov, which takes on extra significance since Anton Yelchin tragically passed away in a freak accident before Beyond's release).
The action is also fun in a sillier way than a more self-important Star Trek might have allowed. Some of the big set pieces involve Kirk riding a vintage motorcycle, blasting the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" to, uh, sabotage the drones, and the final fight between Kirk and the villain takes place in a place with wacky gravity that changes direction. A lot of the film takes place on a strange new world; there are some cool, weird-looking aliens, and there’s a memorable new character in Sofia Boutella's Jaylah who holds her own among the classic characters.
Captain Kirk go vroooom!
At no point is the viewer that concerned that Kirk and Co. aren't going to find a way to overcome the entertaining obstacles that the movie places before them. They've already overcome a bunch of obstacles the moviegoing audience never saw; Beyond is set three years into the ship's five-year mission, and the narrative decision to skip three-fifths of the crew's adventures since the end of Into Darkness inherently makes Beyond feel like another chapter in a long-running series rather than the streamlined, load-bearing continuity of typical sequential films.
The bigger stakes are internal, as Kirk needs to remind himself what it is about the Enterprise and its mission that drove him in the first place. In short, Kirk needs to fall in love with Star Trek again. Beyond, which was co-written by noted Trekkie Simon Pegg, a.k.a. Scotty himself, is the joy of Star Trek hypercharged into just over two hours. It's easy to fall in love with and nearly impossible not to like.
Beyond's low-key vibes made it a hit with critics and audiences who went out to see it tended to have a nice time, but the movie underperformed at the box office. Into Darkness made less money than the '09 Trek and Beyond, while not a catastrophic bomb, made even less still. It's part of the reason why the perpetually talked-about fourth Kelvin Star Trek movie was always just being talked about and never actually made. It's a shame. Beyond showed how to make more fun Star Trek adventures: You just make a fun Star Trek adventure.
