Star Trek Beyond
Written by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
Directed by Justin Lin
Release date: July 22, 2016
Stardate: 2263.2
Please note that this is a SPOILER FILLED REVIEW! Seriously, lotsa spoilers here and in the comments. If you do not wish to be spoiled, there’s a spoiler-free review elsewhere on the site, and you can read that and also comment there without worry about being spoiled. Here, though, we’re talkin’ ’bout the whole thing…
Captain’s log. Three years into the Enterprise‘s five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before, Kirk is suffering a bit of burnout. Things have gotten almost “episodic,” he laments in his log. (Ahem.)
He’s trying to broker a peace between two warring alien races by bringing a gift from one race to the other. But the receivers of the gift respond with suspicion—their first comment is, “What’s wrong with it?” assuming that they’d only give something away if it was flawed and they didn’t want it anymore. It’s part of an ancient weapon that is no longer in use. The gift is refused and results in Kirk being attacked by a bunch of aliens (who are, luckily, very very small and therefore not much of a threat).
Kirk beams back to the ship, his uniform shirt torn, McCoy telling him he looks like crap. He has Spock place the ancient weapon in the ship’s archives. Later, he joins McCoy for a drink, with Kirk not feeling good about his birthday (it’s the day his father died, so he asks McCoy to continue to keep the actual day quiet).
The Enterprise stops for R&R at Yorktown, a giant starbase that is pretty much a big city in the middle of space. Uhura and Spock break up (though Spock refuses to let her give the necklace he gave her back), Sulu gets to spend time with his husband and daughter, and Spock meets up with some Vulcans who inform him that the Spock of the mainline timeline, who has been living on New Vulcan, has died. Kirk has a conversation with Commodore Paris about a possible promotion for him to vice admiral (which is a big jump in rank, but then this is the same guy who went from cadet to captain in six-and-a-half seconds, so whatever).
A ship appears out of nowhere emitting a distress call. Yorktown rescues the ship and its sole occupant, a woman named Kalara, who says her ship is lost in a nearby nebula. The Enterprise takes Kalara on board and navigates the nebula to find and rescue her ship—
—only to be ambushed by a vessel that seems at first to be a single ship, but turns out to be multiple small ones that attack like a swarm of bees, doing considerable damage to the ship, and then boarding it. Spock notes that the boarding party makes off with the ancient weapon from the archives. Kirk goes after the boarding party, and manages to get the weapon free and hide it with Ensign Syl, an alien whose cranial bones can retract and expand, allowing her to hide stuff on the back of her head.
Eventually, the bad guys—who never identify themselves—destroy the Enterprise. The crew who survive the attack get into the escape pods, but many of them are captured as well. Spock and McCoy manage to get inside one of the swarm ships and take out the crew, crash-landing it on the planet below, which is called Altamid.
Kirk, Chekov, and Kalara all find each other, Kalara apologizing for leading them into an ambush, but it was the only way to safeguard her crew. Kirk says that he’s hidden the weapon somewhere in the saucer section, and the three of them trudge to where it crashed in order to retrieve it. Once they reach the spot where he says it’s hidden, Kalara communicates with Krall—the leader of the bad guys—to say they have it. Except Kirk was lying, and just wanted to get Kalara to contact Krall so Chekov could trace it. Kirk and Chekov barely escape the saucer section with their lives, as Kalara has called in the cavalry…
Sulu and Uhura are both captured by Krall, along with several other members of the crew. Krall has a device that he uses to drain the life out of people to prolong his own. As he uses it on the crew, his facial features change from almost lizard-like alien ones to less formed ones, almost as if he’s turning more human. Sulu and Uhura manage to break out of the cell they’re in and do some covert surveillance, only to discover that Krall has managed to tune into Starfleet communications frequencies, giving him access to the logs of Yorktown as well as any ship that has come to that port, including the Enterprise, which is how he knew to steal the weapon.
Spock is badly injured in the crash landing, and McCoy is forced to perform field medicine to at least stabilize him. Spock informs McCoy that the other Spock has died, and also that he is thinking about leaving Starfleet to help with the establishment of New Vulcan. This turns out to be a big part of why he and Uhura split up. Spock hasn’t told Kirk about this yet. (But that’s okay—Kirk hasn’t told anyone about his desire for a promotion to a desk job, either.)
Scotty was cut off from the escape pods, but managed to escape inside a photon torpedo. He clambers out of the torpedo before it falls over a cliff, only to find himself ambushed. He, in turn, is saved by a young woman named Jaylah. Jaylah was on another ship that was destroyed by Krall’s hive ships, its crew used as slave labor and as “food” for Krall. Jaylah managed to escape, though her father was killed by Krall’s lieutenant Manas, and she took refuge in one of the ships that crashed on the planet—which turns out to be a Starfleet vessel, the U.S.S. Franklin, which had been lost a century earlier. Scotty is able to retune the old transporter to work on humans (it was only meant for cargo), and manages to beam Spock and McCoy to the Franklin—and just in time, as Krall’s people just found the pair of them. Kirk and Chekov also find the ship on their own (by triggering one of Jaylah’s many booby traps).
Krall threatens Sulu’s life, which gets Syl to reveal that she has the weapon. Krall then takes Uhura and Syl out of the cell to demonstrate the weapon—which, to Uhura’s disgust, he does on Syl, who is basically cut into pieces on an atomic level.
Using the Franklin‘s medical equipment, McCoy is able to heal Spock a bit more, though he’s still pretty ragged. Chekov is able to verify that the prisoners are in the same place as Krall, and so they need to mount a rescue. Jaylah is reluctant to do so, knowing how dangerous it is, but Scotty and Kirk talk her into it, mostly by assuring her that they’ll have her back.
One of the Franklin crew had a motorcycle on board, and Kirk rides that as a distraction while Jaylah, Spock, and McCoy free the crew. Spock even manages to save Uhura—kind of. In truth, she escaped on her own, and then rescued Spock from being ambushed. But whatever works.
To Jaylah’s relief, Kirk risks life and limb to save her life when he very easily could have left her behind.
However, Sulu and Uhura reveal that Krall is already implementing his plan: to attack Yorktown. Even as his hive ships take off, Sulu manages to get Franklin into the air and out into space. Spock and McCoy fly one of the hive ships as a Trojan horse within the hive, while Uhura hits on the notion of using VHF radio to disrupt the instant communication among the hive ships.
In addition, Uhura realizes that one of the logs of the Franklin has someone with Krall’s voice: it’s Captain Balthasar Edison, a former MACO in service of the United Earth, later made a captain of a starship when the Federation was formed. To everyone’s shock, they realize that Krall is, in fact, Edison. The Franklin crashed on Altamid, and Edison used the technology there to prolong his life at the expense of others he has forced to crash here. He blames the Federation for abandoning him, and also for putting him in charge of a ship on a peaceful mission when he was a soldier.
While the VHF disruption is successful in destroying most of the hive ships, Krall himself still is able to board Yorktown. He brings the weapon to the air supply station in order to spread it to the entire base. While Scotty and Jaylah try to shut down the station remotely—a complicated process—Kirk tries to stop Krall directly, eventually succeeding after a lengthy fistfight. Krall himself winds up being the only other casualty, besides Syl, of the weapon.
The crew recovers on Yorktown, even celebrating Kirk’s birthday (and also making a toast to absent friends) while a new Enterprise—the NCC-1701-A—is built, with Kirk once again taking command, having decided against going for the admiral’s position.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? While it is very difficult to shut down Yorktown‘s air supply for obvious reasons, it’s remarkably easy to physically enter it. Also the nebula that Altamid is in sure looks like a dense asteroid field…
Fascinating. Spock and Uhura’s relationship seems to be over at the beginning, as Spock has withdrawn even more while he considers moving to New Vulcan. But by the end of the film—and in particular seeing a picture of the crew from the other timeline still being together into middle age—he decides to stick around and possibly rekindle his romance with Uhura. (We’ll find out next film, I guess…)
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy manages to cauterize Spock’s wound with almost no actual medical equipment. Because he’s just that awesome. He also flies one of the hive ships by the seat of his pants, which enables him to rescue Kirk at the end.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu is able to make the Franklin—despite never having been built for takeoff in a gravity well—take off. Because he’s just that awesome.
After all the pre-movie fuss about it, the scene that shows him with his husband and daughter is all of ten seconds, and just shows that he’s visiting family when he gets to Yorktown, one of several ways the crew takes shore leave. It’s actually a touching moment, one that adds texture to the scene, and anyone who says it’s gratuitous is showing their bigotry, because if he met up with and kissed a woman, no one would even consider calling it that. It’s also called back to later by the look of horror on John Cho’s face when they realize that Krall is targeting Yorktown.
(Also, the argument that the characters’ sexuality shouldn’t be shoved in our faces in a Star Trek story—which I’ve seen multiple times around the internet—is nonsense. Various characters’ heterosexuality is shoved in our faces repeatedly throughout the original series. Just looking at the first few episodes: “The Cage” is about forcing Pike to mate with Vina; “The Man Trap” is about McCoy’s old girlfriend and the salt vampire appears as various people’s sexual desires; “Mudd’s Women” gives us three women who drive men mad with sexual desire; “Charlie X” gives us Charlie’s crush on Rand; and on and on and on. If you don’t want to see characters’ sexuality, you shouldn’t be watching Star Trek.)
It is a Russian invention. In what is sadly Anton Yelchin’s last appearance as Chekov, he doesn’t get that much to do as such, but he is a steady presence, serving as Kirk’s sidekick for much of the film and doing lots of tech work to move the plot along.
He also doesn’t keep vodka in his quarters, to McCoy and Kirk’s shock, but he does insist that Scotch is a Russian invention.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura is the one who figures out who Krall really is, mostly by recognizing his voice on the Franklin footage. She also implements the VHF disruption plan, with help from Scotty and Jaylah.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty pretty much saves the entire day here, since he’s the one who gets the Franklin up and running, which is what enables our heroes to stand any kind of chance. His banter with Jaylah is epic, also.
Go put on a red shirt. A big chunk of the crew is killed in the initial attack on the Enterprise, with more killed on Altamid. In addition, Syl is killed to demonstrate how awful the weapon is, and to horrify Uhura—and then she is utterly forgotten, and never even mentioned again. When Spock frees the prisoners, Sulu says Uhura is with Krall, without even mentioning Syl, even though they were taken together and Sulu has no way of knowing that Syl is dead.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Spock says they can track Uhura via the necklace he gave her, as it emits a unique radiation signature. This prompts McCoy to be appalled at the notion that he gave his girlfriend a radioactive necklace. Spock assures him that the levels are harmless, but easily detectable. Undaunted, McCoy is appalled at the notion that he gave his girlfriend a tracking device. After an uncomfortable pause, Spock says that was not his intention. McCoy remains appalled.
Channel open. “I’d rather die saving lives than live with ending them. That’s the world I was born into.”
Kirk explaining Roddenberry to Krall.
Welcome aboard. A smaller cast in this one, which works to good effect. Greg Grunberg and Shohreh Aghdashloo play Yorktown crew—the former is Commander Finnegan, the latter is Commodore Paris. Lydia Wilson is effective as the double-crossing Kalara, doing superlative work with facial expressions under the alien makeup, while Melissa Roxburgh does a fine job as the tragically short-lived Syl.
Sofia Boutella is a pure delight as Jaylah, a snarky presence that adds a lot of niftiness to the film. (The movie ends with Jaylah’s application to Starfleet Academy being approved. It is my hope that, with Anton Yelchin’s death, the next film will have Chekov transferred to another ship—the Reliant would make the most sense—with Jaylah assigned to the ship as the new navigator after graduating.)
And then we have the great Idris Elba as Krall, who does the best he can with an unfortunately underwritten role. His best moments are at the climax when he mostly looks human again, because you can see the anguish and the anger on his face when he confronts Kirk, bitter and resentful of the Federation for forcing him into a peaceful mission and then abandoning him when the Franklin was lost.
Trivial matters: The film is dedicated to the memory of both Leonard Nimoy (“In loving memory of Leonard Nimoy”) and Anton Yelchin (“For Anton”).
Kirk’s log says that they’re in Day 966 of their five-year mission, the specific number being a reference to the date of Trek‘s premiere in September 1966.
Yorktown was the original name Gene Roddenberry had for the ship in his earliest drafts of Star Trek, later changed to Enterprise.
Jaylah was inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s character Ree in Winter’s Bone. The character name wound up being a corruption of Lawrence’s name.
The Enterprise saucer can separate, a feature that was mentioned once on the original series (in “The Apple“) as well as in the behind-the-scenes material printed in The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield & Gene Roddenberry, but never seen on screen until TNG, where it was seen in “Encounter at Farpoint,” “The Arsenal of Freedom,” “The Best of Both Worlds Part II,” and Star Trek Generations.
Scotty refers to a “giant green hand” as one of the possible fates of the Franklin, a reference to “Who Mourns for Adonais?” He also mentions that he transported Spock and McCoy separately to avoid the risk of “splicing” them together, something that happened with Tuvok and Neelix in the Voyager episode “Tuvix.”
Kirk grumbles about how his uniform shirt has been torn again, something that happened with sufficient regularity on the original series that it was actually parodied in the movie Galaxy Quest.
Several references to Enterprise in this one: the Franklin is a ship of a similar style to that of the NX-01, the uniform Spock puts on after his own is ripped to shreds is similar to those worn by the cast of that show, and Krall recalls fighting against the Xindi (from the show’s third season) as well as the Romulans (actually from “Balance of Terror,” but Enterprise would have done that war had it made it to a fifth season) as a MACO (Military Assault Command Operations, established in “The Xindi”).
Kirk’s father died the day his son was born in the 2009 film.
Commodore Paris is likely meant to be an ancestor of the Paris family seen in Voyager, including main character Tom and his father Owen, an admiral in Starfleet.
Sulu’s daughter is presumably named Demora, since Generations established that Sulu had a daughter by that name.
Chekov’s explanation that Scotch was invented by a little old lady in Russia is a callback to a similar line he had in “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
A member of the Franklin crew liked twentieth-century hip-hop, as the play list includes Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” The latter song was also being played by Kirk as a young boy when he was stopped for speeding in the 2009 film.
The picture of the crew from the mainline timeline that Spock looks at among his counterpart’s effects is a publicity still from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
In the mainline timeline, when a new Enterprise was constructed after the original was destroyed, it was also designated NCC-1701-A.
At one point, Kirk interrupts Spock and says, “Skip to the end,” a phrase used repeatedly on Simon Pegg’s TV show Spaced.
To boldly go. “Well, that’s just typical…” It’s a huge relief to, for the first time in twenty years, get a Star Trek film that works as a Trek film, as an action film, and as a film in general. It’s not great on any of those levels, but I’ve said before that Trek is not built to be a franchise made of blockbuster movies. Trek is at its best with smaller stories that one tells on television—the very types of stories that are blown off in a log entry in this movie as being “episodic.”
With that caveat in mind, though, this is the first Trek film since First Contact in 1996 that can actually be called good.
What’s best is that the script follows a logical progression, and is mercifully free of the howlers of the last two Bad Robot films. The plot commences with that old Trek standby, the Enterprise responding to a distress call, in this case Kalara’s cry for help at Yorktown, with the Enterprise going to Altamid intending to rescue her crew. That Kalara was using their compassion against them doesn’t negate the importance of that action.
The middle part of the film pulls the old trick of separating the crew, thus giving them all a chance to shine. This was my favorite part, honestly, as the pairings all worked quite well. The weakest was Uhura and Sulu, mainly because it didn’t do much with either character, just moved plot pieces around. It was also the ideal time to do the reveal about Krall instead of saving it for later in the film—more on that in a bit…
Kirk and Chekov teaming up was mostly useful for showing us how Chris Pine’s Kirk has matured. The Jim Kirk of the 2009 film was a punk and the Jim Kirk of Into Darkness still had way too many punk tendencies. But the Jim Kirk of Beyond is, for the first time, the captain. He’s the leader, the one who makes decisions, the one who jumps in with both feet, but also looks out for his people. I would never have credited Kirk with being clever enough in either of the two previous films to pull off the trick he pulled on Kalara, but it was utterly convincing here.
It’s not surprising that Scotty gets so much to do here, partly because Simon Pegg is a great actor whose portrayal of Scotty was one of the high points of Into Darkness, and partly because Pegg cowrote the script. But his banter with Jaylah is tremendous fun.
However, the best parts of the entire film are the scenes with Spock and McCoy. Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban have both done a great job filling the shoes of Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley, but Urban has been criminally underused to date. This film finally rectifies that, and gives us the Spock-McCoy banter that was one of the best parts of the original series and their followup movies. One of the things that gave me hope for this movie in the trailers was the scene where McCoy says, “At least I won’t die alone,” then Spock is beamed away, and McCoy grumbles, “Well, that’s just typical,” and I’m pleased to report that that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In particular, the horseshit conversation is the highlight of the entire film.
There are other great moments here, from Kirk and McCoy drinking (the Roddenberry hallmark of the captain sharing a drink with his doctor to discuss psychological issues, which goes all the way back to “The Cage“) some of Chekov’s purloined booze (“I thought he’d be a vodka man”), to Spock going through his counterpart’s effects, to the best depiction of the universal translator yet, to the use of hip-hop (“I like the beats and the shouting”) to help save the day, the best use of modern music in Trek since “Magic Carpet Ride” in First Contact, to “you kiddin’ me, sir?”
Having said that, the movie is far from flawless. Kirk’s and Spock’s character arcs are weak and poorly defined. The considering-a-desk-job thing and the resigning-Starfleet-because-things-are-weird thing have been done to death in Trek (The Motion Picture, “Emissary,” “The Way of the Warrior,” “Home,” etc.), and this adds nothing to it. What, exactly, Krall has been doing on Altamid for a century is left maddeningly vague. Jaylah’s conflict with Manas is also weak and poorly defined, and doesn’t even get good closure.
But worst of all is that we don’t find out who Krall really is until way too late in the movie for it to have a proper impact. The theme of the soldier who can’t handle peace is a good one in the abstract, and Idris Elba manages to sell it in his conversations with Kirk in the Yorktown air supply station, but this was a reveal we should’ve gotten when Uhura and Sulu confronted Krall in the prison, not when the movie was two-thirds done.
Still, this is the first of the Bad Robot films that feels like a Star Trek movie, which is the best possible 50th birthday present for the franchise.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been doing rewatches of various Trek TV shows on Tor.com since 2011, including The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, with his current Original Series Rewatch running every Tuesday. He also reviewed Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: First Contact, and Star Trek Into Darkness for this site. He has written a ton of Trek fiction over the years, from the 1999 comic book Perchance to Dream to the 2014 coffee-table book The Klingon Art of War.
First of all, I loved this movie. When it ended on Thursday night, I turned to my wife and said “Can we see it again now?” Then on Saturday night, a friend offered to go, and I jumped at the chance. I will be seeing it again with my father-in-law, and anybody else I can drag to the theater. Awesome movie of awesomeness.
One of my favorite bits of Spock-McCoy banter was a very quietly delivered line from Spock. I don’t have the exact quote, but it’s along the lines of “I don’t understand, Leonard, I thought you’d always understood that I respect you despite our mutual teasing.” It was so soft-spoken that it almost felt like a throwaway, but it’s one of the most significant lines in the film for me.
And indeed, it’s only having sexuality “shoved in [one’s] face” if it’s not heterosexual and monogamous. That’s never “shoved” anywhere, that’s just “normal,” right, folks? (Seriously though, thank you, Keith.)
But I didn’t get the impression that the trio that attacks Scotty works for Krall – Jaylah says “they fell out of the sky, like me and you” – which leads me to think they were part of Krall’s attempts to find the weapon. Even Kalara may have been originally a victim; she’s working for him, yes, but we don’t really know why.
Hmm…must buy tickets for next time…
Keith,
You sum up my feelings precisely about this film. Thanks!
— Michael A. Burstein
One thing I thought of on the way out was that Krall wasn’t the only survivor of the Franklin. I think at least one of his people stayed on Altamid when he went out after Yorktown. There was a line about “completing the mission”.
Definitely my favorite since Star Trek: Save The Whales.
@3/wiredog – Yep, Manas tells Krall to let him worry about the escaping prisoners – Krall should head offworld and complete the mission (attacking Yorktown). I am not sure if Manas was a Franklin survivor or not – he didn’t look the same as Krall, but then Krall was a distorted human, not an alien, so who knows. The number of different alien faces here was astonishing – imagine if Mike Westmore had had this budget on the shows!
Kirk wanting to leave in the third year of their voyage also refers to the cancellation of the series in 1969.
I liked the movie and thought that most of the main crew had good chemistry, except for the scenes between Kirk and Spock, which felt flat (except for the finale with McCoy as they watch the new Enterprise being built).
The repeat of the mid-air transporting scene from the first reboot was a nice touch.
I actually disagree about the placement in the story of the Krall reveal. If it had come earlier in the film, I don’t believe it would have had the same impact. Having it paced the way it was, it gave the audience enough time to make assumptions (Krall was an alien; Krall was the frontier pushing back; Krall doesn’t udnerstand humans; Krall doesn’t understand the Federation) and recontextualises his earlier lines about having come from struggle–which gave us time to really process the tragedy of Krall. That he was someone who had lost his faith, and allowed it to fester into hatred. Also, it beautifully illustrated the generational differences between the captains–not just Kirk and Edison, but Edison vs George Kirk, Chris Pike, and Kirk. Edison was a flawed mirror for Kirk to look into and really discover who he is, through his realisation that he genuinely does believe in the Federation.
Also, I utterly ADORE that the structure of Act I was a callback to “The Cage” in SO MANY WAYS. Returning to its roots without being heavy-handed, or needlessly rehashing. And the opening action set piece was also a beautifully meta hommage to Galaxy Quest. And I hope we see MUCH MORE of Commodore Paris in the future! I adored her, and thought if we’re never going to get Captain Number One in the big chair on the USS Yorktown in the AOS (aka Kelvin) universe, Paris commanding Yorktown Station is a lovely tribute.
Good review and a perfect rating (I know the number is just a number, but I happen to agree with it, so there) in my opinion. A good movie. A solid Trek story. Very good acting and effects, with enough calm between action set pieces to let the story breathe a bit.
A few quibbles you didn’t mention:
1. The bio-weapon that was shunned by an ancient race because it was too hard to control seemed:
a. Pretty easy to control
b. Not that terrifying
I mean, yeah it essentially disintegrated living tissue I guess, and could be used to wipe out all life on the starbase, but compared to other weapons we’ve seen in the Trek universe (even compared to the swarm ship armada in this movie) it seemed fairly weak.
2. Speaking of the swarm ships – where did those all come from? At the climax there seemed to be hundreds of thousands of them – perhaps millions? And each one had two crew piloting them? Meanwhile on the planet we only saw Krall have about 20-30 guards in the camp (making it fairly easy to motocross-distract them) max. Did Spoke/McCoy just *happen* to beam into one that had crew, and most of the rest were autonomous?
3. As for the planet itself, I thought the guys who jumped Montgomery Scotty were pointed out NOT to be Krall’s men – just survivor/scavengers much like Jaylah was. That’s why she first tried to tell them “back off this guy is mine” rather than attacking right away. So based on my understanding – if Krall’s got that many swarm ships, how would there be other survivors/scavengers who DON’T have adaptive camouflaged Federation ships lying around?
4. Krall’s second in command – who was this, a crewmate from the Franklin that has used the same tech to stay alive by draining others? A native?
5. How was Krall having superhuman strength at the beginning (lifting Kirk by the throat with one arm) but then by the end he was pretty much just a regular human? It can’t be that he was in need of more victims, he’d just drained crewmembers on the Franklin moments ago.
6. Why didn’t Krall use the Franklin as a base, or at least guard it? There were supplies there, a working transporter, scanners….
I could go on but those were the biggies. Still, a fun story with a good twist at the end that I admit I didn’t see coming. In fact, in the middle when it was revealed that Jaylah’s “home” was a Federation starship, I was kinda like “Oh of course there’s a Federation ship there.” but that actually made sense and was completely justified at the end.
I did see it in 3D and it wasn’t overly dark or muddy (as 3D movies so often are). That said, I didn’t really “notice” the 3D (i.e. I didn’t go “ok that’s cool in 3d”) until the end credits with the nebulae and random space-stuff.
BTW did you catch the giant green space hand nebula during the closing credits?
@7/KalvinKingsley – I missed the hand in the credits! Must watch more closely next time, thank you! As for Krall’s strength earlier, perhaps the flightsuit he was wearing was mecha-enhanced?
With thanks to Kiki Canon in Facebook, I’ve added a Trivial Matter that’s a callback to Simon Pegg’s Spaced.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I saw this Sunday and loved it. The callbacks were perfect. Yorktown was awesome. Good, if somewhat simple, plot. As of now, this is in my top five Trek movies.
I mostly agree that the film worked well (my review), but I feel it was too weak on the emotional aspects; this is the first Enterprise destruction sequence that made me feel nothing, mainly because the characters weren’t shown to feel any emotional reaction to its loss (and partly because I never liked this version anyway — I was disappointed that the E-A looked just like it). Say what you like about Abrams, but he always focused on emotion in the action scenes. I was also disappointed that the “frontier pushing back” storyline wasn’t what the advance publicity advertised, a look at the Federation’s expansionism through a post-colonialist, outsider perspective, but was instead just another “Omega Glory” or “Bread and Circuses” plot about a rogue human captain. I also would’ve liked Kirk to prevail by convincing the bad guy to stand down like in the best TOS episodes, rather than just with fighting until the bad guy dies.
I liked Uhura’s arc here better than Keith did; I thought the movie did a good job letting her be important to the story as more than just Spock’s girlfriend or Kirk’s gadfly. She sacrificed herself to save Kirk, thus ending up in Krall’s custody and thereby being the character who carried the brunt of the interaction with Krall and the discovery of who he was and what his plans were. Sure, it’s plot over character, like so much about this film, but it did make her central to the plot and let her really stand on her own.
I also feel that, while most of the characters were well-served, Sulu and Chekov got marginalized again. Which is really tragic in the latter case, given that this is Yelchin’s final turn in the role. And it’s frustrating that Sulu’s whole arc about having a family and worrying about their safety is reduced to a bunch of wordless reaction shots. I suspect the studio was so nervous about the gay thing that they wouldn’t let anyone actually say words about it, but just kept it to ambiguous looks that the homophobic could comfortably avoid reading anything into. (Like, maybe that guy on Yorktown was his brother! Sure, that’s the ticket!) Fortunately, John Cho is probably the best actor in the cast (aside from Yelchin — sigh), so he acted the hell out of those wordless looks. Still, guys, next time give the man something to do!!
And yes, I saw the big green hand in the end credits. I gather the Doomsday Machine makes a cameo in the credits as well.
John Cho playing Sulu? I guess it was *too hard* for them to find a Japanese actor huh?
I saw it yesterday and liked it for much the same reason that I liked the new Ghostbusters — the film was a bit of a mess, but the cast had good chemistry and were clearly having fun.
I don’t know if we necessarily needed the Krall reveal earlier in the film, but it would’ve been nice to salt in a few more references to Captain Edison earlier in the film. Although I suppose that if they made it clear that Edison was Idris Elba, and you knew from pre-film publicity that Elba was playing Krall …
I also liked the overlap with other franchises — Grundberg was in Force Awakens, and Aghdashloo is in The Expanse. Were there any others?
I do think that everyone seemed awfully blasé about the fact that there were only, what, 40 Enterprise survivors out of a crew of, what, 400+? Have we ever gotten a solid count, and have we ever even established exactly how big the JJPrise really is?
And someone really needed to explain to the writers what a “nebula” is. Although this movie also seemed to have fewer offenses against basic concepts of space & time than either of the first two NuTreks, or than Force Awakens, for that matter.
“With that caveat in mind, though, this is the first Trek film since First Contact in 1996 that can actually be called good.”
What? Sorry, the 2009 Trek was fantastic.
That said, this one was really good as well.
@10/Jason – Oh goodness, yes, Yorktown was gorgeous. Starships flying through tunnels was my favorite part, and the water above some, and…just beautiful.
@11/Christopher – FWIW, the first time I saw the movie, I felt physical pain when the nacelles were torn off, and it continued as the ship was torn in two. When I saw it again, with a friend, it wasn’t as bad because I knew what was coming, but it still hurt, and my friend (seeing it for the first time) was making “I don’t like this at all” hand gestures during the scene. I have no particular attachment to this Enterprise, now that I think about it, but all that she represents is very much part of my life, and it was simply horrifying to see her go. More visceral, I think, than when she arced through the sky over the crew’s heads the first time, and more painful than when 1701-D came to a skidding stop through the trees, because of the nature of the destruction.
@11CLB I actually felt like they tried to make the destruction of the Enterprise into something emotional but it just didn’t work. They focused on a variety of the actors reacting to it (Scotty saying “The nacelles….they’re…gone!” etc.) but maybe I’ve seen the “beloved ship gets destroyed” shot too many times to care anymore. (I wonder how I’d feel if the Millenium Falcon got blown up in the Episode 8 or 9?)
@12 There is overlap with the Marvel movies (Cumberbatch, Bana and Elba all have superhero roles).
Krall’ s suit, during boarding had some spinning devices on the shoulders, which might mean it gave him the strength to lift Kirk but he was wearing just command gold at the end so that might be why he no longer showed super strength.
(There are two #7 comments, what’s up with that?)
Okay, I’ve seen the movie, from a cam version, so I couldn’t appreciate the visuals (or the dialogues) as they were meant to be, but I liked the movie. Is it perfect? No. Is it one of my favorite trek movies? No. But it sure beats Into Darkness, and it sure feels like Star Trek. I agree with most of what Krad said.
Yorktown looks AMAZING, I can’t wait to see it in HD and on a big screen. Another thing I loved was the vast amount of aliens on Yorktown and the Enterprise, that was something I always wanted from the shows. Here’s hoping that Discovery has plenty of aliens.
Am I the only one that thought that Commodore Paris had a very Janeway-sounding voice? I had never noticed that about the actress in The Expanse.
It’s great that Kirk has matured, I liked that. Urban is killing it as McCoy, and I’m glad he gets more to do this time around. His scenes with Spock are some of the best parts of the movie. I loved all the minor character beats, including having Uhura do stuff with comms and voice-recognition.
Really liked they included Enterprise stuff, and, man, I can’t wait to see it in all its glory. (Where are all these screencaps from? If you saw the quality of the version I had to see, you’d cry.) The Prime crew picture made my eyes water, that was a low blow…
Was I the only one who thought of Aurra Sing seeing a white-faced Jaylah shoot that long rifle? :)
Is the tiny, pantless alien with Keenser at the end one of the tiny aliens from the begining?
About the Enterprise A, is it me, or does it look a bit more like the original TOS ship? Chris already said he think it looks the same as the previous one in these films.
@1 – Meredith: I’m with you, I thought the trio that attacked Scotty were just fellow castaways.
@7 – Kalvin: There’s a scene in Altamid that shows that Krall’s armor has mechanical enhancements.
@13 – Edgewalker: Gotta agree with you there, 2009 Trek was good. I think I like this one better, but at the time, I loved the first one.
@14 – Meredith: Me too, it was hard to see the Enterprise being destroyed, even though I don’t have much of an attachment to this design.
I liked this movie. Some points I haven’t seen yet:
1. I’m pretty sure that Scotty fires himself out of the crashing ship in a torpedo, rather than an escape pod. Because he’s just that awesome.
2. Timing continues to be a problem in these movies. Were they only on Yorktown for about 15 minutes?
3. The swarm ships seemed perfectly capable of taking out Starfleet and the Yorktown by themselves, so why wait for the alien weapon? It would have been nice to have it acknowledged somehow that the number of swarm ships was finite, or something.
4. I really liked the scene where the Enterprise is destroyed, and I went in expecting to hate it. We all knew the outcome, but the script did a really good job of showing the crew go down fighting. Ok, weapons don’t work, let’s warp out. Ok, warp drive is gone, let’s hide in the asteroids. Ok, the power is gone, let’s connect the warp core to the impulse engines. Ok, the engineering section is gone, let’s separate the saucer. Ok, we don’t have enough power to escape the atmosphere, FINE, let’s abandon ship. That’s about a billion times better than in Generations.
@14/MeredithP, it was just an awesome design. It actually reminded me of the Citadel in the Mass Effect game series. Makes Deep Space 9 look boring by comparison (I love that show though).
@19, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that had that reaction to the photo of the Prime crew. Maybe it was the emotion of the scene, or the fact that Kelley, Nimoy, & Doohan are all gone now. Whatever it was, I teared up.
Chris, I just read your review, I pretty much agree with it, except for the Enterprise destruction part. And I didn’t know about the filming in Dubai, which is not coo, really…
On a further note, I must admit that I missed the VHF/Sabotage sabotage bit; since the quality of the copy I was watching meant that at times I kinda tuned out the sound, and I was commenting the film with a friend and my son. And we were drinking beer (not my son).
@22 – Jason: It was both things, the in-universe emotionality, and the real world effect on us.
@12/hoopmanjh: “I also liked the overlap with other franchises — Grundberg was in Force Awakens, and Aghdashloo is in The Expanse. Were there any others?”
Well, all of the core cast has other genre-franchise roles — Chris Pine is in Wonder Woman, Zachary Quinto did Heroes, Karl Urban is Judge Dredd, Simon Pegg is Benjy in Mission: Impossible plus the lead in Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End (and Hot Fuzz, which isn’t exactly a genre film), Zoe Saldana is in Guardians of the Galaxy and was in Avatar, John Cho was in Sleepy Hollow, and Anton Yelchin was the only good thing about Terminator Salvation (damn it, he was so good!). And Deep Roy (Keenser) has been in Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Return of the Jedi, and a bunch of other genre stuff. So there’s quite a lot of crossover there.
As for the guest cast, Idris Elba is Heimdall in the Thor films, and Sofia Boutella is starring as The Mummy in the upcoming Alex Kurtzman-directed reboot.
As for the number of survivors, they said they were beaming them over in groups of 20, and it did seem that they beamed several groups over, at least. It’s nowhere near the 1100 people that the ship was supposed to have on board, but it’s more than 40.
And most “nebulae” in Trek are profoundly unlike the real thing anyway. You could be inside a real nebula and it would look like empty space to you, aside from the stars maybe being kinda dim.
@14/MeredithP: Well, for me, the saucer crash in Generations was literally a breathtaking sequence, and I was on the edge of my seat. Here, it was just kind of meh.
@19/MaGnUs: Yes, the alien at the end was one of the ones that got beamed aboard with Kirk at the beginning. Man, I hope they left those guys behind on Yorktown — it’d be even harder to make peace if one of them got killed in the Swarm attack.
@20/Brian Dolan: Yes, Scotty left in a torpedo, which is why he needed to rig his own air supply, and why he (like Spock and McCoy, who came down in a swarm ship) didn’t have those fancy jackets that Kirk and Chekov presumably got from the escape pods’ survival packs.
I think they must’ve spent at least a few hours on Yorktown in the first act, in order for all the stuff we saw to happen.
And yes, the Swarm ships could’ve destroyed Yorktown, but Krall didn’t want to destroy it; he wanted to depopulate it, occupy it, and use it as his base for further conquests.
And I agree, one thing this movie did well was focusing on the crew’s problem-solving and thinking their way out of crises. Sometimes it bordered on Berman-era technobabble a bit much, but it was good that they were always thinking and reasoning out what to do and devising clever, lateral-thinking ideas for how to use the available resources.
@24, where did you hear that there was a crew complement of 1,100 on the Enterprise? The Enterprise in TOS had around 450ish people on board at any given time. I don’t even think the Galaxy Class Enterprise D had that many people on board.
Scotty must a fantastic engineer because that 100 year-old motorcycle with 100 year-old gas and 100 year-old tires operated a lot better than my lawn mower after a single winter in storage!
Great review, Keith. I agree, this is the first Star Trek movie I’ve enjoyed since First Contact. (Only took them 20 years!)
Though Beyond is far from perfect. The villain is fairly weak and underwritten, much like the past four or five villains, and I could do without yet another story climaxing with people struggling to tech the tech while fighting each other. And good grief am I ever tired of particles of CGI eating people alive in these summer action movies! It’s so quick and bloodless it has little to no impact. Remember when that sort of thing was done via practical effects with melting faces that would give you nightmares for years? Yes, good times with Indiana Jones.
But the character interactions were so fun it didn’t matter that much to me. An enjoyable couple of hours for sure.
#11 Christopher L. Bennett “I was disappointed that the E-A looked just like it”
The Enterprise-A was slightly different. It was more streamlined and not as clunky as the previous ship. The nacelles were cleaner, and the neck looked thicker. Probably trying to make it harder to cut I suppose. But I agree the design needed to be more different.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie, its the most Trek movie they’ve done in years.
But . . . the plot setup is killing me. Follow me for a minute –
Random alien lady (Kalara) shows up out of nowhere (the Nebula) in a non-Federation tech warship telling a story about her ship having some kind of critical equipment failure, etc.
And no one asks questions? Its “lets go into the nebula where we can’t communicate and navigation is tricky at best right now!”. Really? No one is asking where the non-fed tech warship came from? How she got it? Why, if it has two seats, and her crew is stranded, isn’t there a 2nd person with her? What exactly was the nature of your ship’s damage that led to it being stranded? Run into an asteroid? Solar flare got ya? Giant green hand pulled you in? (might be nice for the rescue ship to know the hazards going in)
Please. If a guy rowed up to a Coast Guard base in a dinghy and told some story about his ship foundering on the rocks and the crew needed rescue, the Coast Guard cutter wouldn’t get 10 feet away from the dock without asking – and answering – as many questions as possible.
The whole thing makes Star Fleet look like imbeciles.
Oh, and Kalara? Wouldn’t be around after she showed her true colors. Phasers exist for a reason.
I went to see the film today, and wow, I actually liked both Kirk and Uhura. Despite the non-spoiler review, I hadn’t expected that. I still find Uhura a bit bland – but I used to find them both annoying, and now I like them.
Also, good McCoy scenes. And Anton Yelchin’s death made me really appreciate the Kirk-Chekov team-up. Sulu’s little family scene was wonderfully low-key. Yorktown looked great, and so did the planet, and the Enterprise (but then, the new films always had great visuals). The miniskirt unifoms finally look like uniforms instead of summer dresses. (It’s the long sleeves.) Some of the dialogue was a little stilted for my taste, but less so than the dialogue in TWOK, so I guess that’s okay.
Another thing I liked is that there’s very little meta stuff, contrary to the previous films. Little references to Tuvix and Who Mourns for Adonais?, one torn shirt, McCoy’s birthday wish about Kirk’s hair – I didn’t mind any of that.
I laughed out loud at the “tracking device for the girlfriend”.
I was less impressed with the villain and the actual plot. The ancient weapon that fits into the palm of the hand felt out of place in a story that’s neither a superhero comic nor a young adult fantasy, Krall’s backstory felt rushed, but at least the story wasn’t as convoluted as Star Trek 2009 or Into Darkness. Less fighting and more talking would have been nice, but that’s probably too much to ask for nowadays.
Can anybody tell me what Scotty calls Jaylah? In the German dubbed version he calls her “Schätzchen”, which sounds silly.
@25/Jason: The 1100 crew figure comes from the online “Enterprise Tour” webpage that was released as a supplement to the 2009 movie (no longer online, though I think it’s on the Blu-Ray of the film). Keep in mind that the Kelvin-timeline Enterprise is huge, even bigger than the Galaxy and Sovereign classes. It’s the biggest Enterprise we’ve ever had, notcounting the future Enterprise-J from “Azati Prime.”
The Galaxy-class Enterprise had a typical crew complement of about 1,014 people.
@29/Jana: Scotty calls Jaylah “Lassie,” which is what he calls every young woman.
Oh, speaking of subtle callbacks, I cheered when Kirk addressed the crew and paraphrased the line from “The Corbomite Maneuver” about how there’s no such thing as the unknown, just things temporarily hidden. That was thrilling, because I used that as the epigraph for my upcoming TOS novel. Also because “Corbomite” was my first episode ever and still my all-time favorite TOS episode.
@30 Thanks. I assumed it was roughly the same size as the Prime Enterprise. That must have really made the Dreadnought huge in STID.
@29. He called her “lassie”. Stereotypical Scotsman.
As I was coming out of the film yesterday, I was struck just how much Star Trek Beyond is– at its heart– a dark take on Star Trek: Voyager.
The USS Franklin, captained by Balthazar Edison, is exploring space when suddenly they are catapulted (we aren’t told how) many many years away from home. At warp 4, it’s not inconceivable that they were as far away from home as Voyager was at warp 9.
Unlike Janeway, Captain Edison, doesn’t get his crew home. We don’t know his misadventures, only their result: he crash landed on a mostly hospitable planet with only three crew members surviving. (One assumes this is because he brought along a motorcycle, not an EMH.) The locals, all marooned on the planet as well, form gangs to roam and loot. Yes, I’m comparing them to the Kazon…
Unlike Janeway, the distance and his failure during his personal “Year of Hell” breaks him. He doesn’t have a happy planet-side adventure (like “The 37s”), but rather decides to seek out a very protracted revenge against the very Federation that allowed him to get sent out to the middle of nowhere.
After that, of course, his story makes little sense. Once the Federation was close enough to strike, why didn’t he? Why wait until the Yorktown was up and running? Why didn’t he make longer runs against other Federation targets? It’s clear his little ships could do faster than warp 4 (because the Franklin couldn’t keep up), so he really could have gone home a long time earlier. But no, he went native, plotted revenge, and waited for real explorers to come find him so he could kick their ass. He’s the anti-Janeway.
One can’t help but wonder if he might have done better if he had just had his coffee.
@29– Scotty calls Jaylah “Lassie.”
KRAD: Any chance after you finish re-watching TOS and TAS that you’ll be looking at all of the TOS-crewed movies (that you haven’t already covered)?
That will buy us a few more weeks to figure out how to get you to review Voyager and Enterprise….
In all seriousness, we’ve enjoyed your passion and occasional vitriol on these reviews for so long, it will be a sad day when you finally get to the end. I’ve been reading the “Mark Watches” blog on Voyager and while he’s the anti-you (coming from complete ignorance of the series), it has made me remember that there are a FEW good Voyager episodes out there.
(Unless you are going to snag the gig for reviewing ST:D. That would be pretty cool also, but having you review a show where you don’t know how it will end will be a very different experience than these re-watches.)
Keith, I agree with you on all points in this review (including being unimpressed with the 2009 film, which you implied without stating directly). The improvement in Kirk’s character was a huge plus for me, since he was my least favorite aspect of the prior two films. This is the first time since the reboot that I could believe the characters are the ones I’ve known for decades, with special credit going to Quinto and Urban, who are channeling their predecessors with uncanny accuracy.
My personal quibble is that I can’t make the timeline work out. The Franklin’s registry number is NX-326, which puts it well after the NX-01. The registry number seems kind of high for a ship that was lost in 2164, when the NX-01 was launched in 2151. Memory Alpha suggests that the Franklin, being a warp 4 ship, is older than the Enterprise NX-01 (the first warp 5 ship). I can buy that, if there’s an explanation for the higher registry number.
I really want to get a better look at the new NCC-1701-A, and I haven’t been able to find one yet. I noticed when I saw it that the nacelle pylons were straight, rather than curved, and the neck seemed to be forward of its predecessor. I didn’t get a good look at the nacelles themselves, though. The overall impression I had is that it’s much closer to the “classic” Enterprise, which I would support wholeheartedly.
@31, 32, 34: Thank you! That means a better translation would have been “Mädel”, but they probably couldn’t do that because of lip sync issues.
@31/Christopher: I didn’t catch that one. Perhaps because I watched the German dubbed version. Thank you for pointing it out!
@36/Brian MacDonald: “The improvement in Kirk’s character was a huge plus for me, since he was my least favorite aspect of the prior two films.” – I feel the same way!
As summer popcorn flicks, not too bad. 6 on a scale of 1-10.
However, Sulu not only got shuffled off to the background, his primary arc seemed to be centered around his relationship with his husband and daughter. Hey guys, if you didn’t want him to simply be “the gay character” then don’t make his whole reason for being in the movie be about worrying about his partner. Sure, he gets to fly the Franklin but he’s the helmsman. That’s his job. It reminded me of the scene in ST ’09 where Sulu pulls out a katana. The writers said they did it as a call back to the famous fencing scene in The Naked Time but that Sulu was using a foil, not a Japanese sword. All that managed to do was point out that Sulu is Asian as opposed to being a person that’s good at fencing.
Sadly, Anton is pushed even further into the background here and it just makes you realize how much he put into the previous two movies. Too bad his farewell performance couldn’t have been more memorable.
As far as Krall goes, oh goody, another bad guy who’s out for revenge. Nice to see the NuTrek movies trying something new <sigh>. Look at the 6 TOS films and see how different each of them were. Now look at how similar the three bad Robot films are. Not the same films by any stretch but theu sure have a number of common elements. Mix it up next time guys. There’s more motivations out there than revenge. What a waste of Idris Elba.
In the WTF file, So Kirk has the opportunity to go from cadet to rear admiral in just a little over 4 years? Really? By the time the 5th film comes out, he should be asked to run for president at this rate.
Also, hate, hate, hate the motorcycle scene with the heat of a million exploding suns. Not only does he find a motorcycle on a planet way out on the frontier but they get it up and running in short order. The Trek and the Furious indeed.
Spock and Uhura breaking up is a shame but at least she doesn’t get reduced to annoying girfriend in this one. I raised an eyebrow in the first movie when the relationship was first shown in the first movie but I wasn’t opposed to it due to the flirtations that we’d seen between the characters in TOS. Unfortunately, the writing on their relationship never rose above the annoying “We have to talk about our relationship” for the most part. I was excited when Abrams and Orci said that Uhura had a bigger part now. I was disappointed that it mainly consisted of her talking about her relationship as opposed to giving her something more professional to talk about. Relationships are great but if the male characters can have relationships AND other things to do, why should the female character be primarily written as worrying about her boyfriend. Good idea, poorly executed so I can’t say I’m sorry to see that end.
Destruction of the Enterprise. Been there, done that so much that it really doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Especially since we all know it’ll be replaced by the next movie at the latest if not before the end credits roll.
In summary, seen it. Will wait for the video release before watching it again. Nice way to spend an afternoon, especially in air condition comfort. Nothing too special about it.
The motorcycle itself didn’t bother me. I’ll just pretend it was retrofitted with future tech and runs on electric or antimatter or whatever and has a speaker to make it sound like an authentic gas burner. And since Picard kept a saddle onboard, why not a motorcycle for Edison? Ain’t fanplanations great? Well they’re fun anyhow.
I was more distracted by the writers stealing the holographic decoy idea from Total Recall. Also, the climax with the hero and villain trying hard not to get blown into the vacuum is very Total Recall.
@33/Joe: I got the impression that the Franklin was only catapulted as far as Altamid, whereupon it crashed there. I didn’t get the impression that there was a lengthy journey homeward after the wormhole/green hand/whatever.
According to the descriptions I’ve heard, Yorktown is on the edge of Federation space, so there probably weren’t any UFP worlds close enough to strike before now. And Krall wanted to strike at the embodiment of Federation peace and unity, which is what Yorktown was. Also, he wanted it as a staging base for his conquests, something that Altamid probably couldn’t serve as because of the dense nebula/asteroids around it.
@36/Brian McDonald: TrekCore conjectures that Starfleet started the numbering over again for the Warp 5 ships. Which would fit with what the Enterprise novels have done, since the ones before mine established that the Daedalus class predated NX-01 and had registry numbers in two or three digits.
@38/kkozoriz: Your objection to Sulu’s plotline is ridiculous. It wasn’t about him being “the gay character,” it was about him being the married character, the one with a family. The sex of his spouse was totally irrelevant to that.
@39/leone: Total Recall has no exclusive claim to the holographic-decoy idea. It’s such a common trope, in fact, that it has its own TV Tropes page. We’ve seen Loki use it in the Marvel movies (and in the comics going back to his debut), and it’s a go-to trick of the Flash villain Mirror Master.
Of course Total Recall has exclusive claim to that trope, since it’s so much better than anything else in the universe. ;-)
40. ChristopherLBennett – Your objection to Sulu’s plotline is ridiculous. It wasn’t about him being “the gay character,” it was about him being the married character, the one with a family. The sex of his spouse was totally irrelevant to that.
Agreed, but the gender in that case would be irrelevant. Pegg had explicitly said that they didn’t take Takei’s suggestion to create a new character because then people, at least those with no imagination” would think of them as “the gay character.” What bothered me was that they then went out and made Sulu’s arc, such as it was, specifically about his relationship. Sure, they could have married off pretty much any of the characters but they specifically decided to use the character of Sulu because they had just decided that this version is gay. Funny how they can introduce heterosexual characters without needing to make their relationship, if any, the main focus of their (small) part of the movie. It’s like a big red arrow pointing at Sulu that says “See? He’s married to man and he’s worried about him! See what we did?” It’s also the cliche that we’re only introduced to someone’s family member if they’re going to to put into danger. Funny how Kirk can be shown as hetrosexual in the past couple of movies without having to put Galia or the Caitian twins into peril. Sure, Galia probably died on one of the other ships at Vulcan but it’s not like anyone mentioned her after that despite Uhura being her roommate.
But, introduce a gay character and suddenly their spouse and child HAS to be placed in immediate danger.
@42/kkozoriz: Nonsense. There have been thousands of movies where danger to characters’ loved ones has been a plot point. Die Hard springs immediately to mind as an action movie that’s driven entirely by the main character’s concern for his spouse and daughter. Heck, in this movie, Spock was driven by his concern for Uhura, and they weren’t even a couple anymore! But you’re not complaining about that part, which proves that the double standard is yours.
Also, this —
“Sure, they could have married off pretty much any of the characters but they specifically decided to use the character of Sulu because they had just decided that this version is gay.”
— is blatantly wrong. You’re forgetting that Sulu is the only one of these characters who was already canonically established as having a family, in the prologue to Generations when his daughter Demora was introduced. So the idea that Sulu was a family man came first, by about 22 years.
Not that it matters (and it totally doesn’t) but for the record Die Hard is about the spouse, Die Hard 4 is about the daughter.
43. ChristopherLBennett – It’s also the cliche that we’re only introduced to someone’s family member if they’re going to to put into danger.
I guess you missed this part. Besides, Pegg and company didn’t make a big thing about Sulu being married. They gave interviews talking about how this Sulu was gay. The fact he was married was a minor point. And oldSulu was shown as having a daughter. He wasn’t shown as married. As a matter of fact, that’s what Peter David established for a back story for Demora. Sulu was not married to Demora’s mother.
Trek still doesn’t get it that you don’t have to make a big thing about introducing a gay character. That their sexuality doesn’t have to play a part in the plot, any more than the sexuality of a heterosexual character has to be part of the plot. Look at Encounter at Farpoint where the female crew member checks out Riker after she shows him how to get to the holodeck. Simple, understated yet gets the point across. But apparently, if there’s a gay character then it HAS to be part of the plot. In nuSulu’s case, apparently the only real part of the story that he gets. It’s that sort of attitude that’s kept gay characters out of Trek for almost 50 years. That it has to be a big deal, if not for the viewer then for the character. And yet heterosexual characters are perfectly free to be introduced in pretty much all the episodes and movies without anyone batting an eye. Introduce a gay character though and it’s time to put them in peril. Sure, it’s happened with straight characters too but the vast majority of them aren’t put in that situation.
I agree with this review in almost every particular. Finally I can stand this Kirk. Both he and Uhura appear to have graduated from high school. McCoy gets to shine. Scotty is great, and Jaylah is terrific. (And IMO Scotty was the *only* good part of Into Darknesss.) I’m less impressed by Quinto’s Spock than you are, though. Something about his facial expressions puts me off. Seems almost a little pouty.
@20 BrianDolan, thanks for explaining that Scotty leaves the Enterprise via torpedo. I didn’t understand that at all. There were several times in action sequences when I really had no idea what was going on. And CLB @24, thanks for explaining where the fancy jackets came from.
Keith, I also feel that the villain’s motivation and goals should have been made more clear and definitely should have been revealed earlier, in his interaction with Uhura.
@19 Magnus, Commodore Paris’s voice did indeed remind me of Janeway’s.
@45/kkozoriz: Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s about the family. The exact composition of that family is beside the point.
“They gave interviews talking about how this Sulu was gay. The fact he was married was a minor point.”
And that was in interviews. Obviously it’s different in the movie itself. Pegg also gave an interview going into depth about a new timeline-change theory that fandom has been arguing about ever since, but that theory has nothing at all to do with the movie. The emphasis of interviews has nothing to do with the emphasis of the actual film.
“Trek still doesn’t get it that you don’t have to make a big thing about introducing a gay character.”
Ummmmmmm…. “introducing?” This is Mr. Sulu. This is his third screen appearance in this incarnation, his 83rd screen appearance overall. He already has a whole range of established personality traits. The relationship is just being added to the mix of what we already know about him. That’s why it was such a good idea to make him gay rather than introducing a new character to fill that role — because that meant it wouldn’t be tokenism.
@46/Saavik: Yeah, I did find the action somewhat confusingly shot and edited at times. I’m surprised, since Lin is so acclaimed for his work on the action-heavy Fast and Furious films.
@36, Brian,
Don’t get too twisted around the axle on hull numbers. The US and Soviet navies haven’t been perfect about keeping the numbers in order, even re-using some numbers for different ship classes. Hell, the Soviets used to paint new hull numbers every now and then just to screw with the US intel folks.
Just love this movie. Someone here mentioned it already, but this is now my third favorite ST movie after Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home.
And great review BTW.
47. ChristopherLBennett – Thanks for straightsplaining things to me. I’ll be sure to pass it along to my husband as well as the other gay people we saw the movie with. I’m sure they’ll all agree that their opinions were wrong and that the single straight guy set us all straight, if you’ll pardon the pun.
If it were simply about marrying off Sulu then I don’t imagine that Pegg would have sought Takei’s opinion on the matter. But I’m sure you think that he’s wrong too.
It’s taken Trek 50 years to introduce a gay character, two actually. And that’s pathetic. The idea that it can all be forgiven with a wordless 10 second bit at the beginning and then a few concerned looks later on is enough may work for you. “We gave them a gay character. What more do they want?”. What’s wanted is for the characters to be introduced and simply made part of the tapestry without needing to put their spouse and child in mortal danger.
Imagine if in “Family” if Robert’s spouse had been introduced as Maurice. keep the rest of the episode the same, just change the gender of Picard’s brother’s spouse. If you’d had it your way, “Maurice” and Rene would have burned to death at the end of the episode instead of Robert and Rene dying years later, after they’d become part of the lore. Robert and Rene may have only appeared on screen once but their presence was felt for years.
And yes, introducing. Seeing as these are the first gay characters Trek has put on screen EVER. Hell, you could write a story about how how homosexuality was wiped out in the “prime” universe without violating one single piece of canon.
So yes, introducing.
@50/kkozoriz – Would you like it better if a fellow gay person gaysplained it to you? Because I didn’t see Sulu’s part in the movie REMOTELY the same way you did, and I’ve chatted with my wife about Sulu and she didn’t either. Take a step back before you go getting all ad hominem and presuming all queer people saw it the same way you did.
By the way, does anyone have any idea what the stuff in Spock Prime’s box of personal effects other than the photo is supposed to be?
The movie was…okay.
But, as an Enterprise fan, I got a kick out of it. It felt, to me, like the Enterprise movie that never was. So, that was nice.
@53
Yes! I’m an Enterprise fan too, and I loved the subtle hints, specially the uniform. :) btw, I’m glad to know I’m not the only Enterprise fan, I’m tired of all the side glances I get when I say that, hah
@53, @54. Count me in too. I finally finished Enterprise and I loved it. Not my favorite Trek series, but a worthy addition with some great characters. It’s nice to see it get some love.
51. MeredithP – Feel free to give your opinion. And I’m not presuming to say that all queer people saw it the same way. What I’m objecting to with Christopher is having a straight, single guy telling me that he understands same sex relationships better than someone that’s actually, you know, in one.
After all the promotion and interviews and telling George Takei that he’s wrong, Sulu’s husband doesn’t even get a word of dialog. Other characters relatives are introduced in the various movies and episodes and actually have something to say. Here it’s Simon Pegg shuffling the newly introduced gay character off to the background because he was introduced just so he could say “See, we’re progressive and put a gay person in the show. We don’t think they’re important enough to actually give them any dialog or make them a part of the plot but we’ll sure get some publicity out of them when we announce their presence just before the movie opens.”
@29 – Jana: I still can’t stomach the miniskirt uniforms. It’s not 1966 anymore.
@36 – Brian: The NX-326 can easily be explained by either the pre-warp 5 Earth SF ships having different numbering, or by the Franklin getting a new number once it was assigned to the new UFP Starfleet. And I found the new Enterprise closer to the classic one too.
@46 – Saavik: Some of the action sequences were confusing to me too, but due to the horrible quality of the copy I was watching. And I’m glad I’m not alone on Paris’ voice.
@51 – Meredith: I love the term “gaysplaining”. :)
@52 – Saavik: I saw his robes.
I’m just wondering why Spock Prime happened to bring any of his personal effects with him on a mission to stop a supernova. Although I don’t worry about it much, since of course the whole thing was just about paying tribute to Nimoy and acknowledging the 50th anniversary.
@57/MaGnUs: I’ve always liked the miniskirt uniforms, and I never thought they were sexist. Perhaps because I love to wear skirts myself, and short skirts are much more practical than long ones – they don’t get torn when the wearer climbs a fence or rides a bike. (I lost quite a few skirts that way.)
@59/Jana: That’s why I liked TNG’s early effort to have a “skant” uniform for men as well as women. It isn’t really unisex unless it goes both ways.
And that’s a neat insight that short garments are better for more active people. Although, on the flip side, bare legs are less protected from scrapes and cuts. But I guess there are elbow and knee pads for that.
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 58 – We only saw one (the photo) in his personal effects. We don’t know what are the others. He might have picked up other items to count as personal effects during his time in New Vulcan.
Still, to answer this comment – “I’m just wondering why Spock Prime happened to bring any of his personal effects with him on a mission to stop a supernova.”
Even in our daily lives today, we have items that count as personal effects that we carry everyday with us. Personally, I have my watch, my jewelry (ring and earrings) and of course my purse which has so many stuff in it, from my ID to credit cards. And of course, I have my iPhone which actually has many photos, not just current ones but also old ones like when I was a baby, etc.
So going back to Spock, when he went on a mission, he has stuff in his person (like his era’s equivalent of an iPhone) which holds lots of data that he carries around with him. So, having a photo of the original crew is not surprising. It was probably in his data file he brought with him. He just had it printed.
Hope this explains a bit.
P.S. He probably also has rings and other jewelry that he wore everyday and brought with him in his mission simply because he does not leave home without them.
@61: Good thought about the photo being on a thumb drive, as it were. Maybe he got it from the Jellyfish‘s Federation database, even. (Although I think he’d probably have deleted most of that database to preserve the Temporal Prime Directive by not letting the Kelvin Federation learn too much about future events and innovations. Though I hope he’s warned them about some of the bigger, planet-killing threats like the Doomsday Machine, Nomad, V’Ger, and the Whale Probe.)
I haven’t hated the new series of Trek films, but this was by far the one I’ve enjoyed the most thus far. Adding in diverse sexualities, same-sex parents, etc. with little-to-no fanfare just made the deal sweeter for me as a gay man.
That wasn’t the best part, though, at least not for me.
I am an idealist. I acknowledge that about myself readily, and it’s one of the things in Star Trek that always spoke to me. As such, one of the things that I feel Star Trek has been missing for a long time has been a sense of optimism.
Maybe it’s because it’s the Trek I grew up with, but I always felt TNG exemplified Star Trek’s message growing up. Most of their missions and stories revolved around preserving peace, making lives better, the whole ‘seek out new life and new civiizations’ bit, to the point that an episode like “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” which showed them as the crew of a battleship, felt jarring and wrong. Picard would usually win the day with a speech, rather than a phaser fight, which made him my favorite captain.
Then DS9 started a downard spiral into cynicism with the Dominion War, which continued into Voyager with Janeway’s questionable decision-making in the name of gettng her crew home, and then into Enterprise itself with its “Cowboys & Aliens” feel. Even in Nemesis, the last movie that had my favorite cast in it, it never really felt like Star Trek so much as ‘the bunch of guys with a spaceship who do random stuff’.
Sometimes this has worked well — DS9 had some amazing stories about necessary evils, and I did bond with Voyager’s crew over time (well, most of them. Never did get to like Neelix). But other times — like Nemesis — not so much.
Then the reboot came, and while I was ambivalent about the Abrams films, I can’t deny having Classic Spock around for the first two films, I felt, helped ground the new series and keep it connected to the message it used to carry. Since Nimoy’s passing (my mother and I were both inconsolable for weeks) I was concerned that this would rob the franchise of its last connection to its roots.
But in Beyond, the main conflict, once it was set up, seemed to be as much between Krall and Kirk’s respective ideologies as it as between the two of them. Krall, to me, seemed to represent what Trek had become, just another “Cowboys vs. Aliens” Starship Troopers franchise. Kirk surprised me, though, in that he was actually speaking for what Star Trek was envisioned as: a portrait of where we could go, rather than another bitter reflection of where we are. We have plenty of those already.
@63 I always felt that DS9 portrayed the same message of hope, but in a much more difficult setting. It showed that even in an ugly world, we should still strive for hope. The Dominion War story line made the point that sometimes, we must fight for what is right, even though it is not a desirable. Because of this, I always felt that DS9 was a bit more realistic than TNG (although I absolutely love TNG).
@60/Christopher: Yes, those early TNG uniforms were great! I missed them in the second season.
@54
@55
I do feel like Enterprise get’s something of a bum rap, and it isn’t entirely deserved…
…but it isn’t entirely undeserved. Season 3 and 4 are really good, and I think do a good job of showing what Enterprise should have been about. Yes, the Xindi arc was dark, with our “heroes” taking incresingly morally dubious actions… but I thought that fit with the theme they were going for for the show, showing how humanity overcomes it’s prejudices to find resolution. It’s why I liked DS9; “It’s easy to be perfect in Paradise”.
Similarly, it’s why I actually kind of liked how the Vulcan’s played out in it. Cultures aren’t static; it wasn’t just humanity that was changed by contact with the Vulcan’s, the Vulcan’s also adapted and changed in response to humanity. And I really liked that; it helps off-set the idea of the Federation as a gigantic mono-culture.
But. Enterprise did do it’s fair number of botch jobs. The first two seasons have a lot of really good story ideas executed very badly. I like seeing humanity stumble through space, making mistakes; it felt more realistic.It’s just that the show creators expressed those early missteps and stumbles very very poorly, and sandwiched it between some episodes which were appaling, when they weren’t downright offensive (“Night in Sick Bay”, “Dear Doctor”).
Still, on the whole, I liked Enterprise, and I am very excited that it’s gotten a new lease of life in the novels, and that it’s being referenced.
@66, I agree that the first two seasons were weak, but I would make the case that they are no worse, possibly better than, the first two seasons of TNG. I think the first season of TNG is nearly unwatchable, but it grew into a great series. It’s too bad that Enterprise never got the chance. I also agree that its great that it is getting more stories told in the books, as there are plenty more to tell.
Count me in as someone who very much enjoyed Enterprise. I had to struggle to even find out when/what channel I could watch it on, and I haven’t put that much effort into a tv show since, really.
I thought it was okay. Action-packed, good stunts, fun character moments — exactly what I was hoping for. I have no idea why I left the theater so . . . bored. I wanted so badly to love this movie. Ended up only liking it.
And the “Sabotage” scene was, for me, just cringe-worthy. And here’s the thing — they could have had the exact same scene with the exact same visuals and the exact same music, and all they would have had to do was have Kirk hear the music (earlier in the movie) and get nostalgic for when he was a kid listening to the radio. Then when the space fight scene goes down he asks for Jaylah to put the music on while they bombard the aliens with VHF random noise. The idea that they made the ALIENS EXPLODE WITH THE POWER OF ROCK was what changed it from an epic, fun episode of Star Trek into a Tenacious D video . . . which was not what I bought my ticket to see.
Things I liked about this movie:
1. They remembered to write a plot-relevant role for the whole bridge crew. (Still miffed that most of Uhura’s screen time in Into Darkness consisted of supporting, or arguing with, Spock. Sure, she gets to beat up Klingons, but she has way more potential than that.)
2. The whole crew actually gets to interact, and solve their problems together. Into Darkness was so much the Kirk vs. Spock show that nobody else aside from Scotty really got to shine. And they actually made the crew seem like seasoned professionals who can work together to solve problems no matter who they get stuck with – to me the highlight of the Enterprise going down wasn’t the ship’s impending destruction (seen it twice already in the reboots alone….) but the way that the bridge crew actually tried multiple options, was able to change tracks and give each other necessary information, rather than “Only the Captain can save us now!” (Am I comparing this too much to Into Darkness? Probably. That one’s a little fresher in my mind than 2009.)
3. The ending. Sure, Kirk got in his requisite fist fight with the main villain, but the whole crew was working together to come up with a solution, and the solution was both plausible in-universe based on the explanation they gave, and kind of silly. (Real life is also often silly, and Star Trek is usually at it’s best when it isn’t afraid of silliness.)
4. Jaylah. I was afraid that she’d end up relegated to the exotic alien love interest for Kirk or Scotty. Instead we got a relationship where Scotty becomes a supportive mentor for her, and I’m really hoping that the bridge crew gets to have her as a new Ensign in movie 4.
5. They finally went out into space and have missions that involve aliens! More alien crew members! Nonhumanoid alien characters! (Keenser is a space hobbit, he totally counts as humanoid.) Female Humanoid Alien characters that ARE NOT STRICTLY THERE FOR SEX APPEAL!
Disappointing things:
1. Krall’s dialogue. The expressions were great, the physical acting… but a large part of why his backstory fell flat for me is because they spent so much time making his motivations mysterious with all the “finish the mission,” and “the federation will pay,” but they didn’t write enough context in for me to really feel for him and his motivations. His big speech ends up being about how struggling is better than peace because it builds character, but his motivation seems to be about being stranded on a planet forever and left behind, starting at a time when the federation probably had no reason to believe that his ship had survived, or any idea where to star looking. It’s a serious mismatch, and he doesn’t actually make any salient points. (Also, I feel like everything would have been solved if Klingons had stumbled onto his planet a few centuries ago…)
2. They ran out of time for the B-cast to have personal plotlines again. I had high hopes, since they were introducing Sulu’s family, and we did finally get an entire plot point devoted to how good Uhura is at her job that she can recognize a single person’s voice on a recording of a group. Next movie though, I want to see someone, anyone, on a personal or emotional journey besides Kirk or Spock. It felt like they were trying to go there with Sulu, presenting returning to his family and defending them as motivators, but since you could easily have missed half his reaction shots and willfully misinterpreted him greeting his husband, it really felt like they didn’t want to spend time on it at all. And considering how often characters have been introduced and then forgotten by the franchise for the sole purpose of demonstrating Kirk’s heterosexuality, the tentativeness just feels like them not being comfortable with the idea of having a gay character yet. Maybe next time around they’ll write meatier roles for Sulu and Uhura and we can then have Sulu’s marital status become part of what we know about the character as on-screen background information, rather than the weird spot where they ended up.
3. I have timeline and internal logic quibbles. They’re about comparable in number and pettiness to the previous two films, and a good chunk of the major ones have already been discussed, so I won’t bother anyone with them. :)
@70/Quill: Have we ever really had a Trek movie that didn’t focus mainly on the lead characters’ arcs and give the supporting characters less to do? Most of the films give the supporting players individual “moments,” but there’s little in the way of real story arcs for anyone but Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in the TOS films and Picard, Riker, and Data in the TNG films.
Still, Sulu’s long, long tradition of being the most underutilized character in the movies is still in effect here. I hate to say it, but I’m kind of hoping that Chekov’s absence from the next film will create more space in the narrative for Sulu.
@63/ingonyama said:
Yup, that’s how it was for me too, and I think that’s how Christopher saw it as well. I said in many discussions when Sulu’s orientation was revealed that I didn’t want a big deal made of it – that what queer youth need to see is just that gay people are a part of the fabric of everyday life. I like that it was never even acknowledged beyond a couple of shots. That’s how I feel about it as a member of the LGBTQ community.
BTW, @kkozoriz – I have read this thread over and over and I don’t get where you got the impression Christopher is straight. Can you point me to somewhere he’s said so? I ask because it seems fair to make sure before assuming such things.
#57 I’ve never cared for the miniskirts either, and the ‘skant’ only reinforced how silly they are, I thought, for a future space navy. Better to just have everyone in pants. It would be more uniform, and it would avoid unnecessary costume changes before beaming down to Planet Poison Ivy.
In ST: Discovery, I hope we see more use of spacesuits on away missions. And if they’re smart, there will be a variety of them. Different suits for different environments = more action figures. George Lucas learned this long ago.
@72/MeredithP: I appreciate that you have the consideration to ask instead of assuming. I am heterosexual, but I don’t like to use the label “straight,” because it seems to imply that other sexualities are “bent” or “crooked.” It’s one of the only cases of a nickname for one group that’s insulting toward a different group. So I’m not comfortable using it.
And I agree that it was right to treat Sulu’s marriage casually, but I don’t really think that’s what they did — as others have suggested, I think they shied away from it to the extent that Sulu spent most of the movie just mutely reacting to things rather than having any dialogue. It feels like maybe he had scripted lines about his concern for his family on Yorktown, but they got cut because the studio was nervous about calling attention to said family beyond just a quick glimpse. So it seemed a little too casual to be really casual, so to speak. And it resulted in John Cho probably having fewer lines than any other major actor in the movie, which is frustrating and a waste of his ability.
Not to mention that it would’ve been nice to learn Sulu’s husband’s name. And his daughter’s, though she’s presumably Demora. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things that never got named — mainly alien species. What species is Jaylah? Or Kalara? Or Ensign Syl?
I don’t think the skirts are wrong because they’re sexist, it’s because they don’t seem practical for the kind of work they do on away missions, if the ship is under attack, etc. But I might be mistaken, and it does look a bit sexist unless you allow the guys to wear skirts or shorts.
@64 – Jason: Totally agree with you on DS9. Then again, it’s my favorite Trek show, so…
And I’m one of the people who really enjoyed Enterprise, although that was amplified by the fact that this was the first Trek show I could follow weekly as it was being released. I was born in 1980, since TOS is out the question, TNG I got to see haphazardly and starting in 1991-2, the first three seasons I saw haphazardly and years later too, while the rest of DS9 and all of VOY I saw almost complete, but also years later.
@71 – Chris: Me too, I hope Sulu gets more to do next time.
@74/Christopher – I didn’t mean for you to have to reveal anything, was just pointing out that you hadn’t – but I appreciate that you have thoughts on the significance of the word. :)
I see your point on it being too casual – calling her Demora, especially, would have been a nice throwback without putting much emphasis on anything else, just that “yes, this is their daughter.”
I also want to know what the seashell-headed alien at the end was…pictured above at “Russian invention” – some sort of semi-aquatic species? :)
“With that caveat in mind, though, this is the first Trek film since First Contact in 1996 that can actually be called good.”
Just about exactly what I told my husband.
This FELT like Star Trek. Yes, there were flaws, but so were there in the original series.
McCoy was effing awesome. I always loved him. And bonus points because Karl Urban is smoking hot.
I thought Jaylah would just be the “tuff fighting girl” but she was vulnerable and sweet as well. I hope she is chosen to join the bridge since Chekov won’t be back. We could use another woman.
Uhura acted like an adult this movie, not a moonstruck teenager. The romance, the seeming demise of which I cheered early on, is evidently back on. But at least they’re acting like adults. I never liked that she dated her teacher and got a berth on the big E courtesy of that. Unethical.
All in all, it was a good movie. I concur with the 7 rating. I didn’t think Pegg had the chops to pull this off, but I’m willing to eat my humble pie on that account. I wish he and Jung would do the next one, not the guys who got bounced from this movie who are now slated to write 4.
@73/Leone: I actually appreciate it that the TOS uniforms were not perfectly uniform. Three different colours. Trousers and dresses. Kirk’s wraparound tunic. McCoy’s short sleeves. Engineering jumpsuits. I find that the variety reflects Starfleet’s “semi-military” status.
@74/Christopher: I liked the way Sulu’s marriage was presented. More lines would have been nice, but this was nice too, because it felt so natural. And I’m confident that Sulu’s husband and daughter will be back in the next film. (For the record, I’m heterosexual too.)
I also like it that some alien species weren’t named, because it adds to the feeling of normality – having a galaxy full of sentient species and treating everyone as an individual.
@75/MaGnUs: I find short skirts practical, but I may be the only one.
@75. DS9 is my favorite too. I was born in 81, so I’ve been on the Trek Train since I was old enough to watch TV. Plus, I was fortunate to be able to watch all of them but Enterprise in their first run (EDIT: & TOS/TAS). I just recently rewatched every episode of every series on Netflix and ended it with Enterprise. I’m one of the few who didn’t terribly mind the final episode of Enterprise. It reminded me of the season 4 finale of Babylon 5, where they showed the effect the characters had on the future. It was executed better on B5 though.
@77 – Tbonz: They actually made it quite clear in the 2009 movie that, due to her grades, Uhura deserved a posting on the Enterprise, and that Spock had assigned her elsewhere to avoid being accused of favoritism.
@78 – Jana: For exploring dangerous environments and being ready for possible hostile attacks?
I read that a scene with Sulu kissing his husband *was* cut from the film.
@80 Ah, it’s been a while since I saw the movie. Even so, dating her prof.
@81/TBonz: I agree that, in general, it doesn’t seem quite ethical to have two officers in the same chain of command be romantically involved. Indeed, it was rather a central element in the Kirk-Rand relationship in early season 1 of TOS that both of them wanted something to happen between them, but they both understood it couldn’t happen as long as she was a member of his crew. (Then again, maybe the rank difference between a commander and a lieutenant is judged less significant than that between a captain and a yeoman, because they’re both officers?)
Still, Uhura was pretty blatantly flirting with Spock in various early TOS episodes (notably “The Man Trap” and “Charlie X”), so it’s safe to assume that she was the aggressor in their relationship in this reality as well.
Anyway, I like the idea of navigator Jaylah, except for one thing: I’m not sure, but I don’t know if the bright gold uniform tunic that goes with the job would look good with her snow-white complexion. I think she’d probably look better in blue or red. (Photoshop, anyone?)
@80 The scene in 2009Trek merely had her badgering Spock because she thought her grades merited a berth on the Enterprise, as if grades alone determined a posting. Then it had Spock her Boyfriend giving in and agreeing. I get that what you say is what they were trying to say, but that very favoritism that Spock claimed to say he was avoiding showing actually shone through in full force as he almost immediately buckled when she made her demand.
@80/MaGnUs: Hey, skirts and tights are traditional explorer clothing. Ferdinand Magellan wore them, and he circumnavigated the world.
@82/Christopher: Weren’t Tomlinson and Martine in Balance of Terror in the same chain of command?
I had the same thought about Jaylah. And the bright white interior of the Enterprise probably won’t suit her either. But it would still be great to have her in the crew.
#84 JanaJansen
Magellan also experienced several mutinies during his voyage. If only they’d had pants… much anger and misery could’ve been avoided. ;-)
@85/Leone: I stand corrected.
@84/Jana: Oh, good point. Not only did Tomlinson and Martine both work in the phaser control room, but Tomlinson explicitly said he was her superior officer (or at least would be until they got married, although I assume that was a joke). So clearly Starfleet was tolerant of relationships between junior and senior officers, at least sometimes. It’s off-limits for captains, but not necessarily for the rest of the crew.
As for Jaylah, now that they’ve got a new ship, the makers of the next film could redesign the sets so they aren’t so blindingly white.
Hmm… While Jaylah’s look is striking, I do find it annoying that women of color in genre films are so often hidden behind alien makeup or digital creations. Aside from Uhura, Zoe Saldana’s most notable genre roles have been a blue alien and a green alien. Paula Patton in Warcraft had her skin digitally turned green (behind-the-scenes photos show her with her natural brown complexion). And in The Force Awakens, Lupita Nyong’o didn’t even get to be on camera. Though it does look like that’s going to change some over the next few years. We have Viola Davis and Karen Fukuhara in Suicide Squad (though the latter’s face is mostly behind a mask), Zendaya, Laura Harrier, and others in Spider-Man: Homecoming, (though it’s unclear how large their roles will be), Nyong’o and Danai Gurira in Black Panther, Kiersey Clemons as Iris in the Flash movie, etc.
@87,
I don’t really get the concern over Sophia Boutella – who played Jayleh – being hidden behind makeup. Whoever was cast for the role was gonna be in bone white makeup with black stripes. As for Zoe Saldana being blue, all of the natives in Avatar were blue. And Gamora is supposed to be green. Again, whoever got the role was gonna wear the makeup.
@88/ragnar: The point is that it’s not about “whoever.” That implies that everyone is treated equally by Hollywood, and that’s an incredibly naive assumption. Industry-wide, women of color are rarely given featured roles in movies, and when they are featured in genre movies, they tend to be hidden behind makeup. It’s not about this specific movie, it’s about entrenched racial imbalances in movies as a whole and the slow progress in overcoming them. Yes, we’re getting more nonwhite women in major roles, but their true faces are still frequently hidden. Luckily, that seems to be starting to change, albeit slowly.
As for Jaylah’s complexion and the gold uniform/bright bridge lighting; they can say her species is not usually that pale, but she was suffering from a vitamin deficiency while in Altamid, and just darken her skin. :)
@84 – Jana: Unless the tights are transparent (made from some future-ey material), I don’t see any on Uhura. :)
@90/MaGnUs: That’s odd, since Nichelle Nichols and other women in TOS did wear hose with their skirts, I’m pretty sure.
Oh, certainly, Nichols noticeably wore what seemed like dark hoserwith the skirts, but I’m talking about Kelvin Timeline uniforms. They’re probably wearing stockings or something similar, but nothing as protective pants or actual tights.
In any case, we haven’t seen any men wearing shorts or a skirt, so for now, it looks like it’s an aesthetic decision by the costuming department and/or the directors.
@90/MaGnUs: That’s true, they don’t have them in the Kelvin timeline. I was talking about TOS.
Oh, I’ve been talking about Kelvin the whole time, that’s why I started by saying “I still can’t stomach the miniskirt uniforms. It’s not 1966 anymore.” Although “stomach” was probably not the best word, since I think women look good in them, but I don’t think it fits in the setting, as long as men don’t get to wear similar garments too, or we see some women wearing pants.
NuSpock wasn’t just NuUhura’s commanding officer, he was her teacher. Sleeping with your college professor and then getting him to do what you want isn’t ethical. It also wouldn’t be ethical of Spock to take advantage of their relationship wouldn’t be ethical either.
An interesting exchange from BoT
ANGELA: You won’t get off my hook this easily. I’m going to marry you, Mister, battle or phaser weapons notwithstanding.
ROBERT: Well, meanwhile, temporarily at least, I am still your superior officer. So get with it, Mister.
What’s going to happen once they get married then? Why is he only her superior officer temporarily. Perhaps married women aren’t allowed to continue in Starfleet. There’s this from Who Mourns For Adonais?
KIRK: Why, Bones? Scotty’s a good man.
MCCOY: And he thinks he’s the right man for her, but I’m not sure she thinks he’s the right man. On the other hand, she’s a woman. All woman. One day she’ll find the right man and off she’ll go, out of the service.
Apparently Scotty could continue his career but Palamas would be required to sit at home and knit booties. In Amok Time, Spock was intending to get married but T’Pring made it clear that he wouldn’t be required to leave Starfleet.
But if you did not free me, it would be the same. For you would be gone, and I would have your name and your property, and Stonn would still be there.
@95 It was the ’60s. Things were changing, but still, the assumption that a married woman would stop working was still pretty commonplace.
And this was originally supposed to be the exact same universe up to the point of Nero’s arrival. Unless something changed because of that then Starfleet regulations should be very much the same as should cultural norms.
of course, Pegg has now retconned that so the NuUniverse has a different history.
@97/kkozoriz: Actually I think that, ironically, Beyond fits better with the idea of a 2233 divergence than the previous two films did. The first two films had a number of inconsistencies that were hard to reconcile — the Kelvin was huge compared to Prime Starfleet ships, Earth’s cities seemed much more built up and oppressively dense than the Earth cities we saw in the TOS movies, and Pike was about a decade older than he should’ve been. So despite what the filmmakers said about the nature of the divergence, those movies actually make more sense if you assume the timeline was always subtly different, or was altered retroactively. Beyond does introduce new information about the 22nd century — the Warp 4 starship predating Enterprise, Edison fighting the Xindi — but it’s not that hard to reconcile with ENT continuity or technology designs.
So I don’t see Pegg’s retroactive-alteration model as a new retcon so much as a better explanation for what we already saw in the previous two movies. (Note, also, that the IDW comics by Mike Johnson have been assuming all along that the KT was a pre-existing parallel, even though that went against what the filmmakers asserted. I’m not sure they were ever all that firmly attached to the “only different after 2233” model.)
I don’t have the quote handy right now but Orci has said that they were the same up to the point of Nero’s arrival. I’ve always considered it to be totally separate with a Spock switching universes. As Parallels showed, there’s literally thousands of different universes. Why bother tying yourself to one in particular? There’s over 1000,000 that have an Enterprise D that’s pretty much indistinguishable from the one on TNG. How many are there were there is no Federation? No Picard? No Borg?
Pegg’s decision is a retcon of what the former writers have said. It doesn’t necessarily change anything in the previous movies but it does untie the reboot from having to follow ENT and the shared history. Which is as it should be. They rebooted because they said that the vast history of Trek was difficult to keep straight. Why tie yourself to some of it and not to the rest? A clean break is what they should have done from the start. And, of course, they can always have crossovers between the various universes if they like. If they can cross over with Green Lantern, Dr. Who and the X-Men, then crossing over with TOS, TNG or DS9 is a given.
Lots of good comments here.
I saw it Sunday with my 14 year old son who was hammered by Enterprise’s destruction the way I was watching her burn in the atmosphere in STIII. And I dearly loved the “Classical Music?” exchange of Spock and McCoy.
8.5 out of 10 for me & #4 on the all time list after Wrath, Voyage & First Contact.
@87:”Hmm… While Jaylah’s look is striking, I do find it annoying that women of color in genre films are so often hidden behind alien makeup or digital creations. Aside from Uhura, Zoe Saldana’s most notable genre roles have been a blue alien and a green alien.”
Well, she didn’t wear alien make-up/CGI in the TV re-make of ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE LOSERS, or COLOMBIANA.
As for Sophia Boutella, her most prominent role prior to BEYOND was as Gazelle in KINGSMAN, and that did not involve altering her face with makeup/CGI (her feet are a different story….).
And European actresses played two key roles in BEYOND (Kalara and Syl) while being buried under tons of face-altering makeup
And the non-European Shohreh Aghdashloo did not have her appearance altered by makeup/CGI
@87/Christopher: “Tomlinson explicitly said he was her superior officer (or at least would be until they got married, although I assume that was a joke).”
Or perhaps it means that she’s going to be transferred to a different department after marriage, because temporary relationships between junior and senior officers are okay, but more permanent ones are not.
I hope they keep the bright white. It’s one of the (few) things I liked about the new films right from the start. Especially together with the colourful uniforms.
@90/MaGnUs: “As for Jaylah’s complexion and the gold uniform/bright bridge lighting; they can say her species is not usually that pale, but she was suffering from a vitamin deficiency while in Altamid, and just darken her skin. :)”
That’s a good idea. They could also say that her people are naturally light-skinned when they’re young (because they need a lot of UV radiation to prevent rickets, e.g. because they grow very fast… does that make sense?) and get darker as adults.
I actually like Jaylah’s look just fine; it’s very distinctive. I just hope that Boutella gets more future roles in other movies that let her show her real face. The early set photos from The Mummy suggest that her face will be visible there, though there might be digital modification involved.
(And by the way, I love the TMP-homage poster featured at the top of this article, with Jaylah in Ilia’s place.)
But they don’t have to alter her look too much, just darken her skin a bit to better the contrast with her hold uniform.
@104/MaGnUs: But that would still mean she had a much lighter complexion than Boutella herself, so what would be the point? If the issue is how she looks in her uniform, the simpler fix is to change the uniform. TOS often had crewwomen in red when it would’ve made more sense to have them in another color (e.g. Marla McGivers, who as ship’s historian should probably have been in sciences blue). They weren’t above putting aesthetics over uniform logic. And every one of the Bad Robot movies has contrived to minimize the amount of time Chris Pine spends in a gold shirt. So it’d be simple enough to concoct some excuse for Jaylah to be in a different color uniform. Indeed, perhaps the next movie could redesign the uniforms altogether, maybe adopt something like the TWOK uniform style (though I was never a fan of that design).
Of course, we don’t even know if Jaylah will be back for the next film anyway.
I absolutely agree. I said the same words to someone, that this one felt like a Star Trek movie.
So, while I liked the movie, I had a bunch of questions coming out of the theatre, like:
1) If Edison/Krall has those swarm ships and a bunch of wrecked ships with working tech, why hasn’t he left the nebula and tried to get home to Earth/Federation?
2) Krall is angry at the Federation for giving him a ship, sending him out, and then he gets lost. But that’s like me getting mad at GM for me getting lost while driving around. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And someone that aggressive and unstable would never be given command of an expensive and dangerous starship.
3) Jayla is using projectors to hide the Franklin from Krall….who, it turns out, was the captain of that ship and presumably would know where it landed and presumably would notice that it disappeared after Jayla escaped. How does that make any sense?
4) With no technical knowledge, Jayla has gotten key systems working. Yet Krall who actually comes from the civilization that built the starship and has access to technology doesn’t actually try to repair his ship. Why’s that?
5) Krall has access to Starfleet records and logs, apparently in near real-time. So, why not call for rescue?
6) Krall wants access to Yorktown to kill everyone inside, so he attacks with his swarm. Uh, why not use a single ship and get “rescued” and then release his weapon of mass destruction after the Yorktown people bring him inside?
7) He’s got the scary swarm ships. Why does he need some black cloud when those ships seem so much more effective?
8) Wouldn’t random white noise be more effective than rock music at jamming the swarm ships? It might not sound as cool, but it’s more accurate. Rock music does have beats and patterns (which is why people can dance after all).
If anyone wants to explain these things, I’d appreciate it.
@105/Christopher: I hope they don’t change the uniforms! I’ve always loved those bright colours.
@107/Anthony H: To answer your questions as best I can:
1) Yorktown was on the very fringes of the Federation’s expansion. The Federation was too far to get home to before. And Krall didn’t want to get home anyway. He resented the Federation for, as he saw it, abandoning him. He wanted to tear it down. He wanted to conquer its advance base, the symbol of its unity, and turn it into the base from which he would launch his conquests.
2) Edison was stranded for over a century. That’s plenty of time for a rational man to be driven mad by circumstances. Heck, it only took Khan 15 years on Ceti Alpha V.
3) Edison/Krall wouldn’t necessarily know where the ship crashlanded. He may have ejected in an escape pod before it came down. Or maybe he just didn’t care. It was a relic of his old life, and maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of it, so he didn’t keep tabs on it.
4) Again, we don’t know if Krall knew or remembered where the ship was. Apparently, he became more enamored of the ancient alien tech that changed him. He embraced it while rejecting the trappings of the Federation he hated.
5) Again, rescue was the last thing Krall wanted. He didn’t want to go back to the Federation, he wanted to destroy it.
6) He already used the “single ship needing rescue” ploy with Kalara, and then they’d sent the Enterprise and it had disappeared. I think they would’ve been suspicious if he’d tried the same ploy again after all that. (And he couldn’t complete the weapon until he got the component from the Enterprise.)
7) Why did they use napalm in Vietnam when they had helicopters? Why did they use poison gas in WWI when they had tanks and biplanes? Military craft are delivery systems for weapons, and there are multiple different types of weapon used in war.
8) Rhythmic patterns can be disruptive in certain contexts — for instance, epileptic seizures can be triggered by rhythmic flashing lights, and are themselves the result of neuronal firings becoming too synchronized and trapped in a loop of sorts. Besides, the dramatic/stylistic reasons for choosing music over white noise are pretty self-explanatory.
My comment to my wife when I saw the Enterprise crew being herded into captivity on the planet, including several mini-skirted females: “You know, you think they’d have figured out that a miniskirt makes a poor utility uniform.”
Especially on multi-deck ships where some of the decks aren’t solid materials… so people can look up through them.
@/62 – Though I hope he’s warned them about some of the bigger, planet-killing threats like the Doomsday Machine, Nomad, V’Ger, and the Whale Probe.
I kind of hope he didn’t, actually. I thought Nimoy’s cameo in STID really undercut the character. Had Spock really been Spock, he would’ve given Quinto’s Spock the speech about “you have to do this on your own” and meant it and stuck to it. Instead, for the sake of a cheap laugh (I guess an attempt at comic relief?), they had Spock blithely telling his younger/alternate timeline self about Khan — even though the whole premise of the JJ-verse is that things don’t necessarily have to work out the same way. What the heck difference should it make to young Spock how Prime Spock and his crew defeated their Khan? Nimoy’s cameo in STID drove me crazy, and still does. They should have left well enough alone.
Which is why — flame me not! — I really wish they hadn’t felt the need to kill off Prime Spock in Beyond because Leonard Nimoy had died. On the one hand, I appreciate the sentiment, and the moment with the photo was such a lovely one, not only in tribute to Nimoy, but as a 50th anniversary “kiss” to the whole franchise… but I was much happier knowing Prime Spock was off helping establish New Vulcan. And, again, since the JJverse tries to have it both ways (and more or less cleverly succeeds), I don’t think Spock would necessarily have to be any more grieved by Prime Spock’s death than anyone is grieved by the death of any loved one. It seemed like Quinto’s Spock was more upset over the idea that an alternate version of himself had died than that his friend and mentor had died. I dunno, it was a nice attempt, but didn’t quite hit home for me (though I had to forcibly fight down choking tears when I saw the whole original cast up on there on screen. I haven’t gotten that choked up by a Trek film since the 1701-A was revealed at the end of Star Trek IV, 30 years ago.)
Does it strike anyone else as strange that they’d christen the new ship Enterprise, 1701-A? Is Enterprise with that regsitry number such a storied and legendary name in the Kelvin timeline like it was in the Prime timeline? The JJverse 1701 was only in service, what, a little over three years? (It was brand new in the 09 film.) The “A” suffix didn’t feel earned in Beyond. I would have, frankly, been just as happy had Starfleet refit and upgraded the Franklin and given that to our heroes. When their Enterprise 1701 was destroyed at the film’s beginning, I felt nothing beyond excitement at the action — not because I disliked the design (I really like the JJverse Enterprise, actually), but because, as I think Beyond itself does an admirable job of showing, Star Trek hasn’t ever really been about the ship, but about the people aboard it.
For the record, I really enjoyed this film – I agree with all who said it was the best Trek film since First Contact, and it certainly is more of a Trek film than either the 09 movie (which I liked and still like) or Into Darkness (which I like less every time I think about it).
Yeah, they still have miniskirt uniforms – but at least Uhura (maybe others) had long sleeves this time, like the TOS uniforms, so they were overall less revealing.
And I thought I saw one female crewmember in pants. I guess I am wrong because, with all the attention to Starfleet couture in this discussion, surely someone would’ve mentioned it… but I guess no?
@110/Jeff Shultz: The TOS uniforms were less miniskirts than mini-culottes — there were high-cut trunks or briefs built into the skirts, so that it wasn’t like the underwear would be visible. So they were basically like the outfits worn by female tennis players today, or like Supergirl’s outfit on TV — trunks under skirts, rather than just underwear. I’m not sure if that’s the case with the Kelvinverse uniforms, though.
@111/Mike: I’m not saying that Spock Prime should’ve told them everything. But when it comes to threats that exterminated billions of people and had the potential to wipe out the Federation, it seems like there really should be an exception made. This timeline already lost Vulcan; no reason it needs to lose Maluria and other whole planets with billions of inhabitants.
As for the Enterprise, it was, fittingly, 5 years old when it was destroyed. The first film was primarily in 2258, when Kirk was 25, and this was 2263, ending on his 30th birthday. Was it storied after just 5 years? Well, it was the ship that saved the Earth from Nero, which is a pretty good start.
I never liked Yelchin as Chekov in the first two films (I was actively rooting for him to find an open airlock in ST, and simply wanted him to go away in STID), but I rather liked him here. Kirk wasn’t the only one who grew up, apparently.
Still think Urban as McCoy is the best fit, though, with Sylar as Spock being a close second. Their interactions just made ’em even better. The rest of ’em have grown into their roles, though, and I’m genuinely sorry we won’t see more of Yelchin’s Chekov now.
I loved all the references to TOS and the TOS movies – the vodka, the shirt being ripped, Kirk’s birthday, still having their hair and eyes, given Shatner and the reading glasses the last time we saw Bones giving Kirk a birthday gift, the “episodic” nature, the references to possible fates of the Franklin.
Captain to Vice-Admiral is at least as ludicrous a jump as Cadet to Captain (especially with the go-between apparently being a mere Commodore; I figured her for at least an Admiral, and actually thought she was the High Admiral or Admiral of the Fleets or whatever Starfleet calls its Grand High Muckymuck. I just don’t see a mere Commodore telling somebody that he’s been promoted to VA… or even just to Commodore.) But I was willing to ignore that (at least until finding out she’s a Commodore, that’s just *bugging* me!)
When I first saw the swarm ship mega-ship, I actually thought it was the new version of the planet eater at first.
LOVED the Yorktown. Holy crap, that was gorgeous.
I was annoyed at Kirk’s talking about “my dad” having a bike when he was a kid. It would’ve been his stepdad, and Kirk clearly didn’t have enough fond memories of him to refer to him as “dad”. Also, I was waiting for him to meet Greg Gunberg and realize that his stepdad was in operational command of what was basically Starfleet HQ. Or for Gunberg to make a crack about not taking orders from his stepson. Or SOMETHING. A comment about forgiving him for destroying his car if he can save his station, maybe.
Jeylah was a hoot, especially all her references to her “home”.
IMHO, this is by far the best of the new Treks. And I totally plan on seeing it again. I got run off the road on my bicycle on the way to see it… and if I was given a choice between avoiding all that pain and not seeing the movie, or suffering all the damage I (and my bike, and my phone) received and seeing the movie, I’d totally go see it. It was just THAT good. Totally worth crashing.
Yes, there were weak spots (the ensign being just plain forgotten, why Edison would just leave the Franklin like that, what the hell is a Commodore doing telling a Captain of his promotion to Vice-Admiral (seriously, WTF?), how rap could make all those ships just explode – I could understand if they were Martians and they were playing Slim Whitman’s Indian Love Call, but what? Degrade their performance, especially if the majority of them are computer-controlled, but just insta-boom? What?) but it was still overall a great movie.
@114/LrdSlvrhnd: Maybe it was George Kirk’s motorcycle and Kirk knew about it from his mother. After all, I assume it wasn’t with them on the Kelvin, so it would’ve still been there at the Kirk home even after George died, so Winona could’ve shown it to Jim and told him what it had meant to his father.
And Grunberg’s role in the ’09 film was strictly a voiceover. He’s now joined the long list of Trek actors to play more than one character in the franchise. In fact, his character is identified in the script as Commander Finnegan! So he may be the counterpart of the guy who bullied Kirk Prime at the Academy (although they probably never met in this reality, since Kelvin-Kirk entered the Academy five years later).
And Jaylah referred to the Franklin as “my house,” to be precise. I liked that too. At first, when she said she learned English from her house, I assumed she meant something like a Klingon House, a family group that had passed on the knowledge. I guess she actually meant the Franklin‘s computers and logs.
Sorry about your bicycle crash. I had a minor one myself last month, but nowhere near that bad.
111. MikePoteet – is why — flame me not! — I really wish they hadn’t felt the need to kill off Prime Spock in Beyond because Leonard Nimoy had died. On the one hand, I appreciate the sentiment, and the moment with the photo was such a lovely one, not only in tribute to Nimoy, but as a 50th anniversary “kiss” to the whole franchise… but I was much happier knowing Prime Spock was off helping establish New Vulcan.
For the same reason that Abrams decided to set this in a new universe but destroy Romulus on the way out the door. Can’t have Spock actually accomplish anything he sets out to do. Reunification was a great way for Spock to live out his days but Abrams not only had to stop him from working towards that by tossing him into another universe, he had to make sure that Romulus and the Romulans would be gone if he ever got back. That’s one thing I’m hoping that they ignore if Star Trek Discovery ever does an arc set in that time period.
It’s also interesting to note that it’s oldSpock that is the only person in Into Darkness that refers to Khan as Khan Noonian Singh. nuSPock asks if he’s heard of someone named Khan and OldSpock just assumes that it MUST be the same person. Yeah, there’s nobody else named Khan in the universe. Weak and it just adds to the small universe feeling that Trek does all too often.
@113/Christopher: Tennis skirts are a good comparison! When I was a kid, my mother started playing tennis, and her outfit looked like a Star Trek uniform to me. I was very envious.
@116/kkozoriz: “Reunification was a great way for Spock to live out his days but Abrams not only had to stop him from working towards that by tossing him into another universe, he had to make sure that Romulus and the Romulans would be gone if he ever got back.”
I fully agree about Reunification – that was a beautiful story, and they should have left Spock and the Romulans alone after that. But Abrams is not the only one who ruined it. Nemesis had already brought about the Romulans’ downfall and jeopardised Spock’s mission when he came along, and they never even gave a thought to Spock. At least Abrams gave him a new task.
@/113 – Yeah, the thought about saving the world from Nero occurred to me too about a half-hour after I posted. I guess I gotta give ’em that. And there was the pre-5-year-mission mission, apparently (between 09 and STID), and I guess all kinds of great stuff could’ve happened (including Kirk not losing a single member of the crew). So, I guess a 1701-A might be justified in that universe/timeline. Still, from a real world perspective, it kinda bugged me, as much as I enjoyed the movie overall. It felt like they thought it was a box they had to check, and they really didn’t.
Eh. Trying not to turn into Grumpy Old Fan. :) I really did enjoy the film.
@113/Christopher – But when it comes to threats that exterminated billions of people and had the potential to wipe out the Federation, it seems like there really should be an exception made.
But that assumes things must work out in the Kelvin timeline the way they did in Prime, and Quinto Spock explicitly tells us in ST09 that such an assumption is illogical! All bets are off! Supposedly. Maybe the whale probe shows up to bring Earth new whales in the Kelvin timeline. Maybe V’Ger invites some humans to hook up with it and transcend the cosmos. Maybe the doomsday machine got disabled by a superior race at some point after Nero broke through – why should it be lurking in the end credits of Beyond at all?
I like Beyond because it is the first film in the JJverse to fully commit to the JJverse’s premise. While it feels familiar and Trek-y in a good way, it’s a new story, with new characters, new events.
I guess I could see Spock saying, “Well, in my timeline, I stopped Khan this way,” but that should have been (and, maybe, it was, off-camera), followed up with a caveat about, “But I’m not saying it’s going to go that way for you.”
Eh. The whole Nimoy cameo in STID just drives me crazy every time I think about it. In my head canon it never happened. ;)
@114 – Captain to Vice-Admiral is at least as ludicrous a jump as Cadet to Captain. Yes. I think the rank structure just must be more loosey-goosey in the Kelvin timeline. Don’t know why, but it seems so. ;)
@119/Mike: Sure, maybe things happened differently, but that doesn’t guarantee they will. It’s just prudent to keep an eye out for threats of that magnitude. I’ll never understand the argument that it’s somehow wrong to guard against potential hazards just because there’s no guarantee that they’ll happen. I mean, we all pay for insurance, don’t we? That’s not because we know we’ll need it, it’s because we’re smart enough to prepare for the possibility just in case.
Just giving Starfleet a heads-up that these threats might be out there and should be watched out for (and that they can be dealt with in such-and-such a way if they are encountered) is not assuming that things have to happen in the exact same way. It’s just being aware of the potential risk.
And please don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m including anything like the Spock Prime scene in STID. A threat on the level of Khan is too minor to justify Spock Prime making an exception to the Temporal Prime Directive. That scene was self-indulgent and unnecessary to the film. I’m talking specifically about threats with the potential to create planetary-level extinction events — Nomad, the Doomsday Machine, V’Ger. Watching out for such threats is as prudent as NASA’s efforts to watch out for asteroids that could hit the Earth and cause a mass extinction.
“I like Beyond because it is the first film in the JJverse to fully commit to the JJverse’s premise. While it feels familiar and Trek-y in a good way, it’s a new story, with new characters, new events.”
And that’s what the second film should’ve been, but unfortunately Damon Lindelof insisted on bringing Khan into it and rehashing elements from TWOK. Ideally, the series should’ve done a couple of films like Beyond, new stories that let the new timeline stand on its own, before doing something so dependent on familiar Prime continuity again.
Although, really, STID and STB have very similar plot structures — there’s a sneak attack by an enemy who turns out to be a figure from previously established Trek-universe history, and the core philosophical conflict is between warmongers and those who fight to keep the peace. The difference is that STB adds something new to what we knew of Trek history — we get the familiar trappings of the ENT era, but it’s a part of that era we haven’t seen before, so it feels new rather than imitative.
117. JanaJansen – fully agree about Reunification – that was a beautiful story, and they should have left Spock and the Romulans alone after that. But Abrams is not the only one who ruined it. Nemesis had already brought about the Romulans’ downfall and jeopardised Spock’s mission when he came along, and they never even gave a thought to Spock. At least Abrams gave him a new task.
As annoying as NEM was I don’t see it as bringing about the downfall of the Romulans (novels to the contrary). For certain there’d be a period of political upheaval in the aftermath but that could work towards the goal of reunification. But, as ST09 makes clear, the Romulans, at least the vast, vast majority of them, are gone. (Nero’s comment about being the last of the Romulans. No, it doesn’t make sense any more than the 10,000 surviving Vulcans does but that’s what er’ve got to work with.) Instead we get an elderly Spock living his last days with the remnants of the Vulcan people. Their influence diminished as they desperately attempt to save what’s left of their race.
The way I see it, Abrams killed off Romulas so that oldSpock wouldn’t have a reason to try and get home. Since his job there is now impossible to complete, he jst grafts on a new one in the nu-universe.
Hopefully in the fourth movie they’ll find a protagonist that isn’t motivated by the need for revenge but I’m not holding my breath. They’ve settled into a rut already where the bad guy is defeated by a one on one fight, preferably using fists.
@122/kkozoriz: “Hopefully in the fourth movie they’ll find a protagonist that isn’t motivated by the need for revenge”
As a rule, I don’t like bad guys who are out for revenge because I don’t find them believable. It seems to happen much more in fiction than in real life. In real life, people who are smart, ruthless and powerful usually crave more power instead of concentrating on revenge. It gets more annoying when the person they try to take revenge on didn’t even harm them in the first place.
That said, I think Star Trek Beyond did okay. First of all, Krall doesn’t want to take revenge on a single person, e.g. Kirk or Spock, he’s pissed at the entire Federation. That’s an improvement over Khan or Nero. Second, it isn’t only revenge he’s after – he wants to conquer Yorktown and start a war because he detests the new times with their peacefulness and stuff. That’s an okay motive for a villain. So it’s a tiresome trope, but they made the most of it. Maybe they can move on now?
Quoth kkoroziz: “They’ve settled into a rut already where the bad guy is defeated by a one on one fight, preferably using fists.”
They “settled” into that rut in 1982. Wrath of Khan didn’t involve fists, but it was a fight, and certainly The Search for Spock‘s climax was Kirk wailing on Kruge. In fact, that proclivity (also seen in all the TNG films) is why I insist that Star Trek isn’t meant for movies, something I’ve felt since 1979 and none of the dozen movies released since then have changed my mind in the slightest.
But that phenomenon is not even remotely new to the Bad Robot films.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
124. krad – But at least the previous films tried to do something out of the ordinary. After all, you can’t go mano a mano with V’Ger or the Whale Probe. Even Sybok, who was porrayed and the bad guy througout TFF emded up being something other than the one that had to be defeated.
Yes, if your antagonist is a person then it’s quite likely that it’ll involve combat to defeat them. Three movies with three protagonists out for revenge and three physical fights doesn’t make me feel that they wanted a reboot because they felt constrained by what came before. It’s because they wanted to make popcorn summertime movies where such things as solving a problem without using your fists is out of place.
Agreed about Trek working better on TV, nuKirk’s snarky “episodic” comment aside
123. JanaJansen – it’s a tiresome trope, but they made the most of it. Maybe they can move on now?
That’s what I was hoping for with Into darkness. And then Beyond. Just how much revenge do they have to get out of their system? Science fiction should be about something new and different. The War of the Worlds (original, not the wretched Tom Cruise remake) and The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet should be closer in tone to what a Trek movie is than The Fast and the Furious or Transformers.
@124/krad: For that matter, I’d say they “settled” into it as early as the second pilot, where the godlike superhuman was weakened by the other godlike superhuman just enough for Kirk to win by beating him up and dropping a rock on his head. A lot of TOS episodes were resolved with personal combat of one sort or another — in the first season alone, and counting episodes with fights in the climax rather than earlier, we have “Court Martial,” “The Squire of Gothos” to an extent, “Arena,” “The Alternative Factor,” “Space Seed,” and “This Side of Paradise” to an extent. And it happened even more often in seasons 2 & 3. TOS was never as rarefied and intellectual as we like to imagine.
126. ChristopherLBennett – The point is that while there was a percentage of TOSm TBGm and the rest that followed that, with the reboot it’s 100%. 100% bad guy seeking revenge. 100% “Let’s end it with a fist fight”. I thought the idea of a reboot was to wipe off the barnacles of what’s been done to death and get back to the core of what made it great. And in the case of Star Trek, it wasn’t about beating up the bad guys. Sure, it happened, more than it should have. A clean slate should be about correcting what went wrong in a franchise, making it fresh and new again instead of doing the same things over and over.
Errand of Mercy didn’t end with Kirk and Kor in a fist fight. City on the Edge of Forever didn’t end with Kirk beating Edith to death to save the timeline. Cyrano Jones wasn’t beaten into submission for bringing tribbles to K-7.
Three movies into the reboot and already there’s a certain sameness about them.
Loved the movie. McCoy & Scotty have always been ‘my lads’. My poor Enterprise, though. I’ve already pre-ordered the DVD from Amazon.ca & will no doubt go see it in the theatre again. Waiting impatiently for the next movie.
Is it possible that someone in the writers’ room thought that commodore outranks admiral? If you grant that error, all the rank confusion falls into place. I’m not a student of naval history like many Trek fans, and commodores were pretty rare in the TV series, whereas admirals popped up all over the place, so if you’d asked me before reading this thread, I would probably have guessed that commodore was the higher rank. Of course, I’m not a well-paid screenwriter for a series with 50 years of tradition. If I were, I probably would’ve taken 30 seconds to check Memory Alpha.
@127/kkozoriz: As Keith said, it was TWOK that established the template of revenge-driven villains and violence-based climaxes. Other revenge-driven villains include Ru’afo and Shinzon, and TSFS and FC have the hero being the one driven to destroy the villain out of revenge. And most of the Prime movies end with personal or starship combat. People keep blaming Bad Robot for things that are deficiencies of Trek movies in general, and the fault for that ultimately goes back to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, because ever since the late ’70s, Hollywood has assumed that their films defined what science fiction blockbusters had to be like, and so Star Trek movies have been consistently pushed to be like that as well. It’s naive to believe that’s unique to the post-2009 films. I’ve heard people complaining about Star Trek movies being too much like Star Wars since the ’80s. Heck, I’ve been one of those people.
Indeed, it’s not really attributable to Lucas or Spielberg or Meyer any more than it is to Abrams. It’s just Hollywood. Movie studio execs are not very flexible. They like movies to conform to certain known, familiar formulas. And revenge plots are one of the most standard action-movie formulas, whether it’s a villain seeking revenge on the hero or the system, or the hero seeking revenge on the villain. This is why so many superhero origin movies get forced into the revenge formula, e.g. Tim Burton’s Batman making the Joker the killer of Bruce’s parents, or Spider-Man 3 retconning the Sandman into the real killer of Uncle Ben so that they could reopen a revenge plot they’d already resolved two movies earlier. People keep blaming Abrams for things that are the fault of the movie industry’s culture and conventions in general.
I enjoyed visual storytelling in this movie. For example, the number of times Enterprise was shown as a wee tiny thing in space, almost a fly buzzing around.
Space is big.
You are small.
Actually, we met more commodores on the original series — Stone, Mendez, Decker — than we did admirals — just Kommack and the other one played by the same actor.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@130/ChristopherLBennett – I’m not saying that Abrams invented the revenge motive, just that he’s embraced it. Not once, not twice but three times. He’s the producer. He may not have written them but he’s the one in charge.
Part of the problem is that the moves that are post TOS look at TWOK and see it as a template for what a Trek movie should be. And yet the TOS movies gave us an antagonist that wasn’t even human or alen, a revenge plot where they did’ meet face to face, a straight forward adventure flick about sacrifice and friendship, a comedy, a failed attempt at a philosophical epic and one that was a political thriller. Yet TWOK is held up as the best way to do a Trek flick and we simply get retreads that don’t measure up to the original.
Been there, done that. Let’s see something new. And when we get something that’s supposed to be fresh, we get more of the same. And they feel the need to tie them to what’s gone before, at least for the first two. I wouldn’t have been surprised with another Nimoy cameo if he hadn’t died.
I’m hoping that Discovery is more of what I’m looking for, utilizing the setting without being a slave to it.
To me, ST:Beyond felt as though it could have been the first episode of TOS season 4 (minus the reference to the Prime Universe Spock). Pegg and Jung’s depiction of the characters felt very familiar and natural, completely in line with their TOS depictions. The Spock/Uhura relationship is a bit of an outlier there, but as Keith has pointed out a number of times in the course of the TOS rewatch, there really was a flirtation going back as far as “Charlie X.”
Looking back at ST:2009 and ST:ID in light of this movie, I kind of find myself wishing that was the approach they’d taken with these movies. Set in the original universe, depicting previously untold stories of the original five-year mission. Because so much of what doesn’t sit well with me regarding first two movies is because of the need to start with the characters from square one, reimagine them and re-tell their backstories. Trying to overstuff years worth of character development into 2 movies resulted in a feeling of over-amped, overwrought drama. This one felt a lot more natural to me.
Better than the last two movies (they both had moments) but still not entirely satisfying.
Would modern directors please learn to pick a camera location and lock it down, rather than swooping all over? And if you’re going to design a complex alien facility, don’t murktone it — turn up the lights so we can see where we are. And clouds make poor adversaries (evil space cloud Galactus, evil space cloud Parallax, evil cloud of thousands of tiny spacecraft).
Nobody’s made this comparison yet: So, you want to confuse and destroy millions of enemy ships with music — Where’s Lynn Minmei when you need her?
Starbase Yorktown: Cinematic “rule of cool” triumphs over engineering conservatism. IMHO, no human architect would design something that puts so many buildings overhead, and at skewed angles. (With classic toroidal and cylindrical space colonies you have a similar oddness, but it’s unavoidable with centrifugal gravity.) I suppose it was a non-human architect, and all the human psychologists were overruled? :) Those egress tubes from the shell to core, with windows (and water, apparently held in place with forcefields): starships are full of antimatter — you don’t want to make difficult for them to exit in a hurry.
Even if you’re a revenge-focused 150-year-old maniac who’s mutated after life-draining a succession of aliens, how do you go from “Balthazar Edison” to “Krall”? Why not pick a villain-name like “Thazar” or “Zarrad”?
How to assemble a coherent timeline from ST:ENT, Capt. Edison/Krall’s comments re: the Xindi and Romulan wars, and the technology of the U.S.S. Franklin, NX-326: The Franklin is built as Earth’s first warp-4 starship. Years later, the Enterprise is built as Earth’s first warp-5 starship, hull numbering is restarted at zero, and has MACOs posted aboard. The Franklin is progressively upgraded, including its transporter (and possibly engines), and serves in the Romulan War. The Federation is established with a new Starfleet, the MACOs branch is discontinued, and Edison is assigned as the Franklin’s captain. It vanishes during an exploratory mission (a not uncommon plot contrivance, ever since TOS).
If they’re going to tap ST:ENT for history, it would’ve been nice (i.e., gratifyingly consistent) if they’d used the distinctive GUIs established during that show. (We see TV-style uniforms in the grainy green log footage, so we know the Prime timeline is at least partially intact in that century.)
Alien crewmembers: If you’re going to put them onscreen, is it too much to ask that we see at least one reused species from one movie to the next? (Okay, at least two: we had Keenser.) Instead of Andorians, Tellarites or Denobulans, we get slightly-green lady and crab-leg-head-lady and (in the concluding party) chambered-nautilus-head-lady. (But we’ve been getting one-off alien makeups since ST:TMP, so this isn’t a new complaint.)
@135/phillip_thorne: Actually the footage showed a new uniform design that was similar to the ENT uniforms but distinct — it’s the same uniform that Spock changes into after his surgery. Presumably it’s the movie’s interpretation of the first UFP Starfleet uniform — which is different from the one I posited for my Rise of the Federation novels, but with enough points of commonality that I can assume they’re just two different variants in use at the same time, like the TNG and DS9 uniforms.
And the Franklin‘s transporter wasn’t upgraded, because Scotty said it was only rated for cargo, not human transport. That’s a bit incongruous considering that the ship was lost nearly a decade after ENT ended, and they were using the transporter routinely by seasons 3-4. However, this fits pretty nicely with my ROTF novels, because I’ve posited that extensive transporter use was found to cause cumulative damage and thus was discontinued except for emergencies, at least until the system could be redesigned and made safer. (I’d read that the creators of the show hadn’t wanted to include the transporter but had been pressured into it by the network, so I wanted to come closer to their original intentions.)
As for the GUIs being different, again, the ship was lost some nine years after ENT’s 4th season, which is plenty of time for a software upgrade. Does your computer GUI look the same as it did in 2007?
Reading the TOS rewatch again, I was pursuing the entry for the early episode “Corbomite Maneuver” and saw the comment from ChristopherLBennett regarding female yeomen: #19: It wasn’t new to the characters, but it was new to the audience.
This is the real significance of Sulu walking off, arm in arm with his spouse and daughter. From Spock we already know that any two somatic cells can be made into a viable child. No biggie for two men if two utterly alien species can be done. No, the important thing of Sulu being show this way is for the story telling.
Just remember how they had to show the Kirk/Uhura kiss as being forced. “It wasn’t new to the characters, but it was new to the audience.” But we still know the moment that something important changed.
In the long run, this will be the same. I just hope that the movie is remembered for a wee bit more than that.
Yes! And it takes a lot of work to keep it that way! If I could I’ have mine back the way it looked in 1996 too, that was peak user friendliness as far as I am concerned.
This rant has nothing to do with Star Trek btw, it is just my weekly rant against a constantly changing universe. Mutter mutter mutter.
One thing I found amusing: We never heard the end of McCoy’s “I’m a doctor, not a …”. It sounded like he said “Fu” just before being beamed out. I’m inclined to think that that was the start of an adjective, rather than an occupation.
@139/richf: I also think — if I heard the line correctly — that it’s the first time McCoy has actually canonically uttered the memetic version “Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a…”. Everyone insists on quoting it that way and putting it on t-shirts, but until now, it’s been as imaginary as “Elementary, my dear Watson.” After all, they weren’t allowed to say “damn it” on ’60s TV. The only “Damn it, Jim” that Kelley’s McCoy ever actually uttered anywhere in canon was in the TWOK birthday scene: “Damn it, Jim, what the hell’s the matter with you?” (Which makes me wonder how it ever came to be considered McCoy’s stock phrase.) The previous two movies have both had Urban’s McCoy say “Damn it, man, I’m a doctor…” directed at Spock, but this is the first time he’s said it to Kirk in this continuity.
Good catch, Christopher! Now, if Pine’s Kirk will say “Beam me up, Scotty” in Star Trek 4, we can check that box, too! :)
@141/Mike: Kirk did say “Beam us up, Scotty” in two animated episodes and “Scotty, beam me up” in The Voyage Home. And TOS had such things as “Have Scotty beam us up,” “Mr. Scott, beam us up,” and “Scotty, beam us up fast.” I think people get too fixated on the exact wording with that one. Canonically, TOS (encompassing TAS and the movies) used “beam us up” seven times as often as “beam me up” (21 times vs. 3 times).
@138 – random22: So does mine, it’s hard to keep it that way. :)
Oh god.
This review has left me emotionally compromised.
CassR: How so?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There are way too many posts here. Although that makes me happy, because that means there are many Trek fans!
Anyway…my quick thoughts:
I saw this Saturday evening with some friends. I’m honestly not a big movie-goer these days(…so expensive!!) and I won’t make much of an effort to see a movie unless I *really* want to. I’ve not seen a movie for three months before this, but this is Star Trek!!! …I made sure to round up some of my friends and make them come with me, because I was not missing it!! And I was impressed. Need to let it settle a bit, I suppose, but I’m thinking this is my favorite of the “modern three” Trek films we have. The first one(while much enjoyed) was an origin movie, the second one(while also enjoyed!) was a Wrath of Khan rehash…but Star Trek Beyond…we finally get a fairly original movie. And it’s fun. Just a good old-fashioned space adventure movie – just what I wanted. Honestly, it felt almost like an episode from the TV show, except longer. And with much better graphics. Plot wasn’t overly dramatic(Vulcan is destroyed!! Khaaaaaaaaaan!!) and remarkably free of silliness and plot holes…and it just felt like a good story. Which is all I wanted. The actors are in their third movie now, so the chemistry is pretty good and they seem comfortable in their roles. Urban is always my favorite and he did not disappoint. The rest of the actors are suitably good(even if I will forever be biased in favor of the original cast…) and I was impressed with Pegg’s story. I wasn’t sure how well he would do with this, and while not perfect…this is my favorite new Star Trek movie yet. (Only negatives in my mind? Some of the action is a bit fast and all over the place…not my style, I suppose, although it seems rather in vogue of late, so suppose I’m in the minority).
Plot? Fairly simple(FINALLY). Enterprise is in the middle of their five year mission of deep space exploration…comes in for some R&R to a (simply gorgeous!) space station…gets a distress call from a mysterious nebula, has to go investigate…adventure commences!! I enjoyed the whole thing, especially some of the callbacks to old Star Trek.
One of my favorite parts that I’ve seen no one else mention yet(please someone else tell me you enjoyed this as much as I did!!)…Kirk is fighting Krall on the Enterprise – it’s a classic old school fist fight with Kirk getting thrown against the walls, etc…and as the fight continues, the classic Star Trek TV show “battle music/fist-fight music/ridiculously cheesy 60’s music” plays. I was dumbfounded at first, couldn’t believe it. But a grin was on my face as I thought to myself…”This is Star Trek!!” So happy Pegg/Lin put that in. There were some other great callbacks to the original show/movies, but none of them felt overly forced or like they were drawing too much attention to themselves…
Just know that I really liked this movie. And will be buying it for my collection…at some point. Thanks so much for your review, Keith – finally got the chance to read it yesterday since I’ve now seen the movie. I agree on pretty much all points…I might even give it a 7.5. Thanks for all your thoughtful comments…really appreciated.
@142/Christopher – I stand corrected. I still haven’t watched TAS all the way through (I know, I know — reduced two steps in rank). I had long thought the line in STIV was the closest he’d ever come to saying. Darn! I even said so in print once — thankfully, the audience was not composed of Trekkies! Now you’ve gone and deprived me of one of my favorite trivia questions – you know, things “everyone knows” a character said that they never did (“Play it again, Sam” — “Elementary, my dear Watson” — phrases that come close but are not exactly how “everyone knows” they are).
Speaking of the music, as @146 was above: Is it just me, or does Giacchino, with this score, reference not only Courage’s fanfare and theme, but also Goldsmith’s four-note “ship in danger” motif from Trek V and First Contact? I don’t have my CD in front of me at the moment, but it comes at the end of one of the action cues, I’m fairly sure. Any of the more musicalogically minded of you know?
@147, Don’t feel bad. I just watched TAS and Enterprise for the first time this year. Just in time for Beyond.
72. MeredithP – I’ve interacted with Christopher on other boards. No assumptopn on my part.
74. ChristopherLBennett – That’s my beef about Sulu’s husband. We learned less about him than we did about Kirk’s dead brother in Operation: Annihilate. We can’t even call him anything other than Sulu’s husband because he doesn’t even have a name. It’s like he was put in there so TPTB could say “See, there’s gay people in Trek. So stop asking for them.”
it is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 – </Spock>
@149/kkozoriz – I’ve interacted with him in person on multiple occasions, but I wouldn’t presume to know his orientation without being told directly. *shrugs*
I think we’ve pretty well established here, though, that different people, of various orientations, will view this portrayal in different ways. Here and across the web, I have seen examples of queer people who liked it, queer people who didn’t like it, straight people who liked it, and straight people who didn’t like it. You didn’t like the portrayal, kkozoriz, and I did. I don’t think there’s any need to keep bashing this stick into the horse, is there? It’s long dead.
150. MeredithP – It came up on another board. It’s not like I asked him straight (pun intended) out (pun also intended.).
Heavens to betsey. People think differently about something in the movie. Let’s stop talking about it then. New rule, we can only discuss things that everyone agrees on.
Sheesh.
Things seem to be getting a little heated, so in the interest of keeping the conversation civil, now might be a good time to agree to disagree and move on to other topics…
Finally saw it today (in a theatre full of people who insisted on chatting ALL THROUGH THE DAMN MOVIE). Other than the unwanted commentary, I loved it.
@135. Thank you. I thought I was the only one who hated Yorktown. The power requirements to run all those competing antigrav generators and forcefields must be ridiculous.
In fact, the design for all of these movies has been a consistent problem for me, with the overly-complex everything and the needlessly shiny floors –there’s a reason Prime-verse Starfleet ships all have traction carpet (as Kirk & Chekov demonstrated when they were slip-sliding through the saucer fleeing Kalara).
Hell, the Franklin‘s bridge was clearly designed as a movie set first (lots of open space and high ceilings for a camera/lighting/sound crew to move around) rather than a practical workspace. At least it wasn’t as cluttered and overdesigned as the Enterprise bridge.
And yes, I miss being able to recognize familiar aliens. Though I did see on familiar-ish face; I’m pretty sure a member of this guy‘s species (just with bigger ears) was visible among the survivors when Krall threatened Sulu.
@136. As soon as I saw that coloured seam/piping on the uniform chests, I thought of your design. :)
Personally, I am glad we got new aliens. “New life forms” being part of the charter and all. :)
@153. I too hate Yorktown base, for many reasons, but I can kinda make it work. Yes it requires fantastical amounts of power and is stupidly complicated in its use of materials, but humanity is just getting to grips on having unlimited amounts of energy produced from antimatter reactors and is reaping the benefits of brand new materials and processes like never before. The architects were showing off. You give an architect a blank cheque and a pile of new materials and they will go bizarre just to prove that they can do it. That is probably pretty much what has happened, presumably once things settle down and architects and designers get used to all this brand new bounty then they’ll start taking a turn for the practical once the novelty has worn off. It is kinda like how the Victorians went crazy with the decoration on public works and buildings once they had the chance but eventually things died down to become more utilitarian boxes.
I don’t think you’d really need a lot of different, conflicting gravity generators to create Yorktown’s outward-gravity effect. All you’d really need is a single antigravity generator at the center. After all, a normal gravity source would pull things in toward a central point from all directions, the way a planet or star does (as opposed to the “flat” unidirectional pull that’s usually portrayed in sci-fi). So an equivalent antigravity source would push everything outward from that central point.
Of course, this doesn’t fit what we saw in the movie, where there was an air circulation unit at the geometric center and a spiraling “gravitational current” around it. But maybe they were using a number of generators to create the equivalent field shape. A spherical gravitational field, inward or outward, isn’t really more complicated than a linear one; it’s actually quite natural for a gravitational field to be omnidirectional and focused on a single central point. What’s bizarre and unnatural is the usual sci-fi conceit of a gravity “plate” that only pulls “downward” in one direction, rather than pulling up on things underneath it or pulling sideways on things alongside it. That’s just not the way gravity sources work in nature, so it would require one hell of a bizarre and convoluted distortion of normal gravitational effects to make it work that way. (Not to mention the ubiquitous sci-fi stupidity of artificial gravity that somehow stops being felt at the hull of the ship, so that you can be standing on top of the ship’s hull and be weightless even though the ship’s gravity plating is still directly underneath you and you’d feel full Earth gravity if you were just a few meters further down.)
My thoughts, posted elsewhere, copied here to avoid having to retype it all:
Dumb fun, a bit too much sound and fury, which I suppose one should expect from Justin Lin. Not enough backstory for the Bad Guy to make him interesting or believable. Getting a bit tired of seeing ships built for space traversing atmospheres and surviving downhill toboggan runs (and where’s all that antimatter going, anyway?)
Chris Pine continues to be pretty good as Kirk, and the folks playing Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura do decent jobs with what they have. By far the best of the lot, and the team that keep the film watchable, are Simon Pegg as Scotty and Sofia Boutella as Jaylah; they have the best — and most authentically funny when they’re meant to be — lines in the film, and have a real warmth to them that charms. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, given that Pegg wrote the script. Idris Elba is sadly wasted as the requisite villain, Krall.
And, oddly enough, the duo about whom the critics seem the most impressed, Spock (Zachary Quinto) and McCoy (Karl Urban), are the weak spot in the Federation team. Their interaction simply does not have the honesty and depth of Nimoy and Kelley; Quinto lacks any sense of gravitas, and Urban, who finally gets a chance to do McCoy as a major element of the current franchise, is apparently channelling Dan Ackroyd in a Star Trek sketch on Saturday Night Live.
But, hey, it’s a harmless enough way to spend a couple of hours. To be honest, though, it would be more entertaining to queue up ‘The Doomsday Machine’ and ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ and remember what made Star Trek worth watching.
So I think I get the time travel allowances. I think I see how bio-mechanical/physical swarm-intelligence can serve as an interesting “variable” for story telling. What I can’t seem to coordinate is how Spock can see the future on heady issues such as when and how he will eventually die as long as he doesn’t kill his father :) but can”t seem to tie his shoe without help and lots of struggle. Why isn’t this character more “Yoda” like and less “fallible”? Half human should inform… but if you can see the future… it cannot be (logically) as limiting.
“In the mainline timeline, when a new Enterprise was constructed after the original was destroyed, it was also designated NCC-1701-A.”
@krad and #11 CL Bennett (and any other authors participating): I’m curious how, in a novel, you would go about explaining that the Enterprise has been destroyed and replaced by the NCC-1701-A TWICE? (Would you choose a timeline, or try to put the two together somehow?)
All in all, though, I agree with Keith that this is the best film since “First Contact.” The cast is finding the balance between reminding the audience of the original performers while making the roles their own.
There haven’t been two Enterprise A in any continuity; there was one in the Prime continuity, and one in the Kelvin Timeline.
@159/MaGnUs: That’s what Don S. meant, I believe — what are the odds that it would happen the same way in two independent timelines?
But then, you could ask that about all sorts of things in alternate-timeline stories. What are the odds that the same seven people would end up in the same jobs on the same ship in the Prime Universe, the Mirror Universe, the Kelvin Timeline, and others? There’s always a degree of implausible coincidence in parallel-timeline stories. There was even a handwave about it in the 2009 movie, Spock Prime saying something about how the laws of probability were pushing the altered universe back toward its most natural course — although that doesn’t explain why so many of the same things are happening a decade or two earlier.
@159 and @160: I have to admit, I had a brain blank and wasn’t acknowledging the separate timelines! (Maybe my mind was tossing the Enterprise-D’s destruction in there, too?) Thanks to MaGnUs for refreshing my memory, and to CLB for the benefit of the doubt. : )
But, I’m still curious: As authors, do you have a preference between each timeline’s version of certain events (such as the Enterprise’s destruction), for world building purposes?
Glad I could be of assistance. :)
@161/Don S.: I’m not sure what you mean. The timelines are distinct realities. If you’re writing a story set in the Prime timeline, you use its version of events. If you’re writing a story set in the Kelvin timeline, you use its version of events. You don’t get to pick and choose. Not to mention that the novels aren’t currently licensed to use the Kelvin continuity anyway, so it’s a moot point.
@160: Does Star Trek canonically assume there are an infinite number of parallel universes? I know there was a TNG episode where Worf is unstuck and passes through multiple universes, but I haven’t seen it in years. I don’t remember if it was it stated that they are infinite in number.
My point being, if there are actually infinite variants of the Star Trek timeline, then there would be many versions that have a 1701-A, and many that don’t. We just happen to be watching two versions that do.
@164/cosmotiger: The “infinite variations allowing any random thing to happen” idea is the one used by the IDW tie-in comics to the Kelvin Timeline, but it’s never been asserted in Trek canon, and it doesn’t make any scientific sense. Infinity is too abstract a concept to really work with. Statistically speaking, if there’s an infinite number of possibilities to choose from, then the probability of any single one of them is effectively zero, so it’s not really a mathematically meaningful argument. (Mathematics can talk about the limit of a quantity as a related quantity tends toward infinity, but treating infinity itself as a quantity is meaningless.) Many-worlds quantum theory doesn’t say anything about infinity, or about every imaginable combination of events being required to happen. It just says that the universe’s quantum state is a superposition of multiple alternative probability states. And those states would all branch from a common origin, so the only available outcomes would be those that are actually possible results given the starting conditions. (For instance, if you drive north and reach a T-shaped intersection, there might be a timeline where you turn east and one where you turn west, but there are none where you continue driving north.) So that would limit the number of possible universes that could feasibly result; it doesn’t mean that any random, nonsensical scenario you can think up “must” happen in some reality. (Not to mention that it actually applies to quantum-level variations in the states of subatomic particles, which rarely make any observable difference on a human or cosmic scale anyway.)
The problem with infinity applies even more when we’re talking about timelines that actually interact, as the Prime and Kelvin timelines did in the 2009 movie. Again, the probability of reaching any given timeline in an infinite number of timelines is zero. In other words, it would take an infinite amount of time to find it out of all the possible options. So even if the proposed alternative reality did technically exist, it would be unreachable, and thus for all practical purposes, it would not exist. If two or more timelines are able to interact, then they must be part of some finite, associated set, and with a finite set, you don’t get to use the “infinity makes random possibilities mandatory” excuse.
165. ChristopherLBennett – For instance, if you drive north and reach a T-shaped intersection, there might be a timeline where you turn east and one where you turn west, but there are none where you continue driving north.
Well, there could be but that would be the one where you’re involved in an accident and are injured or even die. You could also be hit by vehicle that’s turning south just before you get to the intersection.
The thing that a lot of these stories ignore is that fact that everyone else is also affected by changes n the timeline, not just the time travellers. Imagine that a time traveller goes to a diner to get lunch. He might order the last of some menu item, changing the fate of the person who previously had gotten that, forcing them to have something different for lunch. Perhaps that item causes food poising. That person gets sick when they didn’t before. Also, unless the price is exactly the same, they now have a different amount of money than they did. Since they’re sick, they could miss work and possibly get fired or miss out on meeting someone or they meet someone else at the doctor’s office.
Now extend that to everyone they meet or interact with, no matter how little. Alternate realities would rapidly diverge from each other. But Trek isn’t in the business of teaching actual science. It’s in the business of telling (hopefully) interesting stories. This, we get 285,000 identical Enterprise D’s or an acid stain that’s identical in the mirror and prime universes or a bunch of people meeting up because that’s what we expect to see/
@166/kkozoriz: I thought I’d phrased it in a way that would avoid that misunderstanding. I said continue driving north, as in successfully proceed past the intersection. And hairsplitting the technicalities of the analogy is taking it too literally and missing the point, or else just being deliberately contrary. It’s just a way of illustrating the fact that the multiverse will only produce outcomes permitted by the initial conditions, so it’s wrong to assume it includes every imaginable possibility.
As for your other point, that one’s actually legitimate to a degree. Yes, in some cases, a minor change can balloon outward and cause a major impact. But that’s just half the story. In other cases, an event is the result of many causative factors, so changing one won’t have that major an impact. Sure, chaos theory makes it possible for the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in India to cause a hurricane in the Atlantic a week later, but it doesn’t make it mandatory. It’s just as possible that a minor change will be damped out by all the other contributing factors, rather than amplified.
For instance, it’s often assumed that if you go back in time and kill one person, you wipe out all their descendants. But go back in your family tree, and you gain twice as many ancestors with each generation, so any given one becomes an increasingly small part of your genetic lineage. Since there’s a finite number of chromosomes that can be mixed and matched and passed along, eventually — after about 8 generations or so — you get to a point where it’s a near-certainty that one or more of your biological ancestors will have contributed zero genes to your genetic code. Past about 14 generations, IIRC, you probably have no actual genes in common with any given ancestor. So if a time traveler goes back more than, say, 3-400 years and kills one of your ancestors, it may have no influence on your existence at all. At most, it might induce a slight change in your genetics, perhaps slight enough to make no real difference (because any trait is the result of the combined influence of several genes).
It all comes down to probability. Events in the universe tend toward the more probable outcomes. The probability that a single local event can have a large-scale effect on the whole world is low. Changing the path of one pebble won’t divert an entire avalanche, unless it’s just the right pebble at just the right instant. Some of the pebbles around that changed pebble might change their own paths, but odds are that those changes will be swamped by the momentum of the whole avalanche and won’t make any larger difference.
Of course, that highlights the whole problem with the kind of alternate reality we usually see in fiction, such as the Mirror Universe — it has the large-scale reality vastly different while having individual people follow very similar life paths. A more likely scenario would be one where the overall course of history is mostly the same but there are different individuals in specific roles.
But that’s assuming that your new ancestor has no other effect on your life than the previous one. If I kill my great (however) many times grandfather, my equivalent grandmother is not going to be exactly the same person. She may have six girls instead of the four boys and a girl she had previously. She won’t live in the same house or even the same town or country. If she didn’t meet my grandfather in Ireland, she may instead have married a visitor from England. With her descendant now living elsewhere, they in all probability won’t marry the same people and won’t have the same children that ther counterparts did.
And again, that’s just one person. The change will ripple down the line to the point that there won’t even be a me in the timeline. Yes, discoveries will still be made but most likely they’ll be made by different people at different times and places. Technology may develop faster or slower than before. If Einstein hadn’t been born and the theory of relativity wasn’t discovered for another ten or twenty years, would there have been atomic bombs to drop on Japan or would the allied power have had to commit to a land invasion? And how many would have died in that that hadn’t before and how many priviosly dead would have lived?
In a nutshell, your grandfather did a lot of stuff other than fathering one of your parents.
On a side note, it was Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann’s discovery of nuclear fission which led to the development of the atomic bomb. The theory of relativity only helped to calculate how much energy such a bomb would release.
@168/kkozoriz: No, it is not “assuming.” I am merely saying that it is one of the possible outcomes. You are the one who is assuming that there is only a single obligatory outcome. I did state quite clearly that it was possible that a slight change could propagate in the way you suggest if the specific change happens in the right context that it amplifies over time rather than being damped out. The mistake you are making is in assuming that it always amplifies and never damps. I’m not saying that what you’re describing would never happen, just that it’s not the only possibility. Causality is more complicated than that.
@167/ChristopherLBennett:
Yes, I think alternate universe stories are often based on a sort of “great man” theory. James Kirk is always captain of the Enterprise, Khan always tries to kill him, Bruce Wayne is always Batman– regardless of how vastly different the rest of the reality is. Which is not really that likely, unless you want to assert there are some sort of “currents of fate” that always carry certain characters to certain destinies. Which is a nice conceit for fiction, but doesn’t strike me as realistic.
Also, your comments on the unlikelihood of infinite universes were enlightening. I must admit my understanding of such things comes completely form science fiction and comics, rather than actual science.
@171/cosmotiger: I feel it’s not based on any theory, just on the practical necessity to use the actors you have under contract and the sets you spent a lot of money to build. Or it’s based on wanting to give your actors the opportunity to stretch themselves by playing something different than their usual roles. Or, in a prose or comics use of the premise, it’s about the fact that the readers are more interested in seeing the familiar characters in altered circumstances than they would be in seeing unfamiliar characters in the same circumstances.
Alternate-reality stories are more a thought experiment than anything else. We all wonder what we’d be like in different circumstances, or how our life would’ve gone if we’d made different choices. And we wonder that about fictional characters too. A lot of time-travel and alternate-reality stories are driven by that kind of wish fulfillment and might-have-been musing, and they fudge the theory to fit the goals of the story.
@Christopher: I agree regarding the Enterprise’s destruction. Besides the questionable rapid-fire editing of the whole sequence, there was no emotional payoff to the event.
This felt as antiseptic as when Khan crashed the Vengeance on San Francisco. Star Trek III’s Enterprise destruction had real resonance. Generations’ saucer crash had lots of resonance and tension. Even the Defiant’s destruction on DS9 had its impact, not to mention the very close call Archer’s ship and crew had to go through during the Xindi arc.
I haven’t seen any of the Lin-directed FF films, so I’m not as acquainted with his style. However, I have seen all of the Bourne movies directed by Paul Greengrass. The whole Enterprise evacuation sequence is edited in pretty much the same fashion. While the POV kinectic action works for Bourne’s chase sequences, I can’t say the same for Star Trek. I didn’t even realize Spock and McCoy had entered one of Krall’s ships until they crashed it. I didn’t even realize Scotty had entered a torpedo until the cliffside reveal. Too fast-paced. Way too many cuts. Way too hard to keep track of the action. No wonder there was no room for emotional resonance.
Besides that, I actually enjoyed the film a lot. Took Paramount long enough to bring it over here.
Lack of emotional resonance with this crew and the ship in this new film series is something that came up during my review of the film on my podcast, in which I (who enjoyed it) and one of my columnists (who hated it) discussed the film. He went into the Kelvin timeline films expecting to be engaged in the same way the TOS or TNG movies engaged him, but the thing here is that both the TOS and TNG crews had a TV show behind them to make you become emotionally attached to the characters; while the Kelvin timeline characters didn’t.
It doesn’t matter that these are versions of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the others; because they’re not the “real ones”. In fact, for some person, the flirting between trying to get you to accept that these are the same people and trying to accept them as their own entities is even worse for some fans.
Me, I know that Star Trek’s natural enviroment is not the big screen, and I knew, even if it was on an instinctive level, that I shouldn’t expect from these films the same level of emotional satisfaction I got from movies starring characters I grew up watching on a TV series… which is Star Trek’s natural environment.
So, I went to see the first film expecting a fun action Star Trek film, while others went expecting to see the quintessence of Star Trek, something that was (particularly with 2016 blockbuster sensibilities) extremely unlikely. This has brewed (in my friend, among others) some resentment against the Kelvin timeline movies that has predisposed them against every single sequel; strongly criticizing elements that they gladly gave a pass to in TOS or TNG movies (we all overlook certain things when they’re part of something we love).
@174/MaGnUs: I don’t see why accepting these actors as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc. should be any harder than accepting Robin Curtis as Saavik or Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner. Sure, they haven’t had as much time to make the characters their own, but I think they’ve done a pretty superb job of capturing the spirit of the originals — and let’s face it, at least one or two of them are better actors than the people they’re replacing.
@175/Christopher – Not disputing the “better actor” comment, but how much do you think that is a function of how audience expectations have changed in 50 years, vs. innate acting talent and acquired skill?
@175/Christopher: I found it hard to accept Robin Curtis as Saavik.
Which one or two are the better actors?
Chris, I’m not saying they haven’t owned the characters or not (remember, it’s not me who doesn’t accept them), just that some people have a deeper emotional investment in characters/actors who they saw in dozens of TV episodes. And I don’t think Robin Curtis as Saavik (after only one movie with that character portrayed by Alley) or Banner (after having been portreyed by at least three other actors in TV and movies, and being himself a character adapted from another mediium) are adequate comparison to this: I am talking about the attachment some people have for the TOS characters as protreyed by their original actors during over the course of 79 episodes.
Even if you and I don’t share some people’s opinions, surely we can understand where they’re coming from.
I would argue that Karl Urban and Anton Yelchin and John Cho are all seriously accomplished actors whose body of work is as good or stronger than anything any of the original TOS cast can claim.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Agreed, krad.
@179/krad: Honestly, I’ve never quite gotten what people see in Karl Urban. I first saw him as Julius Caesar on Xena (and, incongruously, Cupid on Hercules in the same universe — lots of actors played multiple roles in that franchise), and he never succeeded at being as impressive or grand or intimidating as he was supposed to be. His acting has never really struck me as all that impressive, though I’ll grant he’s a reasonably good chameleon. Certainly, as far as the new Trek cast goes, he does the most exact imitation of his predecessor in the role, but I wouldn’t say that’s the same as giving the best performance. The other actors have captured the spirit of the characters while bringing their own interpretation to them, but Urban is just doing an ongoing imitation of DeForest Kelley. Which is a very good imitation, but it just feels like there’s not much below the surface.
But John Cho and Anton Yelchin are/were probably the best two actors in the entire Kelvinverse cast, which is why it’s a shame they’ve been so completely wasted in all three films, and an even worse shame that Yelchin was cut down so young.
That said, I think Walter Koenig is underrated as an actor. As Chekov, the accent really got in the way. He’s been excellent in the other roles I’ve seen him in, especially Bester on Babylon 5.
I feel that when you’re playing an already established character, you should be capturing the essence of the character. That’s something that Urban has done in spades, although he’s been terribly underused in the reboot. The trinity is now Kirk, Spock and Uhura but Uhura is primarily there as an adjunct to Spock and doesn’t have the deep connection to Kirk that Kelly’s McCoy did. And Spock is the closest to matching the character in appearance but is terribly lacking in character similarity with his predecessor although Urban does match Kelly fairly closely in appearance, it’s his charactzation that brings McCoy to life.
The rest of the crew are just passing similarities to what came before. Scotty coming off the worst, being relegated to comedy relief.
If it were a new crew then I could see this cast working better but in comparison to the TOS crew, they mostly come up short. A lot of that, of course, is due to what they’re given to work with.
Good actors no question but for the most part they just don’t feel like the original characters. Kirk, for example, registers noting but annoyance at his frat boy characterization, lacking the charm that Shatner managed to give Kirk in addition to his gung-ho leader role.
@182/kkozoriz: Yes, Kirk would have been a different, and less interesting, person if he hadn’t been played by Shatner. (Which makes it kind of ironic that I didn’t like Shatner’s take on Kirk in TFF at all. I guess his view of the character changed in the twenty years between.)
But I find that in Star Trek Beyond, Pine conveys the same aura surprisingly well. He’s nothing like the guy in the first two films.
I don’t find that Urban is underused in the current film, nor in the first one. That was mostly a problem of Into Darkness. I agree about Spock and Scotty, though.
@183/Jana: The thing is, the Kirk of the first two movies wasn’t supposed to be the mature Kirk that Shatner played. This was always meant to be a coming-of-age story about how Kirk grew into the man we know over the course of several movies.
If anything, I wish they’d really committed to that premise and had the first movie or two be about the formative years of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on ships other than the Enterprise, starting at the Academy and then serving on different ships (not all together, but occasionally interacting), gaining experience and rank, having their first meetings with Scott and Sulu and Uhura (Chekov should’ve been too young at this point), and eventually coming together on the Enterprise. I think that would’ve made the coming-of-age idea clearer. I think the reason a lot of viewers see the characters as “out of character” in the first two movies is because having them all together on the Enterprise in their familiar roles from the start worked against the recognition that those were prequels about their formative years.
Arguably, Scotty was relegated to comic relief a long time ago (“Up your shaft,” ST III ; the stupid hit-my-head-on-a-pipe gag in ST V). And, while I am not a big fan of Into Darkness, it did present Scotty as the only crew member with the courage of his convictions when he resigned from the service rather than go along with the torpedo plan. I thought Scotty in Beyond was much closer to his original characterization: older and wiser than some of the crew around him (his callng Jaylah “lassie” reinforced this), and having some comic moments, but not so broad as some of Doohan’s in the films.
I think Uhura was intended to be the third member of a trinity in ST09, but she has been increasingly decreased in importance in both of the follow-ups (she’s little more than a convenient plot point in Beyond – or, rather, her necklace is), so I think we are pretty much focused on the duo of Kirk and Spock. Scotty, I think, got about equal importance/exposure as McCoy in Beyond, thanks to Pegg as co-writer.
Agree with Christopher @183 – And it’s one reason I think Beyond works best of the three Kelvin timeline films. It all feels earned.
@185/Mike: I don’t agree that Uhura is marginalized in Beyond. Sure, she interacts less with the rest of the main cast, but she’s the main person who interacts with Krall, learns about him, debates with him, and eventually determines his identity. She has a crucial role to play in the narrative. And if it happens to be more about plot than about relationships, that’s not actually a bad thing for a female lead in an action movie.
@184/Christopher: I know that it’s a coming-of-age story, and that’s fine – but it is one thing to portray someone as young and inexperienced (I would have liked to see that), and it’s quite another to portray them as self-centered and antisocial. And it isn’t only Kirk. Spock is just as unsympathetic in the first film.
@185/Mike: I’d say that everyone has a role to play in Beyond. There’s the Kirk-Chekov team-up, the Spock-McCoy team-up, Scotty’s scenes with Jaylah, Uhura’s talk with Krall. I don’t remember many scenes with Sulu, but on the other hand, he’s the one who gets a family.
@187/Jana: Well, yes, those are the character flaws they need to overcome in the course of the story. They’re incomplete on their own and need to come together and start to learn from each other. That’s the whole point. They both learn to grow beyond their shortcomings by the end of the film, at least to an extent. A story like that wouldn’t work if the characters didn’t have flaws to start with.
ST09 could have worked better if the ships of the armada were badly damaged, the senior officers killed or wounded and cadet Kirk had stepped in and managed to get the surviving cadets to form an effective force to counter Nero. Instead we got someone who had things handed to him because of who his father was (from Pike) and who he was in another universe (from oldSpock). Make him work to earn their respect rather than jumping from suspended cadet who shouldn’t have been on the mission in the first place, to first officer and then to Captain. It’s just as bad with Into Darkness when he goes from Captain to first officer and back to Captain in a matter of hours. And now, in Beyond, he’s halfway through his five year mission and he’ bored???
Sorry, but Kirk is the most annoying character in the reboot in my opinion, closely followed by Whitney girl fried Uhura and emo-Spock. I was looking forward to Uhura becoming a major character but she is mostly used as one of the main characters girlfried. Bleah. This is the best they could do? Sure, she does a couple of things related to her job but she’s primarily used to make Spock feel bad about himself.
As far as Spock goes, I believe it was David Gerrold who said “If Sock is your most emotional character, you’re doing it wrong.”
To summarize, I have no complaints about the acting chops of the cast but I do wish they were given something better to work with in the scripts.
@188/Christopher: I understand that, I just don’t like it.
@189/kkozoriz: Uhura saves Kirk, faces Krall and later finds out who he really is. IMO her relationship with Spock plays only a minor role in this film, except for the “tracking device for the girlfriend”, which I found funny.
Granted, Uhura had more to do in this installment but there’s still the girlfriend connection. Good thing she was sleeping with one of her instructors or she might not have been rescued.
I find it interesting that Beyond is underperforming the previous two episodes while simultaneously being called the closes in spirit to TOS. Look at the movie grosses when adjusted for inflation.
Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation
Rank Title Studio Adjusted Gross Unadjusted Gross Release
1 Star Trek Par. $299,185,800 $257,730,019 5/8/09
2 Star Trek: The Motion Picture Par. $283,808,100 $82,258,456 12/7/79
3 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Par. $250,013,900 $109,713,132 11/26/86
4 Star Trek Into Darkness Par. $236,422,800 $228,778,661 5/16/13
5 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Par. $232,444,300 $78,912,963 6/4/82
6 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Par. $197,095,000 $76,471,046 6/1/84
7 Star Trek: First Contact Par. $179,620,400 $92,027,888 11/22/96
8 Star Trek Beyond Par. $156,817,500 $158,085,083 7/22/16
9 Star Trek: Generations Par. $156,272,800 $75,671,125 11/18/94
10 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Par. $154,977,100 $74,888,996 12/6/91
11 Star Trek: Insurrection Par. $127,290,700 $70,187,658 12/11/98
12 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Par. $113,888,900 $52,210,049 6/9/89
13 Star Trek: Nemesis Par. $63,740,100 $43,254,409 12/13/02
TOTAL: $2,451,577,300 $1,400,189,485 –
AVERAGE: $188,582,900 $107,706,883 –
The return on Beyond is less than 4 of the 6 TOS movies, only beating The Undiscovered Country and Final Frontier but does better than all the TBG movies except for First Contact. When you calculate the return on investment, the reboots do even worse and the TOS movies had much lower budgets,
TITLE BUDGET WORLD WIDE GROSS RETURN
ST:TWOK 11,200,000 78,912,963 7.046
ST:TVH 21,000,000 133,000,000 6.333
ST:TSFS 16,000,000 76,471,046 4.779
ST:GEN 35,000,000 118,000,000 3.371
ST:FC 45,000,000 146,000,000 3.244
Star Trek 150,000,000 385,680,446 2.571
STID 185,000,000 467,400,000 2.526
ST:TMP 35,000,000 82,258,456 2.350
ST:INS 58,000,000 112,600,000 1.941
ST:TFF 33,000,000 63,000,000 1.909
STB 185,000,000 333,100,000 1.801
ST:NEM 60,000,000 67,300,000 1.122
The reboots all give a lower return on investment than 5 of the 12 ST movies. STB is even beaten by TFF, beating only NEM. I would imagine that Paramount execs are banging their heads on the table trying to figure out how to make Trek into a movie franchise that can stand up with the other blockbusters. Maybe it’s a sign that Trek works best as a weekly TV series and the early movie success was simply because it was the original crew and it had the novelty of seeing them on the big screen.
Really, when you can’t beat TFF, something is wrong with either the franchise or your approach to it.
@191/kkozoriz: “Good thing she was sleeping with one of her instructors or she might not have been rescued.”
You must’ve missed the earlier scene where Uhura broke up with Spock.
@191/kkozoriz: Of course they plan to rescue their people, face obstacles, and overcome them in ways that are unusual, ingenious, entertaining or funny – it’s a film. If it hadn’t been the necklace, it would have been something else. That doesn’t mean that Uhura is reduced to her role as Spock’s girlfriend.
@186/Christopher – Those are excellent points about Uhura, and I should have thought of them. Thanks.
@187/Jana – And your point, too, is a good one. I don’t recall Chekov bringing that much value to his “team-up” with Kirk (more’s the pity; Rest in Peace, Anton Yelchin), but it is true that not everyone’s role has to look alike.
The point is that the method that was used to rescue Uhura was directly related to her relationship with Spock. It doesn’t matter if they had broken up or not, it was still they way they found her. I applaud the fact that she had more to do in this movie that didn’t involve whining about her relationship but it still cast a shadow over her role. Instead of making a new Big Three to match Kirk, Spock and McCoy of TOS, we’ve mostly had Kirk, Spock and his girlfriend.
@196/kkozoriz: Yes, the former relationship is acknowledged, but I think you’re wrong to say that Uhura’s the one who comes off negatively there. Uhura’s storyline through the movie is strong, independent, and resourceful. Spock is the one whose actions are largely defined by his former relationship with Uhura, and in fact he comes off as more than a little stalkerish, which the film specifically lampshades with Kirk and McCoy’s disturbed reactions to Spock giving his ex-girlfriend a tracking device as a gift. If anything, one comes away from the movie with the conviction that Uhura was probably right to break up with Spock. I think this film’s makers were pretty much acknowledging that the relationship had been a mistake and ending it so that future movies wouldn’t be saddled by it.
The sad thing is that a relationship between Spock and Uhura could have been interesting if it wasn’t written like they were in junior high. They’re grown ups. Both top of their class. But i half expected to see them on the cover of 23rd Century Tiger Beat magazine.
Having a fight about what ship Uhura would serve on while responding to a distress call. Shushing her commanding officer on a mission in enemy territory so she could argue with her boyfriend over their relationship, and yes, giving your girlfriend a tracking device as a break up gift.
So much potential wasted in tissue paper thin charactizaion.
Much like Kirk offering to rescue Nero and his crew but Spock chooses to execute them instead and Kirk grins and gives the fire everything command. Next movie they totally reverse the roles and decide to capture Khan instead. Where did the reversal come from? Personal revenge is good when Spock suggests it but wrong when Kirk does? What are you folks trying to say here? Ok to kill aliens but not humans?
How can one expect emotional maturity from Spock?
@198/kkozoriz – Yes! I thought their pairing in Trek 09 was fine, and really intriguing; but their on-mission bickering in Into Darkness was so beneath Starfleet officers. I know they’re young and immature in this timeline at that point, but, c’mon. And for Kirk to be basically egging them on – “What is that even like?” etc. – ugh.
As for the “execution” of Nero, I don’t know that Spock made the decision. He weighed in with his very visceral emotional reaction, but Nero chose death. I suppose Prime Kirk might have acted as he acted toward Maltz – “Fine, I’ll kill you later” – but (as I think someone, probably Christopher <g>, said to me once), it’s not ultimately so different from Kirk kicking Kruge into the lava on the Genesis Planet. I still don’t like it as a moment in a Trek movie, but I’ve made a more or less uneasy peace with it. Sometimes the bad guys won’t let themselves be saved, no matter what. (I wish they’d written the scene in such a way that Nero simply died as a consequence of activating the red matter wormhole or whatever – dying a slow death as he falls toward the center of a black hole, etc. Oh, well.)
@200/Mike: The intent of the climax of ’09 was that Kirk destroyed the Narada because of the risk that the “black hole” might drop it in some other time and free Nero to continue wreaking havoc with history. So it wasn’t an act of revenge, but a necessary defensive action. However, that idea failed to come across in the scene as presented.
There is no indication at all that the Narada was going to go back in time again. When it happened the first time, the ship entered the black hole. This time, the black hole was forming inside the ship. The ship emerged the first time totally intact and functional. The second time, it was being bent, distorted and crushed.
Spock wanted revenge and Kirk grinned and gave it to him. Consider it payback for Spock coming around to the idea that only James T Kirk can be captain. Spock agreed to support Kirk as captain and in return Kirk blew away Nero for him. They were trying for a re-do of the “stand by and prepare to be boarded” scene from TWOK but the difference was that this time Nero had ceased to be a threat. Nero didn’t have a Genesis Device. He had a black hole that was destroying his ship from the inside.
If an idea fails to come across in a scene, how can you possibly argue that it’s a part of the movie? If it’s not in there then it simply isn’t there. Wishing that it was doesn’t make it so.
200. MikePoteet – It’s not the same as Kruge and Kirk because Nero wasn’t actively trying to drag Kirk into the black hole. He simply refused the offer of rescue. Nothing Nero was doing was a danger to the Enterprise. Sure, the black hole itself was dragging them in but they came up with s really dumb way to get away from it. “The black hole is dragging us in!” I know, let’s eject our main power source and explode it so that it can push us away even though there’s no medium for the shockwave to propagate through!? Great idea!”
@202/kkozoriz: I’m not defending the scene; I’m giving a more detailed critique of it. I’m describing what the intention of the scene was while concluding that it failed to live up to that intention. If you think that pointing out the creators’ failure to convey their intention somehow constitutes a defense of the result, well, you have a very bizarre way of defining defense.
Re: Nero. It seems like a pretty overblown controversy. If the black hole was going to kill him anyway, then firing on the ship was a formality– at worst Nero and friends died a few seconds earlier and at best they were spared a longer, more agonizing death. If the black hole would act as a time travel mechanism again (or even if there was a 0.0000001% chance that it would), then destroying them instead would prevent them from victimizing others.
So the payoff matrix looks something like:
Fire phasers, black hole was going to destroy ship: Nothing changes.
Fire phasers, black hole was going to cause time travel: Rescue prospective victims from Nero.
Don’t fire phasers, black hole was going to destroy ship: Nothing changes.
Don’t fire phasers, black hole causes time travel: Very bad things happen.
“Fire phasers” is the clear winner here. If it was possible to stop them some other way– if Nero and crew could have been captured without material risk to the Enterprise— then it would be a different conversation. But risking the ship to rescue a bunch of war criminals who don’t want to be saved? No way. Since Nero can’t be safely captured, then the only alternative is to make 100% sure that he’s dead, as he’s far too dangerous to have running free. Which takes us back to firing phasers. Maybe Kirk and Spock did feel some satisfaction about offing the man who murdered their respective parents, but Starfleet officers feel satisfaction about doing their duty all the time– Picard loved first contact, Sisko eventually embraced his role as a religious figure, etc. It seems unduly churlish to begrudge Kirk and Spock their satisfaction here, given that what they did was fully justified under the circumstances.
Admittedly, they left too much of this thought process to the subtext, but all the pieces are there.
I prefer the Kirk from Balance of Terror who took no satisfaction from the death of the Romulan Commander to the Kirk of ST09 who grinned at the prospect of blowing up an enemy who no longer posed a threat.
So, for anyone who poses a 0.0000001% chance of being a threat, you should kill them? Should Kirk have blown up Koloth’s ship at K-7? I’m sure Koloth was a threat to Starfleet at some point in the next 100 years. Do you believe that Kirk was wrong for not firing the torpedoes at Khan when he was on Kronos in Into darkness? He sure proved to be a threat afterwards. Or does the death of all those civilians in San Francisco not count? Where do you draw the line in when you kill someone?
205– They’re the same guy, just under very different circumstances (including, among other things, the difference between an honorable opponent and a dishonorable one). The Nero situation isn’t anything like the other situations you mention, because there were really only two options: Either Nero or his crew were about to die, or they were going to time travel again. The latter was unacceptable, so making sure the former is what actually happened is the right call.
That is nothing at all like the other examples you cite. In particular, firing torpedoes at Khan would have been unjustified, because (based on the information Kirk had) it was possible to capture him and neutralize the threat without deadly force. Of course, we as the viewing audience know that no movie protagonist has ever successfully captured anyone in the first third of a film, but Kirk doesn’t know he’s in a movie…
Again, the black hole was forming INSIDE the ship. Totally different situation. We saw it deforming and crumpling into itself. Unless you’re also suggesting that Vulcan somehow travelled back in time.
And who’s to say that the Gorn captain from Arena didn’t return at some point and seek revenge against humanity for denying him (her?) an honourable death? The Metron even offered to destroy them for Kirk. Perhaps he should have taken them up on their offer. After all, there’s probably a better than 0.0001% chance that the Gorn would kill someone.
There is no evidence, zero, that Nero was going back in time, your and Christopher’s assumptions to the contrary.
And regardless, what sort of person grins when someone speaks out in favour of killing someone when they no longer pose an immediate threat?
I finally got a chance to see this last night. It was a very good movie. Definitely my favorite of the relaunches.
It’s probably been mentioned, but I haven’t read through all the comments yet. I know KRAD mentioned it under the Sulu section of the initial review, but I couldn’t get over the fact that:
Sulu basically pops the clutch in a century-old NX-Class starship, that has been crashed on the surface of a planet for most of that century, enabling them to take off from the planet. Because he’s just that awesome.
@ChristopherLBennett &co
1) It’s obvious that the creative team had never wanted to break Spock and Uhura up for real. For one, they were just on a break because he wanted to leave Starfleet, not because they don’t love each other; Spock even explained to Mccoy that he had intended to talk with her more before the ship got destroyed. The end scene is as clear as it could get without subtitles: what with Spock saying that he went to the party, in spite of having work to do, just because it was more pleasing to spend time with her? She calls him ‘old romantic’ while suggestively stroking his necklace that she wears open and proud, and they smile at each other even when their friends look at the ship. They are getting back together in the end, if they aren’t already.
In the canon comics they are together on New Vulcan and thinking about marriage.
2) Being in a relationship, caring about the well being of a loved one, and thus being allowed to express different kind of feelings, doesn’t make a woman “weak”. The redundant rhetoric about female characters, and how they supposedly need to be single and unfeeling to be “strong women” is one of the most ridiculous, insulting things we read on the internet nowadays. Let’s be honest, the real issue here is that JJ Abrams had the audacity to suggest that maybe 50 years of trek being dominated by the ‘bros’ stuff only was enough and we can have different relationships too for a chance. It’s all about preserving the white dudes status quo where the woman, and her own relationship, is perceived as a threat (eg ‘uhura replaced mccoy!spock can’t be in love it takes away from his bromances!’ cries from the fanboys, and the slash fans) . You are fooling no one with the concern troll.
Ironically, you are praising a thing – Uhura’s feelings being erased in beyond – that, if anything, it actually is a huge flaw in the writing and what makes the movie actually more sexist and biased about males and their needs than having underwear scenes, frankly.
Breaking them up for good would be a huge mistake since it’s their only new dynamic – and something different from old bromances – and it’s quite popular amongst Abrams verse trek fans. It was already very lame that they sidelined Uhura to give more screentime to Mccoy and Scotty. The nostalgia for the old trio is not a valid excuse to sh*t on the integrity of the established narrative and thus ignore the new dynamics and that JJ’s new trio is, in the reboot, Kirk/Uhura/Spock. The new dynamic worked just fine as the face of this trek in the first movies and they obvioustly know that, or they wouldn’t push it further for promotional posters still (where Urban is ignored because he isn’t a big star). And before anyone “but the original trio!” me yes, the more nostalgic fans liked the back to the 60s vibe of beyond and felt their insecurities were placated by a more reassuring movie… but the movie is the least successful of the trilogy from all the sides of analysis (gross, critics, response from people who liked the first movies and were either ‘meh’ or disappointed by how much the new team ignored what the other did and changed everything from the uniforms to the dynamics)
@209/Matem80: The comics are not canonical. That’s a myth. A number of them contain elements that have been contradicted by later movies; for instance, the first two storylines had multiple crew fatalities, but Kirk said at the start of Into Darkness that he hadn’t lost a single crew member. Also, the official stance of the films is that the Kelvin Timeline branched off of the Prime Timeline due to Nero’s incursion and that preceding events were the same, while comics writer Mike Johnson goes by the theory that they were always separate realities. In the first movie, Spock Prime recognized young Kirk and Scott on sight, proving that they look the same in-universe, but the comics have done one or more storylines establishing that the characters look different in the different universes.
The myth that the IDW comics are canonical results from a single 2012 interview between Bob Orci and TrekMovie’s Anthony Pascale, in which Pascale badgered Orci with his own personal theory for why the comics should be canonical until Orci just decided to humor him and play along — whereupon Pascale misrepresented it in the headline as Orci’s own viewpoint. Orci had to post a retraction mere hours later, reasserting that the canon policy is what it’s always been, that only onscreen material is canonical.
@ChristopherLBennett
your saying that the movie paints spock as a stalker and “uhura is right breaking up with him” is so far fetched and over the top ridiculous too. I know I’m late to the party here but when I read people failing so much understanding basic plot elements I get depressed on behalf of the writers. The joke about the necklace was just that: a joke. I doubt we are supposed to read anything more into it because a) spock didn’t even realize it could have that function until he was in need of a means to save her b) The necklace was a precious family heirloom and a token of love. I doubt his mother or father gave that to him to give to a significant other with the purpose of “stalking her”. Btw, even Mccoy, who knows about the break up, calls her his girlfriend still and that pretty much is the clear subtext of the scene where spock is adamant he needs to be part of the rescue mission because his girlfriend is there. That doesn’t make him a stalker, and neither does the ending when he decides to put work and duty aside to spend more time with his girl and make her happy. If Spock is a stalker to you, then everyone who is on a relationship must be!
As for the break up, it has NOTHING to do with him being a stalker, of them getting tired of each other. They clearly have strong feelings for each other but they just thought they couldn’t be together if he had a duty to help the vulcans and leave the ship to do so. Everything the writers and the actors said confirms this take being the only canon one. If anything, their relationship is portrayed as being quite healthy if she can understand his need to help his people and make him free to decide even if it hurts her, and he doesn’t want to ask her to give up about her dreams and career (if he decided to leave) even if he’d be much happier with her. In the end he stays because not only he realizes how much she means to him, but because he realizes how much Starfleet and his friends mean to him. That’s healthy relationship, not one bit co-dependant, and based on mutual respect and two adult people with a life outside of their relationship. It really is the least forced and pretentious relationship of this trek.
@ChristopherLBennett the comics are licensed and official, still and need to get approved by Paramount, CBS and bad robot, as the comic writer said.
However,, it was just an added plus point to the actual one being that, watching the movie alone, your assertion that the creative team wanted to get rid of the romance flies in the face of what is actually showed in the movie. The movie, alone, clearly hints at them getting back together or some scenes (and stuff Quinto himself said) have no reason to exist. It’s a narrative element that is so clear both in text and subtext that you don’t need to read the comics to understand it, just like you don’t need to read them to get that Spock changed his mind about leaving in the end in spite of there being no explicit word from him about that, or that Sulu is gay..or the break up itself since that aspect was, also, just implied.
@212/Matem80: The Star Trek novels I write for Pocket Books are licensed and official too, but they certainly aren’t canonical. The word “canon” specifically means the original work as opposed to derivative works like fanfiction and licensed tie-ins. There are infrequent cases — more common in recent years — where tie-in material is treated as canonical, but that’s only feasible when the creators of the core work are able to create or closely supervise the tie-ins and make them part of the original core work, which is what “canon” is a nickname for. That is not the way Star Trek tie-ins have ever been handled, and as Orci said in the comment I linked to, the IDW Kelvin Timeline comics have the same relationship to canon as all prior Trek tie-ins, namely, that they are distinct from it.
“Licensed and official” does not mean “canonical.” Those are two different concepts. It simply means that the publisher has the copyright owner’s legal permission to distribute and profit from them. Hallmark Star Trek Christmas ornaments are licensed and official too. So are Star Trek action figures, t-shirts, earrings, breakfast cereal, etc. It’s got nothing to do with their story value, just with their status as a legal and commercial entity.
As for the rest of your comments, you’ve egregiously misinterpreted what I actually said. I never said I objected to the Spock-Uhura romance; on the contrary, I’m one of its defenders. My point in this comments thread was merely to refute Keith’s opinion that Uhura was marginalized in Beyond.
@ChristopherLBennett I stand corrected that while the movies may have freedom to contradict some of the comics plot elements, the comics can’t really do that. His interpretation of the alternate reality isn’t contradicting canon, btw. They use quantum mechanics and while technically the reality became alternate with Nero’s incursion, time isn’t linear that way (past present and future dont really exist like we perceive them) so, in a sense, the reality already exists when he gets there, even if it’s a paradox from our human perspective. That means that yes, it’s possible that even events before Nero happened differently now. Pegg also seems to think the same.
@ChristopherLBennett
What I misinterpreted? I disagreed with your assertion that the movie got rid of the romance “because it was a bad idea”, and that it painted Spock as a stalker. You sure have an interesting way to support that dynamic.
The rest of my comment is in general for all the fans who object to the romance claiming that it makes the female character weak and all that concern trolling that is the real sexism here. To suggest a woman is less just because she’s in a relationship is idiotic. Uhura is more than a love interest but her relationship with Spock is important too and there is nothing wrong about that. The double standard is appalling because it’s obvious that Uhura is, for no other reason than her being a woman and not part of the original white dudes status quo (the original trio and their bromance) , criticized for things that the male characters get a pass for or are even liked for. For instance, McCoy is clearly more defined by his relationship with Kirk than Uhura is by hers with Spock, but no one complains about that because of the double standand making people prejudiced against romances deeming that kind of dynamic as less important than the bros stuff. But it’s isn’t. Urban himself seems to be obsessed about “the friend” being Mccoy’s only purpose in the narrative when he gets nothing outside of that, so to see people concern troll about Uhura is ridiculous. Uhura is a more balanced character for a secondary, she makes a contribution to the main plot in every movie and I disagree with the notion that her role in the new trio is less valid than Mccoy’s just because her relationship with one of the main guys is not platonic and thus she isn’t a “bro”. The whole dynamic is different they don’t have to be the same kind of trio.. .that’s why people liked it! It just adds new layers to the characters. It’s contradictory for people to make the romance a problem all the while they glorify the original series bromances as the most important aspect of these characters and all the while they praise Mccoy when his only contribution is being a friend to kirk and spock, without that being even that mutual – I might add – because the movies focus on kirk/spock so much that they often forget Bones is Kirk’s best friend too and important to him.
Uhura IS marginalized in Beyond, like many pointed up, because they ignored that she was elevated to the original trio level and they sidelined her, and all the dynamics with her that were important in the first movies (spock/uhura, kirk/uhura building friendship) , and even sulu/uhura, to focus on old school bromances more and give more screentime to Urban and Pegg. Even if Zoe Saldana is a bigger star than them both she lost her third top billed spot to Urban and stuff like this, alone, is fail for a franchise that is about inclusiveness and diversity and yet, insists making everything about the same 3 white guys and sidelines the two poc of the cast and their female lead character. The new team seemed to placate those who saw Uhura’s new role as a threat and while she gets her badass moments and is important to the plot, she’s deliberately kept away from the main guys so that Pegg and Urban can interact with them more. The dynamics from the first movies are neglected or ignored in favor of nostalgia. The fact that the female character can’t even talk about her own relationship and feelings, all the while the men are allowed to do that and them emoting is treated as a major plot element, is a big problem. Even more if we consider the context of her being a black woman with all the history of mainstream movies portraying black women with the “strong independent woman” stereotype that, for a long time, was a pretext to essentially dehumanize them. Original Uhura wasn’t single because she was strong but because racism prevented her from getting a love interest, let alone be the significant other of one of the main guys. In that sense, the reboot upgraded the progressiveness of the forced kirk/uhura kiss from the 60s with something more progressive such as giving her an actual relationship where she has agency and she’s loved back. She finally is allowed to have a personal life too outside of her job, which is a more healthy portrayal of the characters as people. Spock himself has an upgraded role as the protagonist with Kirk, something Nimoy didn’t really get in spite of his character being the most popular. The fact he is the one with the main romantic subplot instead of Kirk also is a good move that contradicts the stereotype that Kirk gets the girl, not to mention it has more potential anyway precisely because Spock is not a ladies man and his half alien side makes him a better candidate for developing a dignified romantic relationship that is fitting with trek’s main themes about diversity. But some people clearly want trek to be stuck in the 60s, it’s that mentality that might have, ultimately, doomed this reboot. For beyond’s fault now fans of it can’t even really hope for a fourth movie that, at this point, I doubt will get made. If they aren’t willing to respect the integrity of this trek and insist with the destructive nostalgia for the dudebro having to be ‘the most important thing’, perhaps it’s better to not continue it unless they really want to lose even more money.
Personally I think both Kirk and Spock are poor romantic prospects. Give me the mature man with killer blue eyes!
@princessroxana doctor’s ex wife would disagree with you^
He’s matured since then. Even with a divorce Bones has less relationship baggage then Kirk or Spock.
Matem80: Saldana didn’t lose her billing spot at all — in all three Bad Robot films, the billing has been strictly alphabetical (which is why John Cho has always been first and Anton Yelchin has always been last).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad
The alphabetical list is a different thing. I’m talking about the cast list sorted from who is payed more to who is payed less. In that top billed order, used by imdb and that is the one you see in the final credit list from the movie itself (not the alphabetical order you see right after the last scene. It’s the actual credits list scrolling on black background) Karl is listed as the third lead right after Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto. Zoe lost her third lead status to him for beyond. Which is not surprising as everything about that movie suggests they went backwards and ignored the new trio with her to get back to a 3-4 men dynamic.
@princessroxana yeah, maybe in the fanfictions? because in the actual movies there is no clue Mccoy has matured enough to be able to make a new relationship work more and better than Spock, unless you think human guys are by default better than vulcan ones in spite of having bad personalities. In reality, while Mccoy and Kirk are both still single, and you don’t see them in any stable relationship, Spock is the only one of the 3 who is actually making a relationship work, one way or another, since years now so your assumption that Bones is the better option seems to be based more on your own preference, than canon actually showing him being better than Spock in that regard. The biggest complication between Spock and Uhura isn’t even his vulcan side, it’s his survivor guilt. Putting that aside, he still seems to be a decent man to be in a relationship with and who makes an effort to meet the needs of the person he’s with.
In that first scene between McCoy and Spock in beyond, the doc actually seemed to be almost envious of the alien guy who, unlike him, had a relationship for years. He looks too pleased to see that Spock’s girlfriend dumbed him and, after everything he knows he had lost already, the vulcan guy is losing his significant other too. What did Spock even do to him to justify his behavior, to want to see him fail just like HE did with his wife? He acts like a bully with Spock without ever being provoked (in this trek at least) I don’t find him mature, at all, when he still has prejudices and he acts like that with people that should’ve been his friends after 3 years, or that he’d at least respect more by now.
@@@@@ Matem, forgive me, I was thinking Original McCoy not NuMcCoy. The Original had had ten years at least of character development and maturation since his divorce. Original Kirk was problematic because being with him meant competing with the Enterprise and as for Spock, his personal issues aside who wants to deal with the hot red planet of crazy bigots?
@75 I’d have to agree about the miniskirts. It’s not that they are inherently sexist, if that was the right thing for the job, it’s that they are completely impractical. Having women wear impractical clothes just to look skimpy sexy is where is gets sexist. I work in a ‘similar’ field as the women on the starship. By similar I mean I run around from computer terminal to terminal, sometimes go work with engineers in different capacities, meet people and interact outside the team, and sometimes have to run around or grab things quickly including gear. Sadly, no aliens, phasers or transporter. But as much as women in my field are encouraged to always dress up including heels, skirts just don’t cut it for my work. I’ve done it and spend too much time fussy with what the heck my skirt is doing when I’m half bent over helping to hold some piece of gear or falling off a heel while trying to solve a technical issue. TOS outfits were sort of awesome because they were new, it was a different era, and they wore those dancer/cheerleader pants underneath so if you took the frequent tumble in the line of duty you didn’t expose your all. But they seem silly in the ST produced today. I loved how No 1/Majel Barrett looked in The Cage. She was intelligent, a leader, and looked beautiful down on the planet and was in completely practical, believable clothes (sexy boots!). I only saw TOS in re-runs but I really looked up to that.
Worth noting – If you’re in the Seattle area, STB is coming there (Sept 13 2017) with live orchestra playing the score! That’s a fun night.
@217 Yes those eyes! And that was before they started color contacts. Wow did he have amazing baby blues.