The screenplay is co-written by Simon Pegg, the Shaun of the Dead star who also plays Scotty, and he embraces and parodies buddy-movie clichés with his usual nerdy glee. When the Enterprise crash lands on Krall’s planet – a planet with boringly Earth-like gravity, atmosphere and vegetation, of course – there is still some knockabout fun to be had. Watching Star Trek Beyond feels like fast-forwarding through a DVD while listening to the Best of the Beastie Boys at top volume: it’s exciting, but you can’t always tell what’s going on. The confusion lingers for the rest of his noisy, hectic film. Lin cuts at frenetic speed between several different chaotic scenes in several different under-lit sections of the Enterprise, but it’s difficult to see how everything fits together. well, it’s not clear what happens after that. The Enterprise blasts off in pursuit, but our heroes have barely made it through a rocky “unstable nebula” (the asteroid field from The Empire Strikes Back, basically) when they’re attacked by a swarm of Krall’s spiky metal space bees.Īnd then. The crew’s Yorktown downtime is cut short when Kirk hears that another ship has been hijacked by a bony-faced alien warlord (an under-used Idris Elba) called Krall. However, he doesn’t let us forget that he also directed four Fast & Furious sequels, because, after these establishing scenes, fast and furious is exactly what Star Trek Beyond is. The film’s director, Justin Lin, seems to be responding to the last film, Star Trek Into Darkness, by taking Star Trek out of darkness and into light. The glimpse of Sulu (John Cho) with his husband is uplifting, too.

Its design is a touch too reminiscent of the metropolis in Guardians of the Galaxy, but, in these worrying times, it’s moving to see an optimistic vision of a future in which humans, aliens and holograms bustle along happily, side by side. This classic Trek spirit is still there when the Enterprise docks with a Federation space station called Yorktown, a floating Christmas-tree bauble that is so vast that it has its own skyscrapers.

Star trek beyond cast in character