Anaraphala’s Review: Star Trek Beyond Lens Flare
This round of the reboot series has JJ as the producer but not the director. No doubt Paramount was happy that they wouldn’t need to allocate a lens flare budget.
The movie starts out with Kirk on an alien planet. He is bringing a funny gear thing as a peace offering from another planet. This isn’t exactly a smart idea. Sure enough, the aliens are offended and Kirk is up to his knees in nasty rock trolls that look somewhat like the nice ones from Frozen. I don’t think they want to help Kirk find a wife.
Next we get a voiceover from Chris Pine. Even though my friend Ron might consider this spoilable if I had mentioned it before he had seen the movie, we are told that the members of have been uh mingling with each other and have learned to couple and break up to fit the narration. The real surprise is that Kirk doesn’t have any “encounters” in this movie.
The Big E docks at Yorktown, a weird starbase that doesn’t always know which way is “up”, but that’s not really important. Uhura tries to give Spock back a necklace, but Spock tells her to keep it. You never know when you are going to need something made out of an esoteric Vulcan mineral. Bones offers his sage advice about women, which of course in movies always comes from a single man.
The news of course is that Sulu has been Dumbledored into being Gay. Simon Pegg (Scotty) wanted to do this as a tribute to George Takei. The irony of course is that the actor who plays Spock is gay while the one who plays Sulu isn’t.
Meanwhile, Kirk is working for promotion to Admiral. I guess he finally wants to join that big party that has been going on in the Laurenthian System since the first reboot movie. Come to think of it, this could explain why the Big E has always been the only ship available in a crisis, even in the original series.
An alien ship appears. A woman starts talking and soon we seen a window for the universal translator. So now it’s a Windows app? I thought it was built into Cortana.
The woman says she needs Kirk’s help to get something off a planet in a dangerous area. The Enterprise enters the area and is quickly destroyed by a cloud of swarm ships by a dude named Krall, not to be confused with Krull, a fun movie staring Ken Marshall and which has a great James Horner score.
Most of the crew is captured including Uhura, It seems that Krall wants this gear thing that Kirk has. Him and the alien woman were of course in cahoots. The woman tells Kirk that she lured him here to save her crew. Remember, you can always trust an evil villain when he says he will let you go if you help him. Still, she doesn’t seem quite as dumb as a typical Trump supporter.
Meanwhile Scotty meets a white faced woman with black markings. Her name is Jayla. (actual fact: Her name is taken from J-Law or Jennifer Lawrence of The Hunger Games). She takes Scotty to her “house”, which is an old starship which she wants Scotty to repair.
Spock and McCoy have crash on another spot. Spock severely injured. When Bones tries to remove a piece of metal from Spock’s body he tries to distract Spock and then tells him the distraction lessens the pain. Unlike the pre-reboot Spock, this one shows us he has mastered the art of “colorful metaphor”.
Ok, by now we find out that Krall’s motive in getting the gear thing is to destroy Yorktown. For some reason he really hates the peace and harmony in the Federation. I don’t know what is wrong really. Maybe he hated the “double dumbass on you” scene from STIV. I don’t know.
I will jump ahead a little. Bones, Spock, Kirk, Sulu are in Jayla’s “house” thanks to Mr. Scott fixing the transporter. Now we come to one of the two “set ups”. Mr. Scott need some way of finding the rest of the crew, you know like using sensors to find someone wearing a Vulcan necklace, which I mentioned earlier. Remember, only the good guys get to set things up.
The next set up is a tape of the Beastie Boys which Spock refers to as “classical”. OK. Just one question. Did the producers of this movie have to pay royalties for this? I mean, considering that in the 24th century all current music should be in public domain, unless Disney once again pushes to extend copyrights
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This matters because Kirk needs a way to disrupt the swarm ships and this turns out to be the perfect choice. So Beastie Boys become the 24th century equivalent of “Puberty Love” or the “death music” from Mars Attacks?
We finally figure out what is wrong with Krall. He was upset because Kahn and Adm. Marcus were defeated in the last movie. This is a guy that would think the Klingons and Romulans were way too pacifist.
Well here we are again. Kirk realizes admirals don’t get to meet alien women. Spock and Uhura make up and get ready for the hot “finger touching scene” coming in the next movie. Bones once again goes into a rant about deadly space germs, hostile aliens, dogs and cats living together.
Next time: Star Trek: The Search for the Profits
