So
it’s been a week or so since I’ve seen Star
Trek Beyond, but it took some time for my thoughts on it to jell. My initial reaction was that it was
okay. Better than Into Darkness, but that’s like saying The Force Awakens was better than the prequels. But as I’ve thought about it, the more issues
and problems I realized I have with it.
To
begin, I’m not a fan of this … timeline, whatever you want to call it. I’ve always maintained that if they wanted a new
series set a hundred years after TNG
following the Enterprise H or
whatever, I would have been perfectly fine with that. Well, as long as the stories were good. It would have made money because of the Star Trek name, but it wouldn’t have had
THE Star Trek names of Kirk, Spock,
etc.
A
lot of people dismiss people like me by saying, “They’re just unhappy because
it’s not their Star Trek.” But for
decades and for a hundred or so hours of TV and movies, Kirk was Shatner not
that … other guy. Shall we compare “The
City on the Edge of Forever,” “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” “Mirror,
Mirror,” “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and The
Undiscovered Country with … Beyond?
Yes,
these new movies aren’t my Star Trek,
but they try which mucks everything up.
For example, for Into Darkness
they locked themselves in the Khan closet instead of doing something
original. If Into Darkness had just been about a disgruntled Starfleet operative
wanting to take down Starfleet for personal reasons it … would have been more
like Beyond. While that’s an improvement, they’re still
locked in the TOS apartment. Imagine if this had been a new
franchise. You could have had a
competent, Andorian female captain, a wise-cracking, Hispanic XO, a dour doctor
fighting personal demons of some kind, other new and interesting characters. It could have been opened up to so much, but
instead we get grouchy McCoy arguing with Spock because that’s what my Trek did.
This
idea of we’re new, but we’re also old is one of the reasons I had issues with
the first film. As I watched Vulcan be
destroyed, my thoughts were They’ve
already done time travel in this movie so they’ll just go back in time at the
end to fix that. But they
didn’t. Part of it – I assume – was to
show they’re new bold, gritty timeline.
However, there was Old Spock. You
know, the guy who from memory – not long after being dead – calculated how to
fly around the sun to time warp to go pick up some whales to save the planet of
his mother. Apparently, he never considered
doing that to save the planet of his father.
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