Movie Review: Star Trek Beyond

Jul 24, 2016 | Movies

The new Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, is fine as light summer entertainment. The series’ leading characters, three white males named Spock, Bones and Kirk, are both true to their original incarnations in the 1966 television drama created by Gene Roddenberry and boldly against Hollywood’s new purge of white males. This is the boldest thing about the new picture, which is written by six different writers, directed by Justin Lin (Annapolis and some Fast & Furious movies) and produced by the man who directed the first film in this batch of movies, the overrated J.J. Abrams, who brought forth the bland 2009 reboot.

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I think this is a better movie than that first installment, which was campy and full of itself. The second movie was a snoozefest, so I didn’t bother to write a review but I remember thinking that Benedict Cumberbatch as the villain was the best thing about it. Here, the production design is marvelous, and it is especially well done in rendering the villain’s (Idris Elba) world, which includes a kind of slave encampment.

But success as fun, lighter summer fare means that the boldness of the whole series is gone. The NBC show, which I found in reruns, was serious and dramatic. Something important, occasionally an ideal, was often at stake. Some were better than others, but subsequent series and movies recycled mostly the multiculturalism, comedy and nostalgia. Now, in 2016, Paramount’s Star Trek Beyond delivers more of the same, though it’s more linear. An outstanding actress is wasted in a cameo role (that’s Shohreh Aghdashloo) and the lines are flat, cringe-inducing or worse while the chemistry among the three leads, which was always a sideline at best to the dramatic arc, is the highlight. A self-reliant new character, Jaylah, is a welcome addition in a decent subplot.

Star Trek Beyond mixes plot fragments involving torture, surveillance and loyalty. Yet there’s nothing bold about how they’re treated. With another all-powerful villain named Krall drawing strength from suffering, the madman bit is getting old, and his contest with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine, Into the Woods) feels tacked on because it is. The basic conflict is underdeveloped.

Plot and action move briskly, however, in three different directions, as the U.S.S. Enterprise and crew spin off into separate orbits as Krall amasses the power to destroy an entire idyllic civilization and threaten the Federation.

So much could have been done with Krall’s inferiority complex leading to a barbaric siege against civilization. But no. Amid breakaways, imprisoned or eviscerated crew and tests of character, loyalty and teamwork, the Federation, utopia and the Enterprise are diminished by the end. The crew are smaller as the franchise ages. No longer the intrepid seekers of knowledge in space, these characters—and I’m sorry to say that the late Anton Yelchin in his final appearance as Chekov deserved a better send-off—convey none of the enthusiasm for enlistment that the original cast did. Zoe Saldana plays Lieutenant Uhura as tougher yet she’s less thoughtful and more stereotypical than was Nichelle Nichols in the role. Familiar characters return. There’s a nod to the late Leonard Nimoy. Sulu (John Cho) is, it turns out, a gay dad which plays neatly if predictably into the plot.

In short, Star Trek Beyond is mildly enjoyable at the expense of deeper engagement. Like its muted lighting, which looks the same in every atmosphere, Star Trek‘s whole universe feels artificial. The series, in playing to today’s demand for momentary thrills, jabs and jokes, is selling out its core value premise: excitement about discovering, exploring and mastering the unknown with a united band of enterprising men and women. A movie based on Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek vision should be bold. This one is not.

RIP, Leonard Nimoy

Feb 27, 2015 | Culture, Obituaries, Television

Leonard Nimoy, who died today in Los Angeles, was the godfather of geek subculture. As the rational Mr. Spock on NBC’s science fiction dramatic series Star Trek, he was a voice of reason at a time in American history when audiences desperately needed to hear one. His character was both a contrast to William Shatner’s heroic Captain James T. Kirk and DeForest Kelley’s emotional Dr. McCoy and Spock emerged as a central figure on Gene Roddenberry’s show. Nimoy, a Jewish poet, actor and director (Three Men and a Baby) should be remembered for his distinguished career in show business, too, not merely for his role in the Star Trek franchise, including early performances for dramatic television that predate Star Trek.

NimoyBut it is for his embrace of the genre and spirit that defines the Spock character that sets Nimoy apart and for reasons that transcend the iconic series. First, the 1966-1969 series, which heralded the “voyages of the starship Enterprise” and sought to “boldly go where no man has gone before” was a radical departure from traditional TV programming in many respects. Second, it was a commercial and critical failure, being cancelled for low ratings and largely dismissed or ridiculed by critics and dominant intellectuals. Third, the part of Spock, who was an alien though also part human, was so distinctive that Nimoy became indelibly associated with it once the cancelled series earned new fans through 1970s syndication (which, incidentally, is where I discovered it with my brother). Nimoy’s first book, I Am Not Spock (1975), was published at what was thought to be the peak of the cult success of the Desilu/Paramount produced series. It would be years before Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) would be released and it hardly took Hollywood by storm.

In the intervening years, Nimoy carried on and memorably so in the 1978 remake of the nonconformist science fiction picture Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a psychiatrist. He later played in an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, hosted the syndicated series In Search of… (1976-1982), played in the Marco Polo telefilm and portrayed Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s husband opposite Ingrid Bergman in A Woman Called Golda for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award and of course he played Spock many more times after the Star Trek movies started to gain a wider audience. Nimoy appeared in the mediocre reboot in 2009.

Leonard Nimoy had helped bridge the gap between the wasteland of the late 1960s and the emergence and legitimization of geek culture in the 1980s. By the time the technology revolution launched in the 1990s, Star Trek was an established, respected brand in movies and television. Such acceptance may have fueled and ignited many an imagination for what huge and exciting industrial advancements were to come and Star Trek, with Spock, Kirk and McCoy in particular, led the way in cultivating an American, pro-Western, pro-industrial, pro-reason sense of life. In the words of Mr. Spock, and the late Leonard Nimoy had a hand in this, too: “Live long and prosper.”

These days, with the White House refusing to name an Islamic worldwide barbarian invasion as Islamic, it is all too rare to encounter such a blatantly pro-Western civilization, pro-capitalist, secular-rational-selfish formulation and his remarkable career on and off screen is as uniquely subversive and unusual as the roles he chose to portray (and he apparently did choose to portray Spock). May his Mr. Spock and what this iconic character means—the lone voice of reason defined by volition, not by blood, tradition or religion, acting on his own judgment, often against the collective and refusing to just follow orders—inspire future generations to be bold and radical in the spirit of uncompromising enterprise and may Leonard Nimoy rest in peace.