Star Trek Beyond Trailer Review

Star Trek Beyond Trailer Review

Captain Kirk rides a motorbike in this movie. Yup. I'm the only one who thinks that, along with the trailer as a whole, is kind of awesome?

To give you some background here, my first contact with anything even tangentially Star Trek-related was JJ Abrams' 2009 reboot, which I still hold in high regard today. Although it's not exactly vintage Trek, the action, humour and emotional core of the franchise's essence remained. It's what got me into other Trek ephemera: the Next Generation movies and The Original Series for the most part. If Into Darkness was something of a complete and utter mess, I still appreciated the dopey tale it told, Tribble blood cop-out and all.

This would probably explain my passionate adoration for the first trailer for Star Trek Beyond, the third in the reboot series, which sees Justin Lin take over as director and Simon Pegg and Doug Jung left to pen the script following troubled pre-production.

As evidenced by my prior experience with the franchise, my vision of Star Trek has always lent more towards pulpy space adventure rather than meditative philosophy. Not that TOS was devoid of substance (its deft handling of geopolitical subject matter is now considered one of its greatest strengths), but let us not forget that it was often just as prone to excessive action (the Kirk/Gorn fight) and general silliness (those damn Tribbles again) as the Beyond trailer is hinting at.

Honestly, Kirk inexplicably having a motorbike to hand on an alien planet feels much more in keeping with the movie's campy origins than the stoic philosophising of Into Darkness et al. It's not even like the serious-minded allegories are lost amid this tirade of alien kung fu, space battles and The Beastie Boys' Sabotage. There's a pretty ominous line from Idris Elba's as-yet-unnamed villain about "the frontier pushing back".

Here, we seem to be getting a challenge to the very foundation of Starfleet, which has always suffered from a perverse paradox of righteous colonialism. An antagonist in direct opposition to that goal seems an excellent way of naturally exploring the moral ambiguity of the crew's work without having to deliver it via wrought exposition.

Besides that, the small character beats at play are promising. The Bones/Spock relationship appears to be revelling in their contradictory personalities and Scotty's reaction to the soundtrack is note-perfect. Much has been made of the song choice, with many claiming it to be a rip-off of the nostalgic tunes employed so wonderfully in Guardians of the Galaxy. This could well be true, but nothing has ever been made worse for featuring The Beastie Boys. Except a wedding reception. Never again.

Based on this delightfully offbeat trailer, Star Trek Beyond looks like a classic TOS episode expanded to a 2-hour, big-budget blockbuster. If Pegg and Jung manage to find the right balance between old-fashioned cheese and real-world import, we could be on to a winner. For now, though, let's give the movie a chance...

Star Trek Beyond is out in cinemas on 22nd July 2016