Review

Nearly all action, almost no story. Star Trek Beyond is perhaps the most uninspired and unoriginal Star Trek film ever made, as while Star Trek V: The Final Frontier may have been infinitely worse in just about every way, at least that story was original and certainly not without inspiration; drug induced inspiration perhaps, but inspiration nonetheless. The way in which the bland unoriginality of this film stands out most is with the destruction of the Enterprise. While a somewhat pleasant surprise to see so early in the film, it lacked the emotional resonance of seeing the Enterprise destroyed in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek VII: Generations, despite the clear attempt to be an homage to both. Likewise, the entire character of Krall also seems to be an homage to (or perhaps rip off of) Star Trek IX: Insurrection's main antagonist, as both Krall and Ru'afo attain drug-induced immortality at the expense of others, leading to a disfigured appearance. Like the previous film, too much of this film's story relies on nostalgia for past Star Trek rather than carving out a new, exciting story.

Which is especially a shame, as Krall was the most promisingly original concept for an antagonist that the Kelvin timeline has offered up so far; sadly wasted on mediocre scriptwriting. You'd think a marooned starship captain who is a veteran of the Xindi and Earth-Romulan wars surviving for 100 years using alien technology and developing a deep loathing of the Federation's political philosophy would make for a more compelling villain, but Krall somehow managed to be even more bland than Nero. Chief among the reasons why is he's given almost no screen time with which to articulate his anti-Federation political ideology and as such his motivations seem profoundly half-baked and his evil plan feels laughably impulsive for a person with over a century of wisdom under his belt. "Oh look, a random artifact I can make a bio weapon out of to attack the Federation with! Just what I've been waiting 100 years for!" Really? There were so many ways for a person of his means to use the considerable arsenal at his disposal to wreak havoc on the Federation in more calculatedly effective ways.

Part of the reason why Krall gets so little time to become a compelling villain though is it seems the story's authors felt for some stupid reason that it would be more dramatic if his background wasn't revealed until the end of the film. This, in addition to almost completely destroying the value of such a cool backstory, also creates a series of awkward contradictions to resolve. For instance, why does Krall speak an alien language if he is human? And for that matter why does the distinction of language even matter in the age of the universal translator? Moreover, why is the Yorktown so much more advanced than any starbase seen on other Star Treks? None of those questions rise to the level of continuity errors, but they certainly stretch the limits of fan rationalization.

Likewise, the whole film should leave you wondering what happened to Krall in the prime timeline. Since he was marooned before Nero split the timeline, presumably Krall was dispatched by someone other than Kirk in the prime timeline's version of 2263. Perhaps by Captain Pike and original Spock. If that's how it went down, then since the Enterprise wasn't destroyed during the prime timeline's version of that incident, perhaps Pike prime and Spock prime got more time to learn about Krall's anti-Federation political philosophy before they dispatched him. That sounds like a great idea for a story. Maybe they should've made a movie about that instead.

Overall between the issues with the plot logic, the underdeveloped antagonist, and the film's general blandness, this film leaves much to be desired. Even Kirk complained about it all feeling routine ("episodic") in his captain's log, a joke which applies I think more fittingly than the authors intended. That said, there are some things to praise. The destruction of the Enterprise was visually spectacular for all that it was devoid of comparable emotional resonance to the previous films' takes on it. The parallelism with George Kirk presiding over the doomed Kelvin's evacuation and James Kirk presiding over the doomed Enterprise's evacuation was nice, particularly after framing it around Kirk being now a year older than his father was when he died. And it was nice to see Leonard Nimoy's death worked into the plot with the offscreen death of Spock prime making young Spock question his place in Starfleet. But those details aren't enough to make up for the film's flaws relative to the other Star Trek films. While still a very entertaining film, all but one or two of the preceding twelve Star Trek films were better than this one.