Chris Pine is back as Captain James T. Kirk.
Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is bored. A regular Angela Chase, he fills his Captain’s log with long sighs. Three years into a five-year assignment steering the starship Enterprise across the galaxy, it’s all just become so ho-hum, so hum-drum for him. I’m right there with you, James T.
Kirk’s ennui breaks in Star Trek Beyond when the ship crash-lands on a distant planet, scattering the ensemble cast into micro-hives of ones and twos. Competent but heavy with dutifulness, the script by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung puts everyone in a place on this rock and gives them a purpose — a reason to go from point A to point B. But there’s none of the joyful, swashbuckling sense of adventure evinced in the film’s predecessors, nor a compelling case made for the stakes: Supervillain Krall (played by Idris Elba, regrettably covered in rhino-hide-like prosthetics) is a real drag, and his superweapon, the Abronath, sounds like something jaunty and tartan Scotty might pick up in a Highlands gift shop.
This third film of the franchise reboot is the first to be directed by Justin Lin, who took over the Fast & Furious series in 2006 and promptly sent down the assembly line four superjuiced machines of loving mayhem. (He replaces Trek reboot architect J.J. Abrams, who in the Hollywood game of franchise musical chairs hopped to another Star with last year’s The Force Awakens.) Lin lavishes attention on the massive-scale stuff, but the human side — the tending to these tiny animate beings we’ve been watching for 50 years — feels less carefully considered.