Star Trek Beyond (BD/DVD/Digital HD Combo)

As I sit down to write this "review" of Beyond I'm listening to the soundtrack for the first time on Spotify, and I think the sentiments it's evoking are basically the same for the movie. It has all the traits of the new films but adds in far more Trek "flavoring" which seems very familiar to fans and should satisfy them even more. Far from making it more like Guardians of the Galaxy, the movie went the opposite direction, making it for fans..something I wasn't really originally expecting but may also be affecting it's box office. The 6 original films had a certain "feel". The Next Generation films had one film that felt somewhat like the older films, then 3 with their own tone. The JJ Abrams era began with a retro-original series reawakening of the Roddenberry mission statement from the series "Bible": action-adventure, but with a big budget, huge scale that couldn't have even been imagined with ST: The Motion Picture, the most epic of the original film series. Star Trek had come of age. No longer was it the bastard stepchild of the studio which was the product of complex cost-to-profit ratios that made the movies feel like glossier tv episodes. No one can say that the first two JJ movies do not have differences beyond all the callbacks to TOS however. In the roughly 2 hour run-time for Beyond, the entire world of Trek we saw in hundreds of episodes has to be distilled down from 4 hours of film. That's the entire backdrop of this new universe. It's ripe for all sorts of nit-picking just outside of the story. As such, the movies took awhile to get more quiet and intimate...to have our characters pair off, talk with each other more and really work as a team. So despite two great films in this new "trilogy", with the two over-arching themes being Kirk's development and Spock's trials and tribulations, the films were simply two very well made stand-alones. Beyond brings them both together.In his performance, Pine is now uncannily TOS Kirk. The development of Kirk is happening just as I predicted it: We have the brash, immature Kirk in ST09; the more seasoned but still petulant Kirk who acts on impulse in STID, he makes mistakes but learned from them at the end of the movie; to finally the more developed Kirk who would appear to us to be Kirk from the TV show. This is the exact impression I get from Kirk in Beyond. For all intents and purposes, he starts out in Beyond as the diplomat from certain TOS episodes, negotiating a treaty. His scenes with Bones recall similar soul searching from other movies and Tv episodes..he has gotten past the excitement of exploration and now, despite the technology and volume on a huge starship, he is feeling the oppression of being alone in deep space and encountering numerous dangers that take a toll on one's mindset: a theme that runs parallel to the other captain from Beyond: Balthazar Edison, but in a more extreme fashion. He is the quintessential crazy captain...another staple of the original series. This recognition near the end of the movie dramatically serves to strengthen our empathy with another captain who has gone rogue, but really is just a step or two away from the captains we identify with such as Kirk.Spock's story is less relevant to the film overall, but provides us with further character development as well as memorializing an icon of pop culture. That this film took time to have both a scene on Yorktown and also later in the film to honor Spock Prime/Nimoy is to it's great credit. Justin Lin's direction emphasizing Spock's "aloneness" as he came to grips with Spock's death is terrific. Quinto's Spock has a relevatory moment towards the end of the film as he realizes he doesn't want to leave the Enterprise for New Vulcan. It's one of his best acting moments.Other characters are well served and contribute to the plot moving forward but the real fun is watching them work together. This has really become a family and it appears the off-camera "team" gets along way better than the original actors. Of obvious note, McCoy gets more screen time here and is the heart and soul of many a scene.Jaylah is a welcome addition to the characters, and it's nice to see another female character take center stage. She's a renaissance woman! Engineer, ninja, tattoo artist, music fan.The plot here is not complex..it IS a revenge story so again with these things, it's the telling that's more important than the details. Is it any more or less compelling than Khan? Nero? Shinzon? Khan lost an empire and a wife. Nero, an entire world. Shinzon was emo. Krall couldn't adapt to a new way of life. He existed at the time of a great paradigm shift from a regional space culture with Earth centrism, to an interplanetary UN (ironically these points are more relevant than ever with divisive conservative movements all over the world trying to break up factions of human beings. The message of unity in this movie is so refreshing and a metaphor for the UFP itself!). He seemed to go along with it all, but when his ship crashed, and no one came to help him and his crew, he went off the deep end. His mind twisted by alien tech, loneliness and philosophical differences. Despite being able to leave at some point, his twisted mind led him to stay and plot against the UFP.Unlike some reactions to the film, I think this background to an "alien" character actually helps the film. When I saw Idris's face, I knew there would be more depth to the madness. To my surprise, Krall was in many more scenes of the film than expected, contrary to reports he disappeared in parts of the film..he is there throughout and very much an acting presence.Another thing I like about Krall and the Swarm: I'm just so happy it's not Klingons or Romulans and that both their appearance and tech are totally different. It's so different, the Enterporise is not equipped to handle an attack by so many ships at one time. It's truly an original sequence for Star Trek and rarely seen anywhere else on film. The attack on the Enterprise was much longer than I anticipated and a much better set-piece sequence than even the commercials let on. Never have we seen movement through and around the ship with such detail..crewman running through corridors seen from outside, panning, sweeping shots of relative positions of what is occurring. Yes we've seen ship destruction before, but again how was it accomplished? Surely this is better than any similar scenes we've seen before.So we have terrific character work, a good message and a good "villain". Does it pay off? Well there is a "MacGuffin". That's not a dirty word, and of course the popularizer of the term: Alfred Hitchcock, used them more than a few times. It serves well enough to provide character motives for the rescue mission and for everyone meeting up at Yorktown at the climax. It also provides us with one of the more graphic scenes in Star Trek: the torture and killing of several crewman with the new weapon and Krall's vampiric like absorbption of living beings. The main question here is a bit of a plot hole: Why does Krall need this weapon if his ships can already overwhelm the Yorktown defenses? Ultimately, he does wind up needing it because of what happens to his ships..As someone pointed out on Twitter, Beyond is the first time there is a movie plot where a black man has been defeated by white rappers. Ironically, a review of mine online for the ST: Voyager TV show episode: "The Swarm" which has similar aliens and technological connection between their swarm-like ships, declared simply jamming the frequency between Swarm ships was too easy a resolution to the puzzle...and of course they used a similar solution here, but this time with VHF 20th century classics. This is one of the weaker points of the movie though the result is an epic chain reaction. There probably is very litle science behind ships bursting into flames from sound waves unless it somehow affected the mechanism used to generate them as they shut off abruptly.The final scenes in Starbase Yorktown were more compelling. Krall's fighter chase was thrilling with some of the most spectacular visuals in Trek history, and the scenes of the fight and chase in lower gravity between Kirk and Krall were something closer to what I would have liked for Kirk's death in Generations if the fight had boiled down to fisticuffs as it did.Another one of the best scenes ever in Trek history occurs at the end of the film..a time-lapse build of the NEW Enterprise-A. Off the new beauty sails into the darkness and mystery of space.The ending re-affirms both the Star Trek family, and symbollically, the theme of unity Yorktown represents. Both multi-cultural, both working together to make a better universe.A great, though not perfect film.Miscellany:Justin Lin was a great choice for director. By comparison, the outside "action" director Stuart Baird really infused very little style or nuance into Nemesis despite making the best looking film since STTMP. Lin is no one trick pony.The "look" of the movie was darker and more muted but still had a technological glow to it. We had some of the best scenes of Starfleet and Federation world-building ever. Starbase Yorktown was a revelation. A technological wonder. The cinematography was probably the best of any ST movie.Despite a different FX company, the movie continued and probably exceeded the very real looking, solid CGI work that we saw in Into Darkness. I might give a slight edge to the spaceship work of ILM, but everything else was probably better.The "Easter eggs" were fantastic, and definitely increased my enjoyment of the film because of the 50th anniversary. My favorite was possibly the nod to "Corbomite Maneuver" and the unexpected byproducts of exploration..complete surprise of the scale of a situation.The aforementioned soundtrack. It's simply the best one since the 1980s. Nostalgia fuel.My only decision...I rated it an "A" on a poll elsewhere, but I feel it's on parallel with ST09 in overall quality, so I had to decide if it will replace that as my number 1 film in Star Trek history. At this time I'm going to put it there, though I'll make a more concrete decision after I see it in the theater again.1. STB2. ST093. STID4. STII5. STFC6. STIV7. STNEM8. STIII9. STVI10. STINS11. STTMP12. STGEN13. STV