Because you asked: some thoughts on Star Trek Beyond

I was asked on my Tumblr thing what I thought about it, because I didn’t like the trailer at all (I said something like “I just saw this trailer for a generic sci-fi action movie, but everyone was wearing a Starfleet uniform.”)

I was really disappointed by it, and here are some of the reasons why:

Let me start out by saying that I enjoyed a lot of it. I loved the relationship between Spock and McCoy, I thought the swarm of whatever those ships were was really, really cool, and the Dyson Sphere starbase thing looked amazing. All the performances were solid, and the effects looks great.

But with just a few very small cosmetic changes, the story could have been any generic sci-fi action movie produced in the last 20 years.

I really didn’t like that there was this amazing female character (who could keep a fucking STARSHIP HIDDEN for years while she survived on a hostile planet) who turned into The Girl For Kirk To Save the instant the boys showed up.

I hated hated hated *hated* the whole Sabotage thing.

The whole film was massively overdirected. The camera moves were indulgent and distracting, totally unnecessary more than once, and disoriented me.

There were, like, three? climaxes in the thing and by the final one I just didn’t care and wanted it to be over.

When we got to the message about strength through unity, it felt tacked on and preachy and unearned.

Do we really have to keep destroying the Enterprise?

I could go on, but I’d probably get into nitpicky stuff. Maybe I’m outside the demo now, and it’s not the movie’s fault that it didn’t deliver what I wanted. I think that if it was a generic sci-fi action movie, it would have been fine (I still hate the way a strong, competent, ass-kicking female character becomes the damsel in distress when the boys show up, though). But it’s supposed to be a Star Trek movie, and just like we have expectations for a Star Wars movie or even a Fast and Furious movie, I think movies should fulfill the promise of their premise. Beyond was a Fast and Furious movie in space, and that’s not what I wanted to see.