After many months of not writing anything Star Trek related, the month of July has brought about some excitement and spurred me back into Gene Roddenberry's universe. First, it was the new movie: Star Trek Beyond.
Even before me and the family sat in the theater to watch the movie, my son and I got a promotional cup full of pop to go with the experience, good or bad.
In my opinion, the movie was pretty good, albeit scripted off a lot of borrowed stuff from the other films. The destruction of the Enterprise was seen in both Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek: Generations, but they put their own unique and believable twist on their version of events.
The main antagonist, Krall, who is really a starship Captain named Balthazar Edison, is a good blending of villains seen before. Take a little of Ahdar Ru'afo (mostly his "immortality cheating") from Insurrection, mix in a bit of Khan (for being abandoned) from both Space Seed and Wrath of Khan and add a dash of a few others along the way (those two really stick out for me). With that, you get a nasty adversary that you almost feel sorry for, in the end.
I get the impression the actors who played the crew of the intrepid starship Enterprise had fun playing their roles again. There was an obvious chemistry that came through in their performances and the interactions between each other felt like....family.
Another thing I noticed was the amount of screentime each of them got, except for the now late Anton Yelchin (for whom the movie was partially dedicated to, Leonard Nimoy was the other). Although his scenes made a pretty good impact on the story, just not the same balance as the others, from my perspective.
However, one of the standout moments was McCoy's first aid technique on Spock, injured on the planet Altamid.
For me, the star of the show was the U.S.S. Franklin. I was a fan of Enterprise when it first aired and watch the odd rerun when I could (now, it's on Netflicks) and seeing a ship from this era on the big screen is a huge nod to a show I think was cut too short in it's run. Although the back story given onscreen seems solid, there are big holes on how it fits into the Kelvin (the name adopted for Abrams' reboot series) timeline. Minor continuity issues that could be resolved at a later date, I suppose.
Overall, a good movie and scripted as a standalone episode, so people who haven't seen Star Trek before could jump right into the middle of things, with only a few explanations needed to fill in the gaps. But, it could have also been a standalone movie, with no connections to Star Trek and delivered a good time as well.
