Spoileriffic Beyond review and discussion

[Graham Kennedy]

So Ian and I went to see Beyond tonight. Time for my review!

When I saw we saw Beyond, we actually went to a triple bill of all the Abramsverse movies, with Beyond starting just after midnight! So fun was had!

So...

My overall impression was that this was a really good movie! It's got a few weaknesses, a few "not quite as good" bits, but I didn't find anything in it really weak or awful.

The story... We get another comedic opening, in which we see Kirk on a diplomatic mission which goes really badly, because the people he's trying to talk to are just really grumpy. He's offering them a ceremonial gift from a nearby enemy race who wants to make peace, but it all goes wrong and he's attacked. Only, it turns out these people are all like six inches tall, so it's more funny than dangerous. I liked it, it was a nice laugh to open with.

The Enterprise has done three years of their five year mission. The crew are a bit worn out and tired, and kinda homesick. It's Kirk's birthday, and he's melancholy because it markes the point at which he's older than his father got to be. They're heading back to Starbase Yorktown, which is the newest, most advanced and by far the largest Starbase ever. There are millions of people in this thing, it's somewhat reminiscent of a Culture GSV if that means anything to you!

Turns out, Kirk wants to leave the Enterprise, and has applied for promotion to Vice Admiral. And Spock and Uhura have broken up, because he wants to go back to New Vulcan and help to rebuild the species (make little Vulcans, as McCoy puts it). Spock is even more down when he finds that Ambassador Spock has passed away, which makes him more determined to take up the burden for him.

However, a small ship arrives with a woman aboard. She says her crew have been stranded on a nearby planet when their ship crashed there. It's beyond a huge nebula which nobody knows much about. So Kirk and crew saddle up to go rescue them with the woman in tow. They go through the nebula and find the system on the other side, but sitting in orbit is the giant cloud of ships you see in the trailers. It attacks, and there's a prolonged battle.

Turns out, what they're there for is the ceremonial gift from the start of the movie - it's part of an ancient weapon that they have been hunting for for a long, long time. So they smash the ship up - and I do mean smash, like when they try to go to warm the swarm rips both nacelles off the engineering hull completely. They board and there's lots of fighting. Kirk gets the weapon and hides it before he and a few others escape. Uhura is captured along with most of the crew. The engineering hull is destroyed and the saucer crashlands on the planet.

So on the planet we have Kirk, Chekov and the alien girl in one group. She admits that she lured them there, saying the baddie Kraal had her crew captive and would kill them if she couldn't get Kirk to come. They head to the saucer to try and patch up a scanner to use it to find the crew and to retrieve the weapon, which Kirk says he hid in the saucer.

McCoy and Spock are together, limping around trying to find help.

And Scotty is alone until he meets Jaylah, an alien who is also stranded there. Turns out Kraal has done this to a few ships over the years, and so there are scattered survivors on the surface here and there.

Jaylah turns out to live in an old shipwreck, the USS Franklin. An oddity, this. It's identified as the first Warp 4 ship humans built, but it is the NX-324 (I think the number was. Something in the 300s anyway). So how is the first warp 5 ship the NX-01? I don't get it. They give a date for it, but I don't recall what it was. Scotty assumes it must have gone through a wormhole or something and crashed on the planet. Jaylah has spent years fixing it up, and with his help they are able to get it ready to fly.

Meanwhile Kirk and Chekov get to the saucer with alien girl. She betrays them, laughing that they believed her story, and calls Kraal's guys to come get them. Only Kirk bluffed her; the weapon isn't there and Chekov gets the drop on her. (Side note - Chekov gets a LOT to do in this movie.) The baddies turn up and there's a fight amongst the wreckage, which Kirk and Chekov escape.

As they walk the next morning they're caught in a trap, one of many Jaylah has around her ship, and so they're reuinted with Scotty. They also manage to get the transporters working and beam McCoy and Spock to the ship. They do make mention of the fact that the transporters are cargo only, not cleared for biomatter, but Scotty says it was "a risk" but apparently an acceptable one. I seem to think he may have tweaked the system a bit to improve it.

Meanwhile at Kraal's base his plot is revealed. He has been using captured Federation probes sent into the nebula to tap into Starfleet communications. He knows all about Vanguard and Kirk and the Enterprise, which is how he came up with the plan to lure them there. He plans to attack Vangaurd and use the weapon to destroy it. The weapon is some sort of biological thing, it emits a black cloud that disintegrates any life it touches. Turns out one of Kirk's alien crew has it hidden in her head, and she gives it over when Kraal threatens to kill Sulu. Kraal kills people by draining life force from them, and in the process he changes his appearance to take on some of the traits of the people he drains. This also extends his life.

So Kirk and co come up with a plan to raid the base and distract the guards, whilst they use pattern enhancers to beam everyone out in groups of 20 or so. Kirk rides around the base on an old motorbike he found in the ship, using a holoprojector to make dozens of copies of himself all around to keep the guards busy. Meanwhile Jaylah has a run-in with the baddie who killed her family after she was first captured and they fight.

The crew all get away, Jaylah kills the baddie, and everyone makes it out. But Kraal takes his swarm and heads to Yorktown to destroy it. They get the Franklin going and follow him there.

Scotty and Spock come up with a way to tech the tech-tech, interrupting the signal that controls and coordinates all the swarm ships, overloading them and blowing them up. But, get this, they need a modulated signal they can broadcast. So, of course, they decide to play some music. So we get a scene of the Franklin flying around playing Sabotage by the Beastie Boys at full volume as Kraal's ships explode all around. It really skirts the line between moment of awesome and fun, and moment of absurd and stupid. I think it works, but YMMV.

Kraal survives, of course, and breaks into Yorktown to release the black cloud. He absorbs a couple of humans, so looks Human now. And, it turns out, he IS human! Yes, of course, he's the Captain of the Yorktown. We get his backstory; he was a MACO who fought "The Xindi and the Romulans". With the Federation formed, the MACOS were dissolved and Kraal was given command of the Yorktown and sent into space. But he never liked being in Starfleet, because he missed the conflict and war that he'd come to live for. His ship crashed on the planet and despite sending all kinds of distress signals help never came. He figured "The Federation doesn't care about us", and came to hate it even more. Now he wants revenge, and sees the idea of everyone being united as soft and weak when real strength comes from conflict.

Kirk follows, they fight, and fight, and fight, and Kirk wins. The fight is kinda cool, as Yorktown has different areas with different orientations and different gravity directions, so they go to the gravitational centre of the station, where the gravity is weird. So they are flying all over the place as they fight.

In the course of all this, Kirk gets his mojo back and turns down the promotion. Spock gets a parcel of Ambassador Spock's few personal things, and finds that one of his only personal items was a photo of the Enterprise bridge crew. He sees just how much being on the Enterprise meant to Spock senior, and decides to stay. The picture he looks at is this one, and it's actually a really sweet moment.

With the Enterprise gone, of course, we need a new ship. We see a timelapse sequence of that ship being built - it's broadly similar to the current Enterprise but with a few details changed. But it's nowhere near a revolutionary change as from the TOS to refit, say.

So they say the Final Frontier thing, with all the major cast saying a line each, and off they go for another adventure.

What works...

- It's not yet another "Earth is in danger" plot. We actually see them out on the frontier where they're supposed to be!
- There's many good character moments. It actually has probably the best "TOS feel" of any of the new movies in that respect. We see them happy, sad, angry, we see some of what makes them tick.
- Everyone gets their moment to shine, one way or another.
- Kraal is a decent villain. His motivation... well, it's not that great. It's not PERSONAL the way Khan had a personal grudge with Kirk in ST II, but you are at least given a reason for why he's doing what he does, and it is a coherent one. So it's a big step up from Nero, and better than Khan in Into Darkness.
- The effects have really stepped up. More weird sci-fi locations (Yorktown is spectacular!), more weird aliens, just more money evidently on display.

What's not so good...

- Being on the frontier and having the TOS feel, some might think it feels like an episode not a movie. I think it gets away with it (and don't think that's much of a complaint in the first place, actually), but YMMV.
- Lots of fast cutting and stuff happening in the dark. I found it hard to follow at times.
- The Franklin may or may not make sense. The first warp 4 ship... but given to somebody after the Romulan war? Perhaps it's just a really old ship he's given? But why NX-324?
- Jaylah isn't given all that much fleshing out. Kraal's henchman killed her family, she has a lot of stuff for the crew to use, she gets revenge, that's it. I honestly think that with some tweaking you could remove her from this movie completely, and it wouldn't be much the worse for it.
- There's the usual stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense, like a nebula that's full of rocks and looks nothing like a nebula, that kind of thing. But nothing as egregious as Delta Vega, say.

I rate it 5 stars. I think it is as good as any of the reboot movies, and may well be the best of them.

[Bryan Moore]

There was nothing inherently awful about this movie, but I don't really think there was anything spectacular either, aside from the visuals of the Logan's Run-esque Yorktown. The fact that it was a more angst-driven Trek than we are used to isn't inherently a bad thing, but the Abrams/Orci universe Star Trek is already so different than what we've seen before that I can see where some fans have a hard time relating. I'd be lying if I didn't roll my eyes when it was revealed that the solution to killing the swarm was a Beastie Boys' song - only a Gen X-er could think of that. I'll likely check it out again in theatres before the run is over, but I also don't see myself jumping to watch this repeatedly like I have most of the other films. I am glad my opening day streak of Trek viewing has continued (going back to being 6 years old at Star Trek V), but I am was not ecstatic at the whole experience.

[Graham Kennedy]

Hey Bryan, nice to see you back.

[Teaos]

It's no being shown here in English so I'll have to wait for the dvd.

I am pleasantly surprised though as I was not expecting much.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

I'll be seeing it tomorrow, but almost all the reviews I've seen paint it as really good.

[Teaos]

I find it funny that on a Star Trek fan site only 1 of us saw it first day. We are the audience you'd expect to see it 5 times on the first day alone.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

I find it funny that on a Star Trek fan site only 1 of us saw it first day. We are the audience you'd expect to see it 5 times on the first day alone.

I can get antsy in crowds.

[Graham Kennedy]

I find it funny that on a Star Trek fan site only 1 of us saw it first day. We are the audience you'd expect to see it 5 times on the first day alone.

Ian and I did that literally with Star Trek 2009. Spent the whole day in the cinema watching it over and over. Great fun.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Okay, the movie kicked all kinds of ass. God, my favorite of the Kelvin timeline films. And I really liked the 2009 one, mind.

[Jim]

Kraal is done (written/acted) better than Nero, slightly, but much like him, his motivation is shaky. This makes the motivation of all three Kelvin timeline film villains basically the same: revenge/vengeance. Krall is mad, mad enough to want to kill everyone in the Federation, because when they crashed they were never rescued. That's it. They crashed on an uncharted planet in an uncharted nebula in an uncharted are of space... BUT I AM GOING TO KILL EVERYONE!!!!

:facepalm:

It is also not explained on how he went from being human, to the pointy lizardy thing, to back to human (in the movie). But that could be written off as sci-fi timey wimey stuff.

It would have been better if he was just 100% alien, 100% NOT starfleet, and was just a militant frontier species that was "pushing back" as he says. At least that way the motivation would be weak, well, suck.

I hought that Yorktown was a little overdone, but overall the effects were very good.

[Graham Kennedy]

Kraal is done (written/acted) better than Nero, slightly, but much like him, his motivation is shaky. This makes the motivation of all three Kelvin timeline film villains basically the same: revenge/vengeance. Krall is mad, mad enough to want to kill everyone in the Federation, because when they crashed they were never rescued. That's it. They crashed on an uncharted planet in an uncharted nebula in an uncharted are of space... BUT I AM GOING TO KILL EVERYONE!!!!

It was a bit more than that. He was a soldier in the MACOs, fought the Xindi and the Romulans.

(Aside - I wonder, does this mean Edison/Krall was actually one of the MACOs on board the NX-01 in season 3 of Enterprise? Because as far as we know from canon, aren't those the only MACOs who ever actually fought the Xindi?)

Anyway, he came to believe that these conflicts were a good thing, that it made Humanity strong. And he's actually not wrong; when Edison was growing up Humanity was amongst the weakest of the powers around. We'd had interstellar travel for nearly a hundred years, but human ships were small, very slow, and very weak compared to the others around, and outside the Vulcans not many even seemed to be aware of Earth.

All that changed rapidly, though. The NX class were a match for many others, and we began to become more important politically. We fought in conflicts, including one major war, in which we built hundreds of ships and fought a serious galactic power to a standstill. To Edison, this was humanity at its best, fighting and proving itself strong. He literally watched as Humanity came to be a major player on the interstellar stage, and a lot of it came about because of our ability to kick ass.

Then all that changed. The war ended, and suddenly the Earth signed up to the Federation - a multi-planet alliance. Aliens on Earth in large numbers, signing treaties, trade agreements. Alien crew appearing on Human ships. Immigration. Edison was probably a big sympathiser with the likes of Terra Prime and Paxton in the run up to the Federation.

And suddenly the military that he had served in abolished, replaced by Starfleet - an organisation that had a military role, but which primarily considered itself a diplomatic, scientific exploration force. To him, it seemed like a disaster. It seemed like Earth had given up and let the aliens take over, even surrendered to them.

Then he's given a Starship and sent off into space, where he crashes on a planet. Most of his crew killed. And he sends distress calls, over and over, which are never answered. He decides that the Federation doesn't give a damn about him - and why would it, when it's run by aliens and he's just a human?

So he hates the Federation and he especially hates Starfleet, and he wants revenge.

That makes sense to me. I will say it's not the strongest villain motivation because it's not personal - Kirk and the Enterprise didn't do any of those things to him. But they're a bit hamstrung in that respect because they don't have the long well of backstories to draw on that Wrath of Khan had since Pine's Kirk is still fairly young. But Kirk and the Enterprise crew are certainly the perfect representative of everything he resents, yes? A multi-species crew from the very organisation he hated, serving the government he thinks of as a betrayal of everything he believes. Makes sense to me.

It is also not explained on how he went from being human, to the pointy lizardy thing, to back to human (in the movie). But that could be written off as sci-fi timey wimey stuff.

Yes it is. He found technology on the planet that lets him drain the lifeforce out of other beings. In doing so he prolongs his life, but each time he does it he takes on the appearance of the people he drains. We see him do it half way through, and then towards the end.

[Jim]

I just feel that it is weak sauce, especially since it is the third in a row of basically the same motivation.

I also do not think that it is clear in the movie about the mutation and reversal. I am not sure if possibly he said what it was doing in the broken/slurry English that he was using at first... but in the end it is not clear in the film.

[sunnyside]

I finally got around to seeing the movie (a wife, kids, job, house, and dog give me an overfull life).

I did enjoy my time in the theater, and I'm liking it even more on reflection.

First, I like that it still seemed like Trek. I was really worried that it was going to be "Fast and Furious" in space, or Star Wars without the Jedi or Lightsabers. And of course it was a bit that way. However the vision that we can actually function together is back, and engineering/science was very present and vital to their success (Maybe because Pegg was writing and was also playing Scotty?)

I also quite liked that they managed to pull together the plot to explain why the Franklin was there. Perhaps because I was getting a bit worked up about all the coincidences going on and I thought on top of everything else they just threw in the Franklin to give our heros something else to fly.

Most of my complaints, and I think a lot of the complaints I'm seeing above, stem from the movie feeling really rushed. It felt like they had decided they weren't going to let the movie go beyond two hours of content no matter what it took, and they still wanted their action scenes, so other things had to be compressed or cut.

As an example it wasn't even clear to me that Jaylah killed Manas at all. I think we're supposed to assume he fell to his death, but we don't really see it. And besides the planet seeming to have a lower gravity than earth and the seeming superhuman capabilities of the mutated humans (Kralls strength and how much longer his body resisted the Abronath), there are dozens of ways in Trek to survive a fall like that. A rather anticlimactic end to the whole Inigo Montoya subplot.

Also I'd have appreciated some line about how the life support systems on the Yorktown are rigged with transport inhibitors to prevent sabotage.

They could have also spent a little more time with Krall or one of his minions elaborating on what he actually hoped to accomplish. I think his plan was to cause the collapse of the Federation and then have Earth emerge from the ashes as a local superpower. It would then make sense that he would target Yorktown, which, besides being very close to his base, was a center of diplomacy. Presumably he would then, under the guise of being some non-human species, declare war on the Federation. But he would target non-human worlds for annihilation, though presumably he'd slaughter any humans that got in his way in order to toughen up the species. Eventually seeing that being part of the Federation is nothing but a good way to have your entire bioshpere destroyed by his weapon, the Federation would break up. I'm not sure what his endgame was. Though once he "Made Earth great again" he could presumably make himself look like he previously did and perhaps stage it to look like he and his last two crewmen had survived some time anomaly and figured out how to defeat the swarm just before it destroys Earth, making himself into a hero who can perhaps seize power.

Anyway I'd have liked it if he'd spelled something cohesive like that out or if it was speculated on by the heros trying to figure out what makes him tick. We're rather just left to speculate or be confused. Though again that's not so horrible.

[Atekimogus]

Late to the party so I won't touch the overal plot - which was mostly ok. The motivation of the villain was very very weak and the "big reveal" imho totally unnecessary.

So here just the couple of things which grinded my gears "during" watching it.


Entry scene with the failed diplomatic mission. LIke in Star Trek Into Darkness I was pissed because like there...this small intro looked actually more interesting than the rest of the movie. The crew of the Enterprise doing...star trekkie stuff......no revenge plot, no mass destruction/genocide and mass deaths........horrible...I know

Third movie and OF COURSE there are reference to STar Trek III......Kirks mid-life crisis and talk over booze with McCoy (seriously?) and the Enterprise gets destroyed...of course....


The fight with the swar-ships. Seriously? Why was the Enterprise so utterly ineffective? Heck..even in TOS the Enterprise could set phaser to blast......why is it a problem that torpedoes cannot track the movements of individual ships? Just fire it into the swarm and KABOOM.....it should clear out nicely. The swarships themselves are very inconsitent...either quite easily destroyed or totally undestructable using ramming tactics........


The big window-screen on the bridge of the Enterprise appearently can be destroyed with a handphaser and people jumping through it.........that seems like a huge design-flaw to me. (And no...it wasn't because the saucer previously crashed....the screen is perfectly fine before he shoots it)


The Franklin.....did I hear that correctly? They try to achieve escape velocity via letting it fall down a mountainside? This seems so indredible stupid I am sure I must have missed something here.....can anybody point out what the whole scene was about?

[IanKennedy]

The Franklin.....did I hear that correctly? They try to achieve escape velocity via letting it fall down a mountainside? This seems so indredible stupid I am sure I must have missed something here.....can anybody point out what the whole scene was about?

They did use the engine to fly at the ground, not just let it fall, effectively adding the acceleration due to gravity to that of the engines. That said it should add a minuscule amount to a ship with even the most rudimentary impulse drive. So yes, still incredibly stupid.

It's also an example of the sort of cartoon planet that only exists in order to allow the scene to be shot and games of the movie to be made. I'll explain a little:

We start with a relatively small mountain that Kirk and Chekov can walk up with relative ease. We put a ship hidden on the top of the mountain, where it supposedly has crashed landed. Silly thing number one, how do you crash on the top of a pinnacle. Then it comes time to take off and we suddenly have a vast canyon below the ship that it can happily fall into, under impulse for at least 20-30 seconds. Silly thing number two, how deep would that canyon have to be? Vast, utterly vast, full impulse has supposedly half the speed of light. Lets see 3x10^8 (the speed of light) x 20 seconds / 2 (half C). That comes out at 3,000,000,000 metres, even if we assume that they did half or even a quarter of that it's the biggest mountain the universe has ever seen. Lets compare that with the orbital radius of the earth which is 149,597,870,700 meters (92,955,807 miles). That mountain is about a 50th of that distance. To put it another way the mountain is 42 times the width of Jupiter.

The best example of cartoon landscapes I remember has go to be Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They start out underground in the lava cave and then escape using a gravity driven ore truck. This truck then proceeds, down hill, at ever increasing speeds for a very long time. Effectively getting deeper and deeper into the mine. Lots of capers ensue but eventually they burst through the wall of a canyon. This canyon is massively deep, it take people several seconds to fall to the bottom of it and get eaten by crocks. The amount of height available here is nowhere near that of Beyond, but it does beggar belief.

The reason for this, computer games. There's got to be things in the film that can be reproduced in the game to provide a challenge for the player. The most obvious film for this is another Indiana Jones film, The Crystal Skull. The whole film seems to be one sequence after another of game challenges. Once you start to think about this while watching the film it becomes quite painful to sit through, or should I say more painful.