Star Trek Beyond Movie Review

To any connoisseur of the original Star Trek television series, the sight of Captain James T. Kirk in a torn shirt will feel as familiar as family. (The character had a bad habit of ruining gold uniform tunics in his frequent fights.)

So when the actor Chris Pine - who plays Kirk in the current series of rebooted movies - says, "I ripped my shirt, again," after his peace offering to a delegation of tiny, gargoyle-like aliens goes anticly awry, the in-joke, which opens Star Trek Beyond," hits on all cylinders: aliens; good intentions thwarted; violent conflict; and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of winking, self-aware humor.

The cutaway, which shows Kirk staring into a closet hung with several identical replacement tops, is priceless.

That opening rimshot sets the tone for what follows - an action-packed, fun and funny thrill ride into a cinematic nebula that may be uncharted for the crew of the starship Enterprise, but that will be comfortably recognizable to both diehard Trekkers and those who only beamed on board once producer J.J. Abrams took over the helm with the 2009 film. (Abrams, who directed the first two newStar Trek films, has relinquished the captain's chair to director Justin Lin of the Fast and Furiousfranchise, who maintains Abrams' balance between respect for tradition and the restless need for innovative storytelling.)

As for the controversy over the fact that Sulu (John Cho) is shown to have a male life partner in the new film - played by Doug Jung, who wrote the screenplay with actor Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty - that's a nonissue. The only question anyone should care about is: Can Sulu do his job? And the answer, as the helmsman says to Kirk after being asked whether he knows how to fly a broken-down, jerry-rigged replacement ship when the Enterprise runs spectacularly, shockingly aground, is snarkily appropriate: "Are you kidding me?"

That attitude of cocky self-assurance is in full - if sometimes sublimated - force here, even when things are looking most dire for the Enterprise crew, who quickly find themselves lured into a cataclysmic ambush by a new villain named Krall (Idris Elba, all but buried beneath a Halloween mask of hideous prosthetics), on a planet where their only hope is a solitary alien resistance fighter.Read more