Justin Lin’s third reboot film strands the crew on a rock and lets them bicker, which is the best use anyone has made of this cast. The villain is a blank and the action is cut too close, but the company is good.
Three films into the rebooted Star Trek, Justin Lin takes over from J.J. Abrams and does the sensible thing. He makes an episode. Kirk is three years into a five-year mission, bored of the routine, and has put in for a desk job; then a distress call takes the Enterprise into a nebula, a swarm of small ships tears it to pieces, and the crew spend the rest of the film scattered across a rocky planet trying to find each other. It is the loosest and most likeable of the three, and it has almost nothing on its mind. We have decided not to hold that against it.
The script by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung understands that the cast is the point. It splits them into pairs, and putting Spock with McCoy is the best idea anyone has had for these actors. Zachary Quinto’s Spock, bleeding from a wound in his side, walks miles across scrub with Karl Urban’s Bones, who treats him for shock and irritation in roughly equal measure. Urban has been the quiet asset of these films from the start, and here he gets a whole strand to himself. We laughed more than we had at either of the previous two, and most of it was Urban muttering at a Vulcan.
Pegg has also written himself a partner. Jaylah, played by Sofia Boutella under white make-up with black markings down her face, is a scavenger living alone in a wreck, and she is the freshest thing here: quick, guarded and unimpressed by Starfleet. Sanja Milkovic Hays dresses her in salvaged kit that looks worn rather than designed. Chris Pine plays Kirk lower and calmer than before, a captain who has stopped performing, and Anton Yelchin’s Chekov spends most of the film at his side. The film is dedicated to Yelchin, who died before it came out, and to Leonard Nimoy, and it handles both quietly, in a photograph and a card at the end.
Thomas E. Sanders has built Yorktown, the starbase where the first act happens, as a city inside a glass ball, its streets curving up and over so that a tower on one side hangs above a park on another. It is the best new place these films have given us, and Stephen F. Windon lights it clean and bright. The planet is greens and greys under low cloud, with a ship half-buried in it. Michael Giacchino’s score reworks his own theme and, late on, lets the old television fanfare through, which did to us exactly what it was meant to.
The villain does not work. Idris Elba plays Krall under heavy prosthetics, growling about how the Federation has gone soft, and for most of the film he has no reason we can see for anything he does. The reason arrives late and we will not describe it, except to say it does not carry the weight the film asks of it. Joe Taslim gets one good fight as Krall’s lieutenant Manas, and Lydia Wilson has nothing to do as Kalara beyond delivering the plot. Uhura and Sulu are captured early and spend too long standing in a cell.
Then there is the cutting. Four editors are credited, Greg D’Auria, Dylan Highsmith, Kelly Matsumoto and Steven Sprung, and the action has the feel of it. The swarm attack on the Enterprise should be the centre of the film, and the idea is good, thousands of ships moving like bees. But Lin shoots it from inside tilting corridors, in close, and cuts every couple of seconds, so that we could not tell which way was up or where anyone stood. We felt nothing except noise, and then, once the ship was down, relief that the film had stopped shouting. Lin’s Fast & Furious films kept the geography of a chase clear; here he loses it.
The old series had a moral problem every week and talked it through. This one has an argument about whether unity or strength wins, stated by both sides and then settled with a fight. It is not trying to be a film of ideas, and there is no point being cross with it for something it never promised. It is trying to be a Saturday teatime adventure with a large budget, and at that it succeeds for most of its 122 minutes.
See it with someone who knows the crew and will enjoy watching them get on. It carries a 12A, the bickering is the best of it, and you will have forgotten the villain’s name before you reach the car.
