bjarvis | Star Trek Recovery

We saw the latest movie in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek Beyond, on Sunday. General review: Not bad, to my surprise.

I hated the first movie. Beyond what I thought was a calculated snub to Gene Roddenberry and his vision, it simply had so many internal contradictions from bad script writing that watching it makes me cringe even as the endless lens flares make me nauseated. I'm willing to accept some contrivances for the purposes of science fiction (eg. warp drive, artificial gravity, etc.) but I can't ignore stunningly obvious problems (eg. Spock watching the destruction of Vulcan as though he were sitting on a nearby asteroid rather than in another star system several light-years away).

Star Trek Into Darkness was a bit better but tried far too hard to shoe in elements from The Wrath of Khan. It had a couple of nice twists but again it fell down where the physical universe just wouldn't cooperate with film-making: if the Enterprise was crippled some 230,000km from Earth and so close to the moon (visible in the background), it was more likely to fall to the moon than Earth. Even if it did fall towards Earth, it would take days to drift into the atmosphere rather than less than five minutes. I could go on for several pages more, but you get the drift.

Star Trek Beyond had better timing and some good plot twists. We also had some relatively good character development so a few characters finally seemed to be fully-fleshed people instead of two dimentional cardboard replacements of actors from the original TV series.

There were many obvious consistency issues once again. Nebulae are not as dense as shown, but that wouldn't generate the risk factor needed to further the plot or offer an explanation why only the Enterprise could go on the rescue mission.

And if Kirk's shipwide broadcast explained they'd be completely cut off from Starfleet, how did Kull's communications enable a modified SOS outbound, or monitor Starfleet communications & movements inbound? For that matter, how did he get the encryption keys to decode their communications? Surely they haven't been using the same keys for 100+ years!

Jayla's camoflaging of the USS Franklin was clever, but no one else noticed the ship was missing? Did Kull suddenly forget where he parked?

But worst of all: Starbase Yorktown. Seriously? What a horrifically bad design! Having ships fly *into* the infrastructure via corridors through civilian-occupied sections of the station rather than dock along the perimeter? I like the artistic aesthetic of being able to watch ships come & go from the street or parks, but it's an incomprehensibly bad design from a safety viewpoint, especially since damaged ships may not have sufficient control to stay within the flight corridor.

And revolving interlocking rings of structure? And waterways held together with forcefields? This place is one power failure away from complete destruction from its own design.

And a single point of failure for the ventilation system?!

Yorktown is a case study in how not to do things.

And finally, the biggest mystery of all: Why does anyone keep giving James Kirk ships? Has he ever returned one intact? Seriously, I would not lend the man a pen, let alone a car.

Still, it was overall engaging and I can close my eyes for the most egregious issues. And it seemed much truer to Gene's vision than the prior two installments. I think this one could even earn his endorsement if he was still alive. Well done.