Star Trek Beyond (2016)

STAR TREK BEYOND  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Justin Lin
    Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban,
    Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin,
    John Cho, Idris Elba, Sofia Boutella
The Starship Enterprise blasts off into an unstable nebula, because, like, why would you want to blast off into a stable one? There they encounter much danger, the ship is destroyed, the crew is scattered, and the fate of the Federation once again hangs in the balance. After an impressive reboot (thanks to J.J. Abrams) and a satisfying transition (thanks to Leonard Nimoy), the franchise has settled into a comfortable B-movie groove, or a B-movie groove with an A-movie budget: a formula story with plenty of action and characters we've spent 50 years getting to know and appreciate. The romance is incidental this time around, except for the discreet liaison between Spock and Uhura, and they spend most of the movie apart and not speaking to each other. (A passing shot of Sulu and his apparently happy family suggests an enlightened attitude in Starfleet toward same-sex relationships. The movie doesn't make a big deal out of this. It's just there.) There's a new character (and potential crew member), an alien warrior named Jayla, who has a joking, combative chemistry with Mr. Scott that you wouldn't mind seeing developed in future episodes, and that could happen, if Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, continues to work on the scripts. The chronically hot-blooded Kirk barely gets to leer at anybody this time, but he's too busy swashbuckling and zipping around on a motorcycle to do much leering, anyway. It's the last Starfleet mission for Chekhov (the late Anton Yelchin), and Nimoy appears fleetingly as an image on the younger Spock's hand-held video device. One of them, at least, got to live long and prosper.