Star Trek Beyond: Best of the Rebooted Series

    I went into Star Trek Beyond with very low expectations.  My beef has been that the franchise has put aside the vision of the future, trading it in for zero risk plots.   The Crew of the Enterprise represents the Cops, while the Klingons and Romulans represent the Robbers, led by a really evil leader.  Then the Cops and Robbers shoot at each other, and the Cops win.   Whoopee.  That has been the Star Trek plot for years.

    This movie is different.  The Enterprise encounters beings they have never met before, hearkening back to the original show when we didn't know the Klingons and Romulans so well, and weren't sure what they could do.   But the entire premise of Star Trek is to explore the unknown, so I was getting bored with the previous movies in which the same bad guys were seen over and over and over again.  In Star Trek Beyond, there are some new characters, and you can't be sure if they are good, evil or somewhere in between. That's the way it should be when you encounter a new world!

If you're going to seek out strange new worlds, then it's about time the Enterprise finds some.  Hurray!  So who are they, and what do they want? Are they peaceful?  Or not?

    In fact, this one is so unique, that I will definitely have to see it again.   There were some things I did not understand at first.  For example, I never did figure out what kind of threat is posed by the civilization the Enterprise encounters?  Do they need a secret weapon, or what?  Why weren't they already able to overrun the Federation decades ago?  But in any case, let's just say that the bad guys are much more interesting than previous villains, though still too one-dimensional at times.  If Kirk is not 100% the good guy at times, then the bad guys should not be bad 100% of the time either.  

Definitely some new people for the Enterprise to meet!

Plenty of special effects to please the kiddies.  

But more importantly, the chemistry has started to work between Kirk, McCoy and Spock.  Up to this time, Jeffrey Quinto's Spock has been cranky and middle aged, but in this movie I started to see some of the subtleties of Nimoy's character.  Spock's crush on Uhura, featured in one of the previews, still makes me groan, but at least now Spock is starting to depend on his relationship with McCoy and Kirk in order to develop something really great by working together. Similarly, McCoy is a crabby right wing throwback, but he started to win us over a little bit this time.  

Spock has started to realize that he needs McCoy and Kirk in order to be fulfilled.

No, Star Trek Beyond is not perfect.  They need to concentrate on making the bad guys believable, and creating better story lines, but this is definitely the best of the rebooted Star Trek so far.