tek's rating: ¾

Star Trek Beyond (PG-13)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 2016, but I didn't see it until 2021. Captain Kirk is trying to broker a peace between two alien races (only one of which we see) by presenting one of the races with a peace offering from the other. But the aliens don't want it, because they're too suspicious of the aliens who offered it. So Kirk takes the offering back to the Enterprise. After that, the ship travels to a new starbase called Yorktown, for a sort of shore leave, I guess. Kirk is getting tired of space travel after three years of it, and talks with Commodore Paris (Shohreh Aghdashloo) about a possible promotion for him to vice admiral. Meanwhile, Spock learns that his older self, Ambassador Spock, has died. He considers leaving Starfleet to take up the elder Spock's work on New Vulcan.

Before long, an alien woman named Kalara shows up in an escape pod, begging for help from Yorktown to rescue the crew of her crashed spaceship on a planet in the middle of a dangerous nebula. The Enterprise goes on the rescue mission, but is attacked and destroyed by an alien swarm of small attack ships, and the saucer section crashes on the planet. Most of the crew had evacuated in escape pods, but were captured by the aliens, who are led by a man named Krall (Idris Elba). Scotty wasn't captured, and he soon meets an alien woman named Jaylah, who rescues him from some of Krall's people before they could capture him. The two of them begin working together. Meanwhile, Kirk, Chekov, and Kalara try to find Krall's base to rescue the rest of the crew. It turns out that the whole reason for the attack was that Krall wanted an ancient weapon, the very thing Kirk had tried to give to those aliens from the start of the movie. Once he gets it, he plans to use it against Yorktown and then apparently the rest of the Federation. So our heroes have to stop him. Oh, and McCoy and Spock are also on their own, trying to find survivors, and Spock is injured.

Okay, I guess the one major spoiler here is that the Enterprise (NCC-1701) was destroyed, and at the end of the movie construction is begun on a new Enterprise (NCC-1701-A). That happens much sooner in the reboot than it did in the original series of movies. Other than that, I don't want to spoil any more details of the plot, except of course the good guys win in the end, and both Kirk and Spock decide to remain with the Enterprise rather than taking on new pursuits. But plenty of cool stuff happens throughout the movie, some of it involving "classical" music. And I guess I don't know what to say without spoiling anything I don't want to spoil. I enjoyed various aspects of personal drama (especially the scene where Kirk says "One year older..."), as well as the action, and humor, and nods to previous events in the Star Trek franchise. I do want to mention that I liked this movie slightly more than the first reboot movie, but less than the second one. Of course, that could be a trick of memory; mine is incredibly poor, and all I have to go on is how I happened to rate each movie at the time that I saw them. It's possible my appreciation for this movie was hindered by my own emotional issues, depression and whatnot, so that it might deserve a higher rating than I gave it. But it's still a pretty solid rating.


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