This is not a review. How can I review a movie if I didn’t pay attention to it? And — I admit it — I did not… no, I could not pay attention to Star Trek Beyond.
It’s such a letdown to discover that what the Star Trek franchise has always celebrated as “the final frontier” is so full of familiar, unsurprising, yawn-inducing storylines, worlds, and alien races.
It’s also disappointing when special effects saturate films so completely that it has the effect of making everything seem unreal in the worst way. The crew of the Enterprise began this series with their basic character sketches based on the original series with a few surprises to spice up the mix. But they aren’t growing and expanding. Here, they seem less like well-rounded characters and more like, well… characters described in 140-characters (that is to say, a Tweet).
Bored to Vulcan tears by all of the next-to-nothingness that was so acrobatically “filmed,” I let my mind wander in some strange directions.
First I started imagining that the character of Jaylah had been on her way to star in Hellboy III — she certainly looks the part — when she crash-landed on… um… what was it called? Altoid-mint? But that idea made me sad. Because I really want to see Hellboy III.
Then, I started thinking about how much I wish the crew of the Enterprise could go back in time and save Anton Yelchin from that confoundingly terrible fatal accident that was just one of so many admirable-artist-deaths that darkened 2016.
Then, trying to cheer myself up, I decided that I should try Photoshopping Beyoncé-as-Uhura onto the Star Trek Beyond movie poster, with her standing in front of the letters O-N-D so it just says Star Trek Bey.”
And then I started daydreaming about a spinoff series, directed by Lemonade‘s Khalil Joseph, in which Bey-hura leaves all of these Enterprise idiots behind, and has kickass adventures of her own.
And at the 1-hour 40-minute mark of this thing I couldn’t care any less than I did and I turned the movie off.
But Bey-hura, directed by Khalil Joseph — that stuff just kept unfolding and was one of the best films I’ve seen all year. In my mind.