‘Star Trek Beyond’ intense and funny, but doesn’t boldly go anywhere new

First a Star Trek Beyond personal note. I am a huge Star Trek fan. So it was a major disappointment when the series producers decided not to screen this for the media. Instead, they invited select people to a marathon and I managed to secure an invite. So I drove to Seattle and sat in Pacific Science Center’s IMAX theater from 4:30 until after midnight and caught the first two reboot films in 2-D and Star Trek Beyond in 3-D.

It’s a ton of fun to see such brilliant movie making and superb effects on a screen the size of a six-story building.

The first of the reboots is plain old Star Trek. It was a brilliant premise and — much to our delight — producer/director J.J. Abrams broke all the Federation rules and took the series where no one dared go before. It is the most fun I had in a theater in 2009 and received my pick as the year’s best picture.

It opened my Star Trek day and was followed by 2013’s pretty good Star Trek Into Darkness.

The evening ended with Star Trek Beyond. It takes Kirk, Spock and crew into a nebula at the edge of explored space where they encounter a race seeking a device — which Kirk just “happens” to have — that will allow them to destroy humanity. The reptilian aliens attack in waves of small ships that can slice a spaceship into pieces.

The Enterprise crew ends up stranded on the planet housing the aliens and battling for their very survival.

Abrams still produces but turned the director’s chair over to Justin Lin, who did two of the Fast & Furious movies. It’s written by Simon Pegg — who plays Scotty — and Doug Jung. Pegg’s previous writing includes the wonderfully funny Shawn of the Dead.

While Star Trek Beyond is fairly dramatic and quite intense in spots, Pegg and Jung (TV’s Dark Blue) manage to pack the film with gobs of good humor. Even better, the cast — Chris Pine Zachary Quinto, Pegg, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, John Cho and the late Anton Yelchin — has great chemistry and definitely enjoy working with each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all love the acting, but this is Star Trek, and what matters almost as much as a good story and cast chemistry is the effects. Lin — like Abrams — loves using them and like his predecessor, is very good. There are some pretty intense battle scenes and effects that dazzle the senses.

Star Trek Beyond is not beyond good, and doesn’t boldly go where Star Trek hasn’t gone before, but it is pretty good and ends up the second best of the three.

This story was originally published July 21, 2016 at 1:11 PM with the headline "‘Star Trek Beyond’ intense and funny, but doesn’t boldly go anywhere new."