Film review: 'Star Trek Beyond'

“Star Trek Beyond” begins with Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) sulking in an empty bar aboard the USS Enterprise, halfway through a flagon of Saurian brandy and a five-year exploratory mission to make deep space peace. He murmurs about finding his purpose, by which, as a good American boy, he means finding something to fight.

Happily the cosmos soon obliges. The Enterprise is attacked by a swarm of thorn-shaped alien mini-ships and overwhelmed, like a juicy bug in a flight of swallows (or Pine himself on the Comic-Con red carpet).

The baddies are led by Krall (Idris Elba) who refutes Kirk’s offer of truce with the snappy, Kim Jong-unian retort, “The Federation is an act of war.” Well, the real act of war is covering Elba’s pulchritudinous face in a pearl-inlaid carapace of makeup – Benedict Cumberbatch didn’t suffer this treatment when he Star Trekked “Into Darkness.”

After the Krall attack, the crew of the Enterprise crash lands in a scatterplot on the planet Altamid where they explore anew their idiosyncrasies. Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto), still reeling from the death of Leonard Nimoy, continues his endless two front battle: to maintain logical order in an infinite universe and to keep his sideburns and eyebrows properly arrowed without use of a mirror.

In “Star Trek,” there are the out-and-out heroes and then there are people who talk funny, a crowd-pleasing throwback to Gene Roddenberry’s ’60s, where broad cultural caricature was wanted and desired. There’s the southern Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), full of people and objects to loudly damn. Scotty’s (Simon Pegg) Aberdeen burr is perhaps the last bastion of accent where you can diminutize a woman by calling her “lassie” and completely get away with it. Chekov (Anton Yelchin) speaks in a peanut buttery Russian intonation that is simply irritating.

For women, there’s Uhura (Zoe Saldana), her dress cut a centimeter below the level that would appear lascivious, and Altamid-native Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), an alien stranded after Krall murdered her parents and used them as a non-renewable energy source. She squats in an abandoned starship vessel and uses it as a chop shop/invention lab. She’s fashioned a clever holographic device that makes things appear three times when they should only appear once – like the “Hobbit” films. She’s full of gumption and malapropisms, at one point clarifying for the panting Scotty: “I know what is engineering!”

“Beyond” is directed by Justin Lin (the helmer of the late model “Fast & Furious” films), who is always wondering if a shot wouldn’t be better if canted 45 to 60 degrees one way or another. Like Kirk on his “Great Escape”-inspired motorcycle, the plot zips right along.

Less successful is the screenplay from Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, who appear to have written the script by using Bartlett’s quotations like a flipbook (when not relying on the Scottish vernacular). Thus Krall and Kirk fight each other mostly with poorly-supported rhetorical statements: “There is strength in unity!” “Unity is not your strength; it is a weakness.” After the battle of koans there is a more straightforward intergalactic climax (zero gravity, grimaces). As Bones says, as stolidly as possible: “Fear of death keeps us alive.” And “Beyond” is a fine enough episode – the franchise lives.

• • •

“Star Trek Beyond” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13. Running time 2:02. Visit www.cinemawest.com.