Star Trek Beyond

Justin Lin’s 2016 film finds the crew worn thin on a long mission, their ship torn apart above an unknown planet. Its shape comes from a rescue job. After Roberto Orci’s screenplay was set aside, Paramount brought in Simon Pegg and Doug Jung in January 2015, and Pegg’s brief was to build a western, a thriller or a heist and populate it with Star Trek characters. That is why it moves as a survival and salvage story, not a first contact problem, and why Carol Marcus, who joined the crew at the end of the previous film, is simply absent: Pegg found nothing meaningful for her to do. The aliens are rubber rather than pixels. Makeup designer Joel Harlow ran a crew of sixty and had forty six alien designs finished before production moved to Vancouver. His wife pointed out that it was the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary, so four more were built, and production kept asking. Krall’s face changed very late, at one point carrying tracking lights at the sides of his head. Part of Yorktown is real Dubai. Lin’s first cut ran two hours and twenty seven minutes. A good fit if you notice fifty odd prosthetic designs in a crowd. Not for anyone who comes to this series for a bridge full of officers arguing over an idea.