Star Trek is Now Just Another CGI Action Movie

By James Nelson

Okay, so the new trailer for Star Trek Beyond is out. Now, I usually can’t stand it when people jump onto a two minute cut of a new movie and make rash and undeserved statements about it. It is genuinely hard to tell how good a movie will be based on that, and when I say good I’m talking about being enjoyable. I could tell watching the Terminator Genesys trailers that the movie was going to be nothing like the originals, but I had no idea whether I would enjoy it (I didn’t). The trailer for Star Trek Beyond, however, tells me everything I need to know. Star Trek as we know it, is dead.

So the trailer opens up with a monologue from Captain Kirk. “We got no ship. No crew. How are we How are we gonna get out of this one?”

We see this in the sequence.

The Enterprise is unsalvageable burning refuse on a distant planet on the frontier of Federation space … and the five year mission has just barely started. The Enterprise is dead, and fittingly enough, Star Trek may have died with it.

I’m not going to bother screenshotting the rest for you. If you want to see it, here’s the video.

Star Trek has always been an entertaining show, but it was always one that attempted to be poignant and relevant. I’m not opposed to action, in fact outside of scifi, action movies are my favorite genre. They’re fun and provide a lot of entertainment, but Star Trek is supposed to me more than that. It’s a show that teaches about racial diversity, economic theory, imagines places where technology can go, and the perils of that technology. The planets they visit in the series serve as a metaphor for the human condition, even when it’s a silly old west world. The stories almost always served a purpose (like when the Enterprise discovers an old Federation observer has used Nazi ideology to take over a planet, in violation of the Prime Directive).

The show added depth to the characters that movies can seldom do, but what the Star Trek movies have always done is make an entertaining story that also teaches like the show. I get that they’re not mega-hits like Star Wars, but they were never meant to be. Star Trek has always been a low budget wonder. They made the first six movies for less than what it did to make Star Trek Into Darkness when you combine the budgets. Star Trek is not a tentpole action movie, but by God, Paramount is going to keep trying to make sure that it is, and until they stop, Star Trek is going to just be a scifi version of the Fast and the Furious franchise (which is probably why they hired it’s director for it). Until they stop, Star Trek is dead.

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James Nelson

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