Star Trek Beyond: Final frontier is as engaging

Cast: John Cho, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Idris Elba 

Rated: 6/10

Good, old Star Trek. Oh! The good old Captain James Kirk and the ever enigmatic Mr Spock. The bumbling Scotty, the disagreeing doc, the Starship Enterprise. It’s all delectably the same.

Those school days heroes who used to go into space — the final frontier — where no man has ever gone before, are back and how! The groovy call from the past does well to stand up to gizmotic spatial mounts of frenetic present-day cine activity. The beauty of this edition of Star Trek is that it is still the same, still languorous, still drama-oriented both at the space and the inter-personal levels and it is still as engaging as ever before.

This time the mission is to save themselves from a rogue soldier who has the technology to destroy the Enterprise and much of the Federation with an ancient tool of destruction. He used to be a Fed too, though that was long before he got disillusioned and formed his own destruction machine with abducted races and slavery.

It is a juncture in which BFFs Spock and Kirk both are contemplating leaving the ship but just then the battle for survival emerges from nowhere and the story gets sucked into fast-paced and beautifully choreographed space fights. The 3D is in good hands as is the injection of hi-tech gadgetry which does well not to overcome the original strain of the Star Trek series and is happy to only aid the proceedings from behind.

A good mixture of drama, emotion, action, comedy and a journey you have grown up on and were wanting to revisit. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 24 July, 2016