A very personal view on Star Trek Beyond
If you grew up with the original series, the new Star Trek movies are something you need getting used to. All these characters I knew for decades, looking, acting and speaking so differently alienates me. If they need to make these new movies so zeitgeisty, why not coming up with a whole new crew and a new ship? Star Trek sure has enough momentum to establish something new. It worked for Deep Space 9 and it worked for Voyager. With the latest series „Star Trek Enterprise“ they already were disturbing the canon, affronting lots of fans. Why are they doing this to us?
Sure the new movies reflect the spirit of the time with that spectacular action scenes, lots of special effects and all that cool talk, and young people may even expect all this from a contemporary film. At least my 18 year old daughter loves it.
I admit, there are quite a few things that I like about the new movie. The visual effects are great, as you’d expect from a movie in 2016. Kralls bee-like swarm fleet is an interresting concept. Starting the USS Franklin, a starfleet ship that went down on the alien planet, by plunging into the abyss is just hilarious! The alien makeup is quite elaborate and Jaylah is an interesting character. On the other hand, the story line of a disappointed former starfleet commander turning into a vindictive creature that dispirits its captives to live long over his natural live span is a bit flat and not very compelling.
But there is one thing that really catched my eye. Something I wished for a long time to see on more movies. When arriving at Yorktown station, we see Sulu beeing welcomed by his husband and their daughter. It turned out, that Sulu is a gay father. It’s just a small scene, a blink of an eye, no big deal made out of it. And that underscores it, that this is something perfectly normal, expecially if we look into the future. Today, many films broach the issue of beeing lesbian, gay, trans- or intersexual. They make it something special, and that’s eligible, of course! Nevertheless I hope to see more of this in such a casually context. I am pretty sure this will help our community to achieve more normality and acceptance.