Star Trek Beyond: 10 Best Moments
Best use of a Beastie Boys song ever?
What a relief it is that, despite a relatively divisive marketing campaign, Star Trek Beyond turned out to be a rock solid follow-up to Star Trek Into Darkness, certainly besting it in many areas and proving that the series will be just fine without J.J. Abrams serving as director.
It's a movie full of insane action as presented by Fast and Furious director Justin Lin, plenty of heart and humour by way of Simon Pegg's pithy script, and also a ton of welcome nods to the original series for long-time fans.
Regardless of how you feel it compares to previous Trek films, it's hard to imagine many fans of the series not enjoying this fun, visually stunning journey, which leaves the franchise in strong stead moving forward.
Here are the 10 best moments from Star Trek Beyond...
10. Sulu Is Gay... And It's No Big Deal
Much has been written in recent weeks about the revelation that John Cho's iteration of Sulu is gay, and even the original Sulu himself, George Takei, expressed disappointment in the choice, as he felt that it implied his Sulu was closeted, when he intentionally played him as straight.
This of course completely ignores the fact that these Trek movies take place in their own separate timeline and continuity, but even so, the only remote nod to Sulu's homosexuality comes early on when the Enterprise parks at Starbase Yorktown for a breather. Sulu meets up with his boyfriend/husband and young daughter, and the two are briefly seen walking with their arms around one another.
It's 20 seconds out of a 122-minute movie and absolutely doesn't affect the film negatively in any way, nor does it feel overly forced, and if there hadn't been so much publicity about it beforehand, most viewers would probably just accept it without much thought.
More movies should have the courage to depict these relationships and to do so without drawing a tokenistic sort of attention to it.