10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

The JJ Abrams-directed Star Trek movies were box-office successes but not super profitable given their — for a Trek film — relatively high budgets. For the third installment, Abrams yielded the director's chair to Fast & Furious franchise director Justin Lin.

Of the three “Kelvin timeline” films, Lin’s 2016 Star Trek Beyond was the least controversial among the franchise’s fandom. Finally, Kirk was a seasoned commander and not a hot-head, Spock was not prone to emotional outbursts at the drop of a hat, and McCoy finally got to have some of that classic bantering with Spock that fans have been jonesing for since the original cast bowed out in 1991’s The Undiscovered Country. Even Uhura and Scotty had meaty parts, and while Sulu and Chekov were not as well-served, they weren’t sidelined.

Despite these improvements, it under-performed at the box office compared to its predecessors.  Despite some epic set pieces, many viewers felt the film’s scale was slight. And, paradoxically, it came across as more “safe” and perhaps less ambitious by being less controversial. While the film suffers from fewer overall dumb moments than its predecessors, where it does go dumb it goes there in a big way. 

One might say it goes “Beyond” them in terms of dumbness that hurts the film.

I’ve groused about Trek’s comic book portrayal of space in the past, but the so-called “nebula” (identified as a “Nekro Cloud” in Cinefex Magazine #148) here takes the cake. It’s dumb as a box of, well, rocks. It’s not a nebula; it’s a freaking wall of asteroids.

Even as an asteroid field, it makes no sense. Gravity works, and a bunch of giant rocks moving slowly about one another are going to gradually congeal into larger and larger bodies. There’s no way they’re going to remain a set of rocky “chompers” a la Galaxy Quest. To paraphrase Gwen DeMarco’s assessment from that film, someone on the Enterprise should have said ” I am not doing it! This movie was badly written!” 

Chompers aside, a point is made that it takes the Enterprise to go through this barrier because it has the best navigational system in the fleet. So how do our heroes get the beat-up, comparatively ancient USS Franklin through without a hitch?

And this hazard is so dumb it’s no barrier at all. Once the Enterprise arrives on the Altamid side there are stars visible in almost all directions, which means this isn’t some rocky bubble around the planet, it’s some preposterous “wall” suspended between Yorktown and the planet. But if we don’t suffer from “two-dimensional thinking,” then the obvious solution to this so-called barrier is just to fly around the damned thing, making the entire premise false.