10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek has never really been about the future. It’s about people of today in a fantasy future. Roddenberry’s description “The vessel is a kind of magic carpet/with scientific basis and jargon-- but no less magical for it,” was written in his 1974 “Starship” concept for Filmation, but it could just as easily apply to the USS Enterprise. But where possible its makers did go out of their way to try to make the setting as futuristic as the practicalities of time and budget allowed. Irwin Allen shows like Lost In Space or The Time Tunnel might be chock full of surplus contemporary hardware, but Star Trek built what it could for its strange new worlds.

Towards that end, attempts were made to avoid depicting things like clothing closures, wristwatches, and food preparation, reasoning that just as a zipper would be alien to people in the 17th century, such things in Trek’s time would be alien to us. But starting with Star Trek II appurtenances of our times increasingly snuck into its far-flung future … to the point where the people of the 23rd and 24th centuries seem to have fetishized the late 20th.

So when Kirk finds a motorcycle on the crashed USS Franklin, heaven forbid it’s anything but a contemporary make. At least Kirk’s bike seen in 2009 was a futuristic model. It’s not product placement, as the "PX70" motorcycle is heavily customized for the film. So one wonders why the filmmakers made this choice. The obvious answer is they think the audience can’t get involved in the story unless it constantly evokes our familiar world, from familiar objects to popular music like Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.”

Underestimating your audience is dumb.