10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

Jaylah’s light refraction trick hiding the crashed USS Franklin is more for the benefit of the audience than the story, allowing for a dramatic reveal of the ship and its mountaintop perch. But hiding the ship in this manner doesn’t make a lot of sense in these circumstances.

Given Krall and company crashed on Altamid aboard the ship they surely know its whereabouts. So, given it’s a known wreck, why does Jaylah hide it? Sure, maybe the drones flying the Swarm ships wouldn’t pay attention to a missing shipwreck, but the moment Krall or his minions Kalara or Manas noticed it was gone, you’d think they’d look to the bottom of the impossibly high cliff to see what was left of it. The fact there’s no wreck there would instantly signal something fishy was going on and maybe draw them right to the spot. There’s something to be said for hiding in plain sight. 

Circumstances imply that the planet is littered with shipwrecks from which Krall gets victims to suck dry — examples being the three aliens from which Jaylah rescues “Montgomery Scotty” — but the film fails to depict a landscape littered with such derelicts. In their absence, vanishing the Franklin would doubly stick out like a sore thumb.