The first Star Trek Beyond trailer has arrived, and it looks beyond terrible

 

 The first trailer for Star Trek Beyond hit YouTube today, but if the movie is accurately reflected in what we’ve seen thus far, I may not bother watching.
Ever since JJ Abrams rebooted Star Trek in 2009, you’ve had a group of die-hard fans arguing that he completely misunderstood the Trek universe, ignored its fundamentals, and wrote a Star Wars movie with mini-skirts and insane amounts of lens flare. By and large, I wasn’t one of them. I never cared for the giant Enterprise with super-sized warp nacelles and I disliked its inconsistent use of established Star Trek technology, but I thought the movie worked reasonably well — certainly better than the last TNG film, Nemesis.
Star Trek Into Darkness kicked off with interesting developments that could have highlighted the tension in Kirk and Spock’s early friendship and offset it against Kirk’s loss of the Enterprise to Captain Pike — something that never happened in the original Star Trek canon. Instead, Abrams dumped the beginning of an altogether new story in favor of shoehorning as many call-outs to the original Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as possible.

If you can beam to Qo’noS, why is anyone using starships?

The use of technology became even more incoherent: Starships that can travel hundreds of light years in minutes, transporters that beam across the galaxy, “superblood,” and phaser blasts powerful enough to push the Enterprise from a position between Earth and the Moon deep into Earth’s atmosphere were just a few of the highlights. Worse, though, it fundamentally misunderstood what made Star Trek II work.
The Wrath of Khan is a film about about living with the choices we make when we’re young. It’s about the opportunities we seize, and the ones we let slip away. Now in his 50s (in the film), Kirk doesn’t just face down a villain from his past, but his own decision to prioritize being a starship captain over becoming a husband and a father. The “no-win scenario” discussed in the film isn’t a doomed mission to rescue a freighter, but the inevitability of death itself. The final scene with Kirk and Spock works, cinematically, because these are two middle-aged men who have literally known each other for decades. Each had shaped the other, in real life and on-screen. Trying to force that same dynamic into the second movie about a young crew was doomed to fail from the start.
Star Trek Beyond was supposed to be the film that put the emphasis back on exploration, but the trailer shows very little of that promise on-screen. Watch the trailer below:

 

We see the enterprise hammered by a swarm of flechettes and at least some of the major crew using escape pods to reach a planet’s surface. It’s heavily implied that the swarm of projectiles either crippled or outright destroyed the Enterprise — in the first scene, where we see them punching through the hull, the port nacelle is already gone.

That’s not gonna buff out.

The later shot of a destroyed saucer section either shows the Enterprise’s hull or one of her sister-ships. Either this is an epic fake-out, or Abrams and crew have once again decided that the only way to serve up Star Trek to the masses is to simply copy the events of the previous films. In Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, the Enterprise (and, as far as the crew knew, the careers of everyone who stole her) was destroyed for a reason. While it isn’t as well-regarded as some of the other films in the series, the idea that the crew of the Enterprise would agree to a hare-brained scheme to help Spock if there was any chance he could have survived fit thematically with the rest of the series. Here, the Enterprise just goes poof. No explanation. No particular significance.

2 Trek 2 Spurious

The rest of the trailer looks more like The Fast and the Furious series that Justin Lin previously directed. We see aliens kick-boxing, Kirk on a motorcycle, and what look like micro-bombers strafing an unidentified planet. All with the tagline “This is where the frontier pushes back.” And then some shots of Starfleet crewmembers at what appears to be some kind of labor camp or prison (it’s not clear based on the few seconds of screen time). All set to The Beastie Boys.
It’s impossible to judge a movie based on a 93-second trailer, but the only good scene in the entire arc is the McCoy / Spock bit. Unfortunately, it looks like this movie is going to continue the worst parts of Abram’s reboot — slavishly copying some of the dialog and scenarios of the previous films, even where it makes no sense to do so, while refusing to show any the relationships that made the original worth watching. You can do an action-oriented Star Trek, maintain narrative development, and show the evolution of relationships — but that doesn’t seem to be the film that Abrams or Lin are interested in making.
At least there’s less lens flare. So far.