Star Trek Beyond

Hey you, don't watch that. Watch this! This is the heavy, heavy monster sound. The nutsiest sound around. It's Star Trek Beyoooooond!

Anybody else feel like getting up on a stage and dancing with some trumpets or whatever when they hear that title? Just me then. Still a good tune.

So the film. Nothing new.

Big ship gets decimated by some weeny bee ships. Nicely done but seen it before.

Crew crash-land on a planet and are right up against it. Seen it.

Meet a troubled individual who may just help them. Seen it.

Bit of 'buddy buddy' stuff between captain and 1st officer. Seen it.

Civilians running in peril on a big floating city. Seen it.

The one barnstorming moment of using 'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys when the swarm are all but about to buzzfuck the space station is rendered a bit twee by focusing on crew members toe-tapping and jiving along with it. Oh, and heard it. In the first reboot.

[This kind of sequence was done with more panache and oddly, more tension in Serenity. Do check it out if you haven't seen it.]

In fact, you may have noticed I'm more than angry. I'm disappointed in Simon Pegg. As co-writer and a bloody near-genius, I expected a lot more from him. The cliches are rife. The Enterprise is destroyed and then rebuilt. Someone says something about 'strength in unity'. Spock is amusingly deadpan, even after finding a little more emotion in the last film. The villain is beaten....but wait, he has one final crack at Kirky. Colour by numbers, I'm afraid.

There's another irritating point that I've just noticed, but which may have been in the other Trek reboots. Shit, maybe in myriad films of this ilk. It's a common dialogue tick - someone asks a question or makes a comment, there's a pregnant pause, then a glib punch - "That was not my intention" or "You're kidding, right?" or "Only one way to find out" and so on. These seem to be either for laughs or oral money shots.

I know this is not going to happen but I'd really like to see the crew deal with internal ship stuff. Maybe a whodunit on board, Agatha Christie style. Or some shape-shifting spy action.

But ideally it'd be with the cast of Pegg's old mates from Big Train plus Richard E. Grant as Withnail and Maggie Smith as the much hoped for screen incarnation of Cider Woman from Viz. Make something of that, you bastards!