‘Star Trek Beyond’ Is Pleasing Popcorn-Movie Mediocrity

STAR TREK BEYOND

It’s rare, now, that a summer blockbuster stands alone. Tentpole filmmaking is given to us in regular instalments, the latest edition in a stream of endless iterations on a familiar IP. In that environment, Star Trek Beyond is a perfectly fine film. It needs never pretend to be its own movie, to reinvent a formula, only be the latest adventure in an ongoing serial. The fact that the third film in the reboot’d universe —and 13th Star Trek film— never seeks to shock nor stand apart seems like a wise choice: its feelgood parade of sentimental fan-servicing making for a pleasing popcorn-movie mediocrity.

Here, screenwriters Simon Pegg(!) and Doug Jung boldly go where we’ve gone many times before: to a final frontier filled with derring-do, adventure, sexy alien ladies, a bellicose race to thwart, an Enterprise to be destroyed, and a new Enterprise to be built. It tips its cap from its opening narration: three years into a five-year mission, the ol’ crew are bored shitless; like a band on an endless tour, their dream job has lost its lustre in the face of an ongoing Groundhog Day. This repetitious blur, Chris Pine’s Cap’n Kirk laments, is starting to feel “episodic”.

And, so, this is the episode where Pine and Zachary Quinto’s Spock both start to get restless in their jobs, as they grapple with existential angst: Pine facing an imminent middle-aged birthday that’ll make him older than his dad ever lived to; Quinto shaken up by the death of the timeline-hopping OG Spock (a meta plot-point which gives Star Trek Beyond a sense of real-life mourning; this the episode where the late Leonard Nimoy is officially, collectively grieved). Ultimately, this is the episode where they lose their mojo, then get it back.

They do so by getting attacked by Idris Elba’s evil Federation-hating monster-man, crash-landing on a foreign planet, getting separated, banding together, coming up with a plan to thwart the villain by each speaking a line in order, then performing an act of heroic rescue at the final horn. There’s endless scenes where our heroes —here joined by Sofia Boutella’s albino warrior-woman, a sole survivor of her race living in the ruins of an old starship— have to sneak past Elba’s clueless guards; sequences of little tension and no real threat, less like spy-thriller tropes, more like Wizard Of Oz homage.

Those new-millennial, dude-ish, Snyderist buzzwords of rebooting —dark, gritty, heavy— get no play here. Star Trek Beyond is brightly-coloured, briskly-paced, and light as a feather. There’s lovingly-designed space-worlds —from a man-made space-city utopia, to a planet filled with mountains, forests, floating spores, buzzing insects— and maybe a few too many scenes of shifting gravity. Pegg, Karl Urban, and the late Anton Yelchin totally ham it up; the jokey banter and terrible accents rolled out in homage to the old TV show’s cheesiness.

And speaking of cheese: there’s that great action-movie cliché where the villainous Elba, once the power of a magical MacGuffin is finally in his hands, patiently performs a full walk-through of his diabolical scheme, explaining every detail to a nodding Zoe Saldana. You know, full well, as he talks of the imminent destruction of the Federation, that this plan will come undone; that he’ll be thwarted by our heroes banding together, strength found in togetherness. You know that the day will be saved, and that, having survived, Pine and Quinto’ll be over their mid-mission malaise, ready to return for another adventure. After all, they are under contract.

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

In the ’90s, Whit Stillman was cinema’s foremost chronicler of the ‘urban haute bourgeoisie’, mannered and moneyed Manhattanites navigating the social engagements of an Ivy League upperclass. This makes him, then, a perfect match for Jane Austen; especially given, in his classic 1990 indie Metropolitan, Austen’s works were discussed by his characters. Taking a little-loved, late-period epistolary work, Stillman has authored a comedy of manners that’s big on the comedy: Love & Friendship showing a sparkling wit that makes the whole a quiet delight.

Where most period-pieces —be they based on classic lit or penned contemporaneously— are the story of fundamentally good people battling the unforgiving strictures of society, Austen’s story of letters was written from the pen of Lady Susan, a grand egotist, callow flirt, and top-shelf manipulator; she making the mores of the day bend to her will (“facts are horrid things,” she laments) whilst being regarded as a charmer of “captivating deceit”. She’s played, brilliantly, by Kate Beckinsale, whose press tour behind what’s, really, the role of her career, has played out as an extended fuck-you to a film biz that —Michael Bay especially— has barely employed her talents.

Love & Friendship is filled with actors relishing their roles; especially Tom Bennett, whose turn as good-nature buffoon —a kind of Regency David Brent— feels a lot like a breakout turn. There’s a delightful sense of theatre at play; with the characters billed, on screen, with titles and pithy reductions; and all the social wrangling or moral dilemmas played up with a sense of performance, old-fashioned society itself a gay charade. The story takes its cues from its lead character: there no scene, herein, that cannot be bent towards sharper wit, more incisive comedy.

HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT

In 1962, François Truffaut —the 30-year-old filmmaker who’d become the goldenboy of world cinema with his 1959 debut The 400 Blows— came to Los Angeles for a meeting with one of his filmmaking heroes, Alfred Hitchcock. In the US, Hitchcock was regarded as a carnival showman, but the tyros of the French nouvelle vague regarded him as a master of the form. The conversation between old artisan and young acolyte became the basis for the 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut, a seminal cinematic text that put craft —camera, composition, cutting— to the foreground.

Half a century on, Kent Jones’ documentary hopes to find the story behind the book; to unearth as much recorded material of this long-ago meeting-of-the-minds, a summit between two filmmakers dead for over three decades. But, once he’s dug out the logistics of back-in-the-day, Jones must turn elsewhere. And, it’s there that Hitchcock/Truffaut finds its own voice. And it does so, surprisingly, through the tired convention of the talking-head.

A host of contemporary filmmakers show up to speak on the influence of the book, and of Hitchcock. And, in doing so, people like David Fincher and Olivier Assayas articulate greater thoughts about film grammar, about theatrical cinema. This, effectively, feels like a continuation of the original conversation, making Hitchock/Truffaut a companion-piece that earns that status.

THE SECOND MOTHER

The Second Mother’s title refers to the way teenaged Michel Joelsas views Regina Casé, the maid who’s lived with his upper-class São Paulo family for the past decade. She’s left her own life in Northern Pernambuco behind to raise him; she at once provider of maternal love, confidant, and co-conspirator; the soft-touch parental figure who stands at odds with his actual mother, Karin Teles. Teles is an interior designer, socialite, and cold matriarch; her husband, the stoned, diffident Lourenço Mutarelli, is an architect dawdling through days and daydreams. They’re not old money, which makes their employment of a host of servants something that triggers their liberal guilt. So, they like to think of Casé as ‘family’; even if, unlike their son, they don’t treat her that way.

That progressive idealism is put to the test when Casé’s headstrong daughter (Camila Márdila) —who was left behind when she moved South for work— arrives in São Paulo to sit entrance exams for local university. Márdila takes this decree of ‘family’ at face value, and accepts every hospitality extended to her; trampling over old lines of class distinction, divides between upstairs and downstairs. Anna Muylaert’s film wears its themes openly, and obviously, in its drama, but The Second Mother plays with warmth and humanity, for all involved; buoyed by a host—especially Casé, Márdila, and Joelsas— of excellent central performances.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

When Embrace Of The Serpent closed Melbourne’s Spanish Film Festival earlier this year, some random dude in the crowd got up and, unprompted and unwelcome, started proselytising the legalisation of ayahuasca. It seemed a little ironic given that the fictional psychedelic flower at the centre of the film is, in the narrative, little more than a MacGuffin; the empty lure stringing two separate 20th-century colonialists down the Amazon on quixotic vision-quests half a century apart.

Ciro Guerra’s film is shot in high-key black-and-white; the endless greens of the Colombian jungle made muddied greys, light reflecting on the water turned bleached-out, harsh. This vision evokes early daguerreotypes and ethnographic films, and Embrace Of The Serpent is based, in part, on the journals of early Amazonian explorers. Where these stories, historically, have been told only from the interlopers’ perspective, here the main character is the indigenous shaman (Nilbio Torres in his youth, Antonio Bolívar in his old age) recruited, twice over, 40 years apart, to guide white men deep into the jungle in search of literal/spiritual healing (and/or money).

The journeys are told in parallel, as history repeating; some of Guerra’s most artful choreography coming when he moves between the two stories without cutting, only turning to gaze on the opposite bank of the river. As Embrace Of The Serpent heads downriver, further into the jungle, it moves deeper into the horrors of colonialism: the genocidal practices of rubber plantations, the religious madness of delusional missionaries.

Guerra’s film mixes verisimilitude (it features nine different languages on screen, and is populated by indigenous natives) with parable: the spirit-guide the last surviving member of his tribe, looking for the last remaining tree of its kind. And when, finally, the psychedelic revelation comes —in a burst of Kubrickian colour— it reveals not healing powers nor the truths of existence, only the folly of man, the limits of experience, and the finality of extinction. The film’s long, strange trip leads to a short, strange trip, where sound and fury signify either everything or nothing, depending on who’s doing the telling.