A Quasi-American “Star Trek Beyond”

“Star Trek Beyond,” starring Chris Pine as Captain James T. Kirk, at left, borrows tropes from Westerns, including the 1959 film “Rio Bravo.”Photograph Courtesy Paramount

Since space is the final frontier, it’s apt that “Star Trek Beyond” borrows tropes from dramas of that primal frontier, Westerns. Even if it mixes its metaphors along the way, those metaphors give the movie a welcome bump to the second level of meaning, since, for most of the film, there isn’t even a first.

It’s a tired movie about a tired man on a dubious mission: in his opening voice-over, Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) expresses doubts about his multi-year mission in space, saying that, if the universe is infinite, he may be “chasing nothing.” The Enterprise makes a pit stop on the star base called Yorktown, an intriguing convolution that’s the movie’s most ingenious touch: it’s an Escher city with Möbius sidewalks, a vast postmodern city of gleaming glass and light-toned metal that seems like a skein of streets and highways, overpasses and bridges held together in a loose and airy web. Its gravitational forces are omnidirectional; as they shift suddenly across invisible borders, falling down is succeeded by falling left, right, up, and whichever other orientation a place is built for.

Yorktown (which shares a name with the Virginia town where the decisive Revolutionary War battle of 1781 took place) will ultimately live up to its name as the site of the final battle of the Starfleet against Krall—for that matter, the crew of the Enterprise will make that decisive return aboard an obsolete vessel called the Franklin—and that’s apt as well. Early in the film, the words “Republic” and “Federation” are intoned like mantras to position the mission in quasi-American terms; the name Yorktown links the space combat of “Star Trek Beyond” to the existential, the primordial, and the revolutionary—the fight to retain independence in the face of a force that would snap it back in, engulf it in a dictatorial order, and milk it as a mere source of sustenance (which is depicted in a grotesquely literal way that morphs the vampiric into the cannibalistic).

The first visit to Yorktown is pacific, even lullingly placid; the swoops and loops of its gravity curves play mostly for fun, and Captain Kirk, mission-weary, applies for a desk job there. Meanwhile, though, he and the crew return to their patrols and are lured toward the planet Altamid, where an ostensible rescue turns into an attack led by Krall, a wrinkled, reptilian humanoid who vaguely resembles the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but who mounts his attack with an overwhelming barrage of fast-moving, sharp-pointed projectiles—essentially space arrows (though, because of their mass-controlled swarming, the crew of the Enterprise calls them “bees”).

The arrows rip the Enterprise to shreds, and the crew is jettisoned in escape pods, crash-landing on Altamid; there, they need to regroup, to fight Krall and his minions, and to recover the MacGuffin, a little medallion called the Abronath that the Enterprise crew members consider a mere inert relic but that turns out to be the missing piece of an apocalypse-gizmo that Krall wants to seize in order to destroy the Federation and humankind.

Altamid, however, is no stereotypical weird planet of green cheese and pungent atmosphere. It’s an unadorned and uncultivated Earthscape, strewn with sharp rocks and hulking boulders and reminiscent, above all, of the craggy settings of Anthony Mann’s classic Westerns of the nineteen-fifties (such as “The Man from Laramie” and “Man of the West”). There, Spock (Zachary Quinto) is wounded, and he’s tended to by Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), a.k.a. Bones, whose improvised medical tools are barely up to the task. Meanwhile, Scotty (Simon Pegg), alone in forbiddingly rugged terrain, is confronted by a stranger—Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), a paper-white, black-striped woman-like being from an alien species who is also marooned on Altamid—and her performance is, by far, the most intriguing and invigorating presence in the film.

Jaylah makes Scotty identify himself to her, at the point of a space gun; when he says that he’s Montgomery Scott, and adds, “Scotty,” she calls him “Montgomery Scotty,” as she does for the rest of the film. Pegg, who co-wrote “Star Trek Beyond” with Doug Jung, says that he based the character—and even the name—on Jennifer Lawrence’s character in “Winter’s Bone.” I don’t disbelieve him; yet there’s another, even more prominent influence that, for all we know, may have acted unconsciously on Pegg and the director, Justin Lin, but that’s nonetheless both conspicuous and affecting: the character of Feathers, from Howard Hawks’s 1959 Western, “Rio Bravo,” and Angie Dickinson’s performance of the role. Jaylah speaks with a blunt intensity that’s sharpened with a constant tone of coolly theatrical irony, just as Dickinson does in Hawks’s film. Boutella’s controlled balletic, ferocity is also akin to Feathers’s own calmly forthright stride. The likeness is locked in by Jaylah’s meeting with Kirk: he introduces himself as James T. Kirk, and, for the rest of the film, she calls him “James T.,” echoing Feathers’s mode of addressing the protagonist of “Rio Bravo,” John T. Chance, played by John Wayne.

Jaylah’s presence and Boutella’s performance are fortunate, as the rest of the doings on Altamid are of a nearly relentless dreariness, not least because the battles on which the heroes’ survival depends could have been borrowed, costumes and actors aside, from more or less any superhero movie. The script doesn’t offer much in the way of martial inspiration, and Lin does nothing original with the flinging of bodies and the flash of guns. It isn’t until the crucial showdown on polygravitational Yorktown that the director struts his stuff; there, his kinetic imagination, stoked by geometrical wizardry, creates a battle sequence of unpredictable lurches and launches, high-energy gyrations that are rendered all the more exciting by the vast open spaces separating the ribbons and whorls of Yorktown’s architecture.

It’s no spoiler to say that one of the key weapons that the Enterprising fighters deploy, while flying the rickety Franklin in the face of Krall’s unified swarm of metallic “bees,” is a blast of the Beastie Boys’ 1994 song “Sabotage,” drolly called “classical music” by the twenty-third-century warriors. The victory is itself a strange echo of the movie’s own prevailing ethos. Throughout the film, both Kirk and Spock confront their own legacy—Kirk as the son of George Kirk, who died in battle, and Spock as the son of, well, the Spock—which provides the movie with its key emotional arcs, the personal struggles that underpin the political ones. A climactic depiction, in an archival photo, of the original “Star Trek” cast pushes in the knife of nostalgia and gives it a poignant twist. Personal and public legacies ultimately unite to bring about the unambiguous triumph of good over evil and preserve the Republic. The self-celebration of a legacy property’s sequel has rarely been framed in such starkly civic terms: the link between the historical continuity of the American federation and the personal continuity of family is the cultural continuity of “Star Trek” and pop music—and, for that matter, of classic Hollywood. Buy a ticket, keep America safe and free.