I like it.
The first trailer, for a movie that’s out in seven months, doesn’t have to do a lot. The idea is to whet the appetite, to remind the viewer of who these characters are and the world they inhabit.
That’s what the trailer for Star Trek Beyond does.
Yes, it’s loud and brash and full of explosions and stunts and derring do.
And I think that’s exactly right.
Star Trek is supposed to be fun. The original series was wild and over-the-top and, above all, entertaining. Star Trek was full of fun — flying leg kicks, ripped uniforms, fist fights, places we’ve never been, things we’ve never seen. Ignore Gene Roddenberry’s stoned-out 70s revisionism where he started to believe his own bullshit and decided he was a prophet and a philosopher, not an entertainer.
You know what I see here? “Wagon Train to the Stars.” Quite literally — frontier world, natives who say this is where the frontier ends, fistfights and canyons, the harsh realities of the wild. That’s what Star Trek is. That’s what this trailer captures. Yes, it’s louder and brasher than Gene Roddenberry could ever do in 1966, because technology has come a long way and Paramount has more money to spend on this movie than he ever had. It’s doing exactly what Roddenberry and Robert Justman and Herb Solow did in 1966, just it’s doing it the way we do it now.
This looks entertaining. I got warm fuzzies from this trailer. I’m confident I’ll enjoy the movie. 🙂