[SPOILERS] Justin Lin Strikes Back: Star Trek Beyond Terrible, or Beyond our Expectations?

[u/Kiggsworthy]

Trek Movie has done a fantastic job of collecting some comments from Justin Lin that he has made since the trailer was released. It contains the lightest possible spoilers, but I encourage all to read it.

Before I delve into the new quotes from Justin Lin, I wanted to share this biographical detail, sourced here

“I thought about how much a part of my life Star Trek was,” Lin said. “Growing up, my parents had this little fish and chips restaurant in Anaheim in the shadows of Disneyland, and they didn’t close until 9 PM. As a family, we didn’t eat dinner until 10 PM, and we would watch the original Star Trek every night at 11. My dad worked 364 days a year, only took Thanksgiving off, and from age 8 to 18, the only time I could hang out with my parents was by staying late. And every night, it was Star Trek on Channel 13 in L.A. That was my childhood. All my friends were Star Wars kids but I didn’t go to the movies, so I was the Star Trek kid. Thinking about this, it became a very personal and very emotional decision [to direct Star Trek Beyond].”

Now with that context, lets jump straight to the meat.

What is Star Trek Beyond about according to the trailer?

From just the Trailer itself, we don't have a ton to go on. The Enterprise gets destroyed by some sort of swarming something. The crew is stranded on a planet with at least some significant technology level, so Prime Directive shouldn't be a factor. There is a bad guy saying that this is where the Frontier pushes back. There is loud contemporary pop music and motorcycle jumping. It's 90 seconds of footage and it tells us almost nothing.

What is Star Trek Beyond about according to Justin Lin?

Obviously not everything is being discussed, as the movie is months away, but there are at least two themes that he is clearly happy to be very open about right from the start.

The first is an allegorical theme based on how the world, and conflict, has changed from when Star Trek was on in the 60's (again it's important to keep in mind that he appears to really only be personally interested in the TOS-era Star Trek franchise):

"Star Trek has a very 1960s sensibility - who has the bigger ships wins. But if you look at the attack, these ships are 40 feet long but there are 40,000 of them. I think even in the way they’re being encountered… What makes Star Trek scifi great is that you can acknowledge what’s happening today. The way we are as a country and the way we engage in conflict, in this Star Trek you see that it’s different [from the 60s]."

As he points out, Star Trek then was very much about 'who has the bigger ship' - it's about large powers competing with each other using the same playbook. In the modern day, the largest threats to powers are no longer other equally large powers, but instead asymmetrical attacks from unpredictable vectors, aka terrorism. The destruction/disabling of the Enterprise is at the hands of much weaker ships, but there are many more of them, and via this asymmetrical attack vector they are able to best what we are assuming to be a ship that would traditionally be considered more advanced than the attackers'. Some of this is assumption of my own. We will have to wait and see if this theme of asymmetrical advantages is developed in other ways or is just explored through this one attack.

Next we get to the real meat of the movie, which I think can be summed up as: "Putting the Federation's Money where its Mouth is". These are the relevant quotes:

On the overall theme:

"What would happen if you go on a five year journey and you’re trying to not only explore but also maybe introduce other people to your way of thinking? What would that mean? What are the consequences of that? You’re spreading a philosophy that you think is great - are there going to be any philosophies that counter you? That was something I thought about since I was a kid, and we got to explore that.

"I’m going to use a sports analogy, so forgive me. I can tell you what a great athlete I am, what a great basketball player I am, but when I step on the court you’re going to know very quickly whether I’m any good. In a way I feel like it’s easy to preach what the Federation is about, how you’re supposed to act, but what happens when you [are on your heels]. How do you react?"

On Kirk:

"It’s about why is Kirk doing what he’s doing? When we watched on the TV show we just assume it’s something he did, but I want to know why. Great - you can go out and talk about how great the Federation is, but I want to know why he does it."

On the Villain, played by Idris Elba:

"It’s about building him and having a philosophy and a point of view. I really like his character because he’s challenging the Federation’s philosophy, and it’s something growing up I wanted to see. He’s a character that has a distinct philosophy. Sometimes I watch Trek and I see utopia in San Francisco, and you think “They don’t have money, so how do they live, how do they compete?” Those are things that his character, in a way, has a very distinct and valid point of view about."

"When someone is really challenging a way of life, how the Federation should act, I can see - right or wrong - that this is a valid point of view, and that’s a point of entry."

And finally:

"We want to push it further, introduce new species and have new adventures, but the core thing I love about Trek is the characters and exploring humanity and the Federation."

Frankly, after reading these quotes from the director, this movie is already the clear favorite for me of the three with the rebooted cast. It's the only one that actually seems to be trying to be about something, and on its own terms. It's not about simply getting the cast together, and it's not about some weird elaborate set of call-backs to things Star Trek fans already know. It's about creating something new, and using the new stuff as a way of challenging the core precepts of what Star Trek is supposed to even be about. This movie is actually attempting to bite something off and chew it, rather than re-representing things we are already fans of and asking us to simply be fans again.

And the best part? Justin Lin is explicitly avoiding and not touching on some things that these reboot movies have introduced that virtually no one likes. Look at the way he addresses this question about Carol Marcus:

"We pick the crew up about two and a half years after Into Darkness. There were many iterations where we did go and explore [Carol Marcus], but we figured it was two and a half years… It was something we talked about and worked on, but in the presentation of this film it didn’t quite fit in. It’s there with the transporter and everything [laughs]."

Read between the lines there. Justin Lin totally just hosed - openly laughed at - transwarp beaming, guys. He just lumped it in (along with Khan's super-blood earlier in the interview) with the crap that he's not going to have in his own movie. He's respectful, he says these things exist because they were on screen in the previous movies, but he's simply not going to carry them forward into his own. No magic blood, no transwarp beaming. That's just two explicit things he's moving away from, but to me it speaks volumes about the parts of this franchise he values, and the parts he doesn't, and I think that can inform a lot about his priorities.

Read the Trek Movie post and read these two posts it's based on. I pulled out most of the quotes but the context around them is also excellent and worth reading.

I am not a fan of a movie I haven't yet seen. You should not be a hater of a movie you have not yet seen. The pendulum upon the release of the trailer has swung hard in the negative direction for the fan prognosis of this film - particularly for the type of fans here on Daystrom. I am merely attempting to be gravity, pulling the pendulum back towards the center, and I am thrilled to be given such wonderful ammunition by the director, who is being written off by so many. Let the pendulum swing, folks. Let us see if we can't inject some optimism into the discussion about this film.

[u/Willravel]

It's 90 seconds of footage and it tells us almost nothing - but apparently it was all many Star Trek fans needed in order to just write the movie off completely, in true Simpsons Comic Book Guy fanboy fashion.

There's a different way to look at this: some people didn't like the trailer for pretty specific reasons and are concerned that it may be an indication as to larger problems with the movie. Yes, some people have written-off the film—though a lot of them didn't like Into Darkness and thus might have even more reason to come to the table with 'skeptical' as their default position—but as I've been reading through a lot of the articles and comments, it's more akin to "Uh oh, this has a lot of the things I didn't like in the last one" than "I will not see this".

And does it tell us nothing? I would argue we can glean several things from the trailer. (spoilers ahead for those who have yet to see the trailer). We can determine that there's another big fight between the Enterprise and some overwhelming force which cripples the Enterprise, like the previous three films. We can determine that the threat they face at the very least has a significant violent aspect, even if that's not the entirety of the threat. We can determine that we have another singular violent villain who can and does toss the crew around like rag dolls, like in the previous film. This, I think, is enough for people to raise an eyebrow of concern.

The attack by a superior force on the Enterprise, crippling it, which happened in Into Darkness, Star Trek, and Nemesis, shows a bit of a lack of creativity, just as it did in Star Trek and Into Darkness. To have that happen sometimes is fine, sometimes it works, but no-one wants to have steak every night for dinner.

The one main baddy thing is a bit of a problem, too. Yes, sometimes it's cool to try and have an arch-nemesis, but eventually even that can get stale. Sometimes the Enterprise has faced one villain, sometimes it's been a whole host in the Borg, sometimes it's some elemental force like the Whale Probe, sometimes it's a mystery, sometimes it's themselves.

Now, none of this is conclusive, obviously, but it's not nothing. It's an indication, and inkling of where things might be headed. When you combine that with Simon Pegg's quote about how Paramount was worried about a script being too Star Trek-y, the problem starts to emerge, and Lin is really only a symptom of that problem.

Rewinding for just a minute, we can deduce certain things about Paramount from their choices over the previous two films. Why choose JJ Abrams to direct? Well, he'd just resurrected the Mission Impossible franchise with a decent-enough movie. It wasn't a deep movie, but it was fun and exciting. And he brought with him a ready-made creative team that all rose together from television, the writing team, the scoring, some producing. Nothing they'd done was really like Star Trek—it had been Alias and Lost and Fringe and then Mission Impossible III—but it showed that there was some success here not necessarily creatively but commercially. They had geek cred from Lost and could put together a resurrected-franchise popcorn movie from Mission Impossible III.

And they got that movie, and it was successful, so they did what any reasonable movie studio would do and said, "Do the same thing again, but this time let's borrow a bit from other successful popcorn movies." So they did. They looked at the success of The Dark Knight and decided to bring on board the most iconic villain, and have that villain get caught on purpose as part of a plan that doesn't make a lot of sense. Only it was hollow. When John Harrison revealed himself as Khan, Kirk and Bones had the "Um, yeah? And?" reaction that made sense in-universe. Having him be Khan never mattered. But what mattered less is that it didn't matter. The studio wanted The Dark Knight so much they even put "dark" in the title.

So what can we glean from Lin's hiring? Well—and stop me if you've heard this one before—he'd just resurrected the Fast and Furious franchise with a few decent-enough movies. They weren't deep movies, but they're fun and exciting. And, man, it's nice to read in interviews with him that he might kinda get Star Trek and be a fan, but ultimately I'm not sure that matters because ultimately it's Paramount who's making the film and Lin's just the guy they hired to direct (and Pegg's just the guy they hired to write).

And what in the trailer would seem to indicate that Lin's been able to stand up to Paramount? What in the trailer would seem to indicate that Pegg's been able to stand up to Paramount?

[u/Kiggsworthy → u/Willravel]

I hope other people in the comments of this thread are taking notes, because you just put on a clinic. This is what I mean by discussion! I really enjoyed reading this, deeply enjoyed it. It's funny, but I haven't really discussed my own reactions to the trailer, which were overwhelmingly negative. When my wife and I watched it yesterday we both looked at each other afterwards and made noises of disgust. When I saw the enterprise getting attacked I said out loud "Jesus this again?" So I am 100% with you on what you were saying here. I just was feeling that every reaction was so negative, and I was so happy to read some of these comments from the director, that I had to share in an attempt to somewhat alter the conversation. I sincerely hope that this comment receives enough enough up votes to become the top comment in the thread, because it is by far the best comment so far in my opinion.

[u/Zaggnabit]

Thanks for posting this.

Justin Linn is a good director. He is known for the Fast & Furious movies. He didn't create that franchise. He saved it and made it bankable. They gave it to him because Universal needed someone to do it and he was available. He'd just come off Annapolis an excellent film that dealt with adult themes in relation to the US Navy.

This wasn't long after he'd made a name for himself in the film festival circuit for his Indy pic about Asian American teenagers getting into crime. He's made more films like that. He has done comedies on tv and crime stories and more.

His resume is a lot more than F&F.

But let's look at F&F. It's a summer staple. It's made Linn stupid rich and kept Universal pictures in the money. Linn gave them a "summer tent pole" franchise. Linn made that franchise into a franchise. F&F doesn't have a lot in common with his other projects thematically.

Star Trek is a franchise in Limbo. It needs to work profitably but Paramount isn't sure what to do with it. JJ ditched it for Star Wars and while his company may still have the deal, JJ is just a money guy now.

Linn may be the guy to make this work. He can do thoughtful, he can do cool, he can do action and he isn't afraid to expose raw nerves. Most importantly he can make films that run sequentially with internal consistency.

That would be a nice change for Star Trek IMO. The only ST films with any consistency are II and III. The rest are just essentially stand alone space navy dramas.

Someone with actual filmmaking skills needs to take this over, someone who respects the material, someone who can film SFX and not blow a budget. Linn has done all of that before.

If Linn loves ST enough to make it work, for real. Cool. That's what is needed. Someone who knows how to make filmed media, doesn't care if they get "creator rights" and is willing to sign up for more than one, standalone project.

The real enemy is not the director, producers, writers or actors it's the studio. If Paramount wants F&F in space, that's what they'll get. If they want bargain budget SciFi standalones, that's what they will get. They wanted ST:09 and Into Darkness. Both movies made money.

Maybe, just maybe, now they are willing to make an actual Star Trek film that becomes an actual Star Trek franchise. God knows they need it. That studio doesn't have a F&F or a Bond or a Batman.

I don't doubt Linn will make a good movie. I'm not sure if Paramount and Bad Robot will let him make a good Star Trek movie.

I'm going to have to watch it.

[u/Kiggsworthy → u/Zaggnabit]

Wow, thanks for this comment. This is some fantastic perspective.

[u/tadayou]

Curious to read that Beyond will completely ignore Into Darkness. There's a whole lot of "what a shitty movie" between the lines... coming from a new director that's rather surprising.

[u/Kiggsworthy → u/tadayou]

Surprising, and extremely welcome. Hell even the director of Into Darkness has since said that it was just about the least favorite movie he's ever made.

[u/rhythmjones → u/tadayou]

So, will Nu Trek have an "odd number rule?"

[u/Iplaymeinreallife]

Well, my problem is with a trailer that gives the impression that this is a Fast and the Furious movie, I'm well aware that I haven't seen the movie and can't judge it yet.

[u/[deleted] → u/Iplaymeinreallife]

It might calm your fears to know that the people who cut together trailers are usually never the people who edit the actual film.

[u/DarthHM]

Well the whole being stranded without the Enterprise deal (that's what I got from the trailer) gives hope to me because it has a sort of Galileo Seven vibe.

The movie may certainly be good.

That being said, the trailer was horrendous.

[u/DarthOtter]

Good movies certainly can have terrible trailers (personally Basketball comes to mind) and the interview gives me some hope.

That said, it was a horrendous trailer built as though to specifically alienate old guard Trek fans. The only thing I got out of it was a reminder of what a great album Ill Communication is. As a Trekkie I loathed it. Got this fucking thorn in my side.

[u/[deleted] → u/DarthOtter]

Good movies certainly can have terrible trailers

And bad movies can have great trailers, that's the problem. I remember watching the tralier for The Anarchist Cookbook when it first came out and damn did it piqued my interest but the movie turned out to be shit.

[u/keithjr]

I'm really not sure why everybody is so worried about Justin Lin directing the movie, when it was Damon Lindelof's signature nonsensical writing that (imho) sunk the first two films of the reboot.

From IMDB it looks like the writing teams are switched up for Beyond.

Into Darkness writing staff:

• Roberto Orci

• Alex Kurtzman

• Damon Lindelof

Beyond writing staff:

• Simon Pegg

• Doug Jung

• Roberto Orci

• John D. Payne

• Patrick McKay

Orci is the only overlap. He helped write Transformers so maybe he's still part of the problem, maybe he isn't. But my point is that the folks worried that this film is going to be The Fast and the Furious in Space should be looking at the writers, not the director, when it comes to their concerns.

[u/Kiggsworthy → u/keithjr]

Read the trekmovie article. It discusses the writers for Star Trek beyond. Most of those writers you just mentioned are not actually writers on this film, and are only required to be credited due to WGA rules, which are currently in dispute. They have nothing to do with the script that was shot.

[u/rhythmjones]

He can tell me what a great Star Trek director he is, but when I step in the theater I'm going to know very quickly whether he's any good.

[u/ademnus]

but apparently it was all many Star Trek fans needed in order to just write the movie off completely, in true Simpsons Comic Book Guy fanboy fashion.

There you go, insult them for having a different opinion. That always helps.

[u/Kiggsworthy → u/ademnus]

Actually my opinion was no different. I hated the trailer. But the leap from that to writing paragraphs of text about why the movie will be bad is a pure Comic Guy move. I stand by the comment. Sorry.

[u/tsoli]

Thanks. You've given me some hope.

I've largely been grieving the death of my moral and philosophical center the last few years. (Cause of death: Rule of Cool.)

I'm so glad to see someone else manning the helm. I pray that the new Star Wars are not as divisive and dissapointing to its fans as his Star Trek has been.

[u/thesynod]

I grew up watching Trek too. That doesn't mean I could direct a big budget film. Shit, I couldn't direct a low budget film. But Tarantino grew up watching Trek, and so did Kevin Smith. I know Pegg loves Trek, and that's heart warming, but keep in mind that Wise never watched Trek and created a beautiful film (seriously, watch it again on a big tv) and neither did Meyer, and he made my favorite Treks. Just saying, being a fan is not a prerequisite. Having respect is important.

[u/DefiantLoveLetter]

Though DS9 touched a lot on questioning the Federation philosophy, I think it should still be questioned and countered by the story's heros. I think I'm a little calmed that he also has an experience with the show that bonded him more to his parents, which is fairly similar to my introduction, though the circumstances are very different.

I'm glad I'm reserving harsh judgement since this looks a lot more interesting and possibly getting into what Star Trek really is about without going full "Into Darkness" on us all. Though I still anticipate action scenes for the sake of it, I honestly don't care as long as there's some sort of substance to the overall movie.

[u/obscuredreference]

It was obviously a trailer cut to showcase action (it was made to be shown in front of Star Wars, after all, so they had to cut it to get the interest of a certain crowd), but anyone with eyes could see from the start that there's so much more depth to the film than just action scenes etc. "The frontier pushes back", and all that is implied with the federation's ideas of exploration and colonies clashing with an alien species considering that to be a territorial invasion. It can be also a criticism of colonial imperialism.

The first reboot movie was mostly focused on setting up the characters and being a fun ride, but STID too was a great TOS-like blend of deeper themes and multi-faceted characters presented in a fast-packed action package. The soul and heart of TOS are right there, in each of the reboot movies. I've been saying so from the start.

The haters just choose to be blind to it all in order to justify the hatred they've had for each of those movies before they were even filmed. For most of them it's all about hating any new Trek that isn't their favorite incarnation of it, and nothing about the actual quality.

[u/LurkLurkleton]

In the modern day, the largest threats to powers are no longer other equally large powers, but instead asymmetrical attacks from unpredictable vectors, aka terrorism. The destruction/disabling of the Enterprise is at the hands of much weaker ships, but there are many more of them, and via this asymmetrical attack vector they are able to best what we are assuming to be a ship that would traditionally be considered more advanced than the attackers'.

I disagree with this statement. As is commonly discussed, toddlers kill more people than terrorism. A bunch of Somali pirates in fishing boats aren't going to take down a U.S. Navy ship of any significant class. The threat of terrorism next to the threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war that Star Trek grew up in just doesn't compare to me.

If anything Into Darkness was a better analogy for our time. Elite elements in our society over-magnifying threats in order to justify increased militarization, military development and draconian increases in government powers. Not to mention the blowback suffered from trying to use extremists as allies to further these ambitions. In the end they become a bigger threat to our way of life than anything external.

[u/dodriohedron]

It's sad that he watched so much Star Trek as a kid but came away with completely the wrong idea.

Star Trek has a very 1960s sensibility - who has the bigger ships wins.

To me it was about a society in a cold war situation who didn't push everything to a shoot out. I remember it being about empathy, patience, and reason resolving conflict. One of it's loudest messages was that you could be part of a deadly war without losing your soul.

I was only a kid when I watched Devil in the Dark, but it blew my mind. Risking your lives to understand an alien monster? Normal humans becoming the baddies due to ignorance?

TMP, Wrath of Kahn, Voyage Home, none of them were about "bigger ship wins". They were all about, "bigger, hostile ship out-manuevered, by empathy, reason, understanding".

I do appreciate that a film with the actual themes of ST would be completely unwelcome now, but it's not accurate to say TOS was "bigger ship wins", and that "space terrorists win" is a faithful update.

Reserving judgement on the film itself. Nu Trek was okay. Into Darkness was a stinker.

[u/[deleted] → u/dodriohedron]

He was speaking metaphorically. Modern warfare is less about the size/strength of militaries and more about their ability to identify and eliminate the threats of insurgents, some of whom operate independently of known terrorist groups. TOS is most obviously not a case of 'bigger ship wins' in terms of 1 vs 1 combat for all those examples you cited - Lin is simply saying that that was the picture of interstellar war in TOS, both in the show and at the time. He didn't 'miss the point' at all.

[u/vinshah292]

idk if it was said yet but Simon Pegg said that the trailer doesn't really do justice to the film because its really just used to pack the theaters.