RageLite review - Star Trek Beyond

Captain’s Log: Star Date... I think we’re in August now, this is the voyage of the Starship Enterprise and the story of how when we explored the final frontier, we delivered a Box Office bomb.

Star Trek Beyond is the third and currently final instalment in the Star Trek reboot series. The series would still have a future in its series on streaming but the adventures of Captain Kirk would seem to be at an end for the moment, with Chris Pine becoming Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman, and somehow will be in its sequel despite being dead and all.

When it comes to the writers we’re out with the old and in the with the Simon Pegg, who has certainly written stuff before but is mostly well known for comedy. Doug Jung joins him and his experience is mostly in TV. JJ Abrams has stepped back into a producer’s role, with Justin Lin taking over as director.

Released in July 2016, just 2 months off the series’ 50^th anniversary, made on a $185m budget, the film underperformed, making just $314m at the box office. Having to compete with Ghostbusters, Jason Bourne, and Suicide Squad, 2/3 of which are terrible, and the other only slightly less terrible, didn’t help, attributing to a 63% drop in the box office on the second Friday, and lead to an estimated $50m loss for the studio.

The series continued to get critical praise, with an 85% Rotten Tomatoes rating and an 80% audience rating with averages 7/10 and 3.88/5 respectively. So, what happened here? Let’s take a look

RageLite review - Star Trek Into Darkness

You may remember just under a year ago I covered the first of the Star Trek reboot films. And now we move onto the second with Star Trek Into Darkness.

Although the original reboot film was released in 2009, it wouldn’t be until 2013 until the sequel was released. Far as I can tell the major issue was the script, which underwent several revisions, then having it line up with the schedules of the actors, and J J Abrams who’s stepping in as director again.

Alex Kutzman and Roberto Orci return for the second film, the two have almost identical filmographies, and have written films featured on Rage4Media (mostly Guilty Pleasures) such as: The Now You See Me films, the Amazing Spider-man 2, Cowboys vs Aliens and Mission Impossible III. Joining them is Damon Lindelof, who was a producer for the original reboot, and had written with them before on Cowboys vs Aliens. He also helped write Prometheus but you can’t win them all.

The film was financially successful, making $467m on its $185m budget, although that said once marketing and theatre cuts are taken into account, the total profit wound up being about $30m, not exactly the take you’d hope for. The movie was praised critically at time with an 84% Critic Rating and 89% Audience Rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with average scores of 7.46/10 and 4.23/5 respectively. That said, this film has some level of infamy among fans, so what do I think?

Mini Review - Star Trek

Let me tell you about my experiences with Star Trek

Yeah, whilst it took me until I was in my 20s before I watched Star Wars for the firs time, I never watched Star Trek. I think I had an old VHS of it, but it never caught my attention. But in 2009 they decided to reboot the franchise in bring it in the New direction, brought to us by the guy who directed the Force Awakens and Mission Impossible 3, JJ Abrams.

The movie was modestly successful, earning $385m on a $150m budget, not that great, but enough to kickstart this franchise anew leading to a new TV series on Netflix. Look, my schedule’s pretty packed, I may get to discovery some-when down the line but not in the near future.