Virag's Movie Reviews: Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Certainly this flick was way better than the two ginormous radioactive turdbombs J.J. Abrams inflicted on humanity, and it plays out like a long tee vee episode, but Star Trek Beyond was beyond dumb.  Not sure it made any sense why the Federation would put their largest, most comically advanced, pointlessly ostentatious, and crucially important--as well as remarkably undefended and hopelessly helpless--starbase on the border of completely unexplored, and hidden-by-spooky-nebula, territory.  I also don't see how the Stacker Pentecost guy had access to a technology which completely overwhelmed Starfleet's flagship in seconds.  And if Pentecost was able to somehow hack into the Enterprise's logs from so very far away, why wasn't Yorktown able to use any sensors or scanners or probes to find out what the fuck was hiding out there?  Why didn't they try?  Did the enemy ships even have warp drive?  They were so tiny.  What were they using for power?  The technology of those swarm ships seemed completely out of place in Star Trek.  Shouldn't the deflector shields on the Enterprise have scattered those ships away harmlessly?  Wouldn't a couple of full-yield photon torpedo detonations have turned that swarm into subatomic particles?  Once Pentecost made it into the starbase and was running around, why didn't they transport him into space?  They showed some goofy alien using a transporter earlier in the flick, so it would have saved everyone a shitload of trouble if they'd just beamed him out into space to die.  The whole exercise looked and felt like a rushed placeholder, a cheapo quickie run out there as fast as they could because they had to.  Still, way better than anything Abrams has ever done.