Star Trek Beyond was the first movie to really depict the USS Enterprise’s five-year mission, exposing the harsh realities of deep space exploration.
Summary
- Star Trek Beyond depicts the banalities of a five-year mission, highlighting isolation and tedium aboard the USS Enterprise.
- The movie explores the crew’s struggle with monotony and their search for meaning during prolonged space travel.
- Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk gains a renewed sense of purpose at the end of Star Trek Beyond, setting the stage for a potential sequel.
Star Trek Beyond finally showed the starship Enterprise’s real mission by portraying the day-to-day realities of spending five years in deep space. The third Chris Pine movie is unique among Star Trek movies because it goes back to basics by depicting the USS Enterprise’s five-year mission. Previous Star Trek movies had generally focused on a single high-stakes cinematic adventure for the crew of the starship Enterprise, such as the battle against Section 31 and Khan Noonien Singh (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Star Trek into Darkness.
Star Trek into Darkness ended with Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) excited about embarking on his five-year mission of exploration. Star Trek Beyond picks up the story three years into the USS Enterprise’s five-year mission, and Kirk appears to have lost his passion for the mission. Scotty actor Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the third Chris Pine Star Trek movie, was keen to show the isolation, tedium, and banality of the Enterprise’s five-year mission because it was crucial to Kirk and the crew’s stories in Star Trek Beyond.
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Star Trek Beyond Showed The Realities Of The USS Enterprise’s Five-Year Mission
Simon Pegg says the Enterprise crew were “cooped up”.
Star Trek Beyond‘s stars Chris Pine, Karl Urban and Simon Pegg all discussed the movie’s opening sequence in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross. As co-writer of Star Trek Beyond, and a fan of Star Trek: The Original Series, Simon Pegg was keen to explain why they decided to depict the five-year mission as something quite banal. Read Pegg’s quote below:
Simon Pegg: That was never really questioned in the movies, about the fact that they were on this five-year mission, away from all their loved ones and just basically all cooped up together in one spaceship. What would that be like? Not just for Kirk, but for all of them. That’s a nice thing to look at.
Chris Pine and Karl Urban responded well to this emotionally realistic portrayal of what it must be like to spend five years aboard the USS Enterprise. In one of Star Trek Beyond‘s best lines, Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk muses that “If the universe is truly endless, then are we not striving for something forever out of reach?” However, as Pine and Urban explain in The Fifty-Year Mission, Kirk’s search for meaning is at the heart of Star Trek Beyond‘s story. Read Karl Urban and Chris Pine’s quotes below:
Chris Pine: So it looks at what it’s like to be with the same crew of people for five years. What is the boredom of that kind of monotony; of having to find meaning and vision when you have to grab a fourteenth cup of coffee to stay awake to get through the night?
Karl Urban: It questions why we are doing what we’re doing. What is the validity of it? What is the meaning of it? Through this movie we disperse and go on these amazing individual journeys of growth, and then come together.
| Chris Pine’s Star Trek Movies | Director | Box Office | Rotten Tomatoes Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Star Trek (2009) | J.J. Abrams | $385,680,446 | 94% |
| Star Trek Into Darkness | J.J. Abrams | $467,365,246 | 84% |
| Star Trek Beyond | Justin Lin | $343,471,816 | 87% |
Star Trek Beyond Never Completed Its Five-Year Mission
Is Kirk’s Enterprise doomed to never complete a five-year mission on screen?
Star Trek Beyond ended by giving Captain Kirk a renewed sense of purpose and a brand-new USS Enterprise with which to continue his five-year mission. Sadly, no sequel to Star Trek Beyond surfaced, with Star Trek 4 still in development eight years later. Chris Pine’s Star Trek adventures being effectively canceled after three movies draws an uncomfortable parallel with the cancelation of Star Trek: The Original Series after three seasons. Hopefully, like William Shatner in the TOS movies, Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk will get a chance to complete his Starfleet mission on the big screen at some point in the future.
