To boldly go where we’ve gone before

When we first encounter Captain James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine) at the opening of Star Trek Beyond, he’s trying to broker peace with yet another hostile alien race who are suspicious and ultimately reject his Kissinger moves by attacking him, climbing on his back like midget rug rats and biting his ankles.

Just another day in the Federation, in other words.

But Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, is starting to experience a real five-year itch out there in the final frontier. It seems exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life forms and new civilizations can get to be monotonous after a while. He says as much to Dr. McCoy, better known as Bones (Karl Urban), over whiskey that’s been filched from Chekhov’s locker (there’s a touching moment when the two clink glasses with an empty one in the middle — an unintended toast, perhaps, to actor Anton Yelchin, who plays the ship’s navigator and who recently died in a freak car crash).

The gist is, Kirk feels like he’s lost direction; he doesn’t know what the point of it all is anymore.

And that’s kind of a weird message to send at the start of a third movie in a franchise, even if it’s directed by Fast and Furious helmsman Justin Lin and features the same familiar faces and J.J. Abrams-approved tongue-in-cheek humor.

You know how third movies in franchises go: they tend to run out of rehash, like Return of the Jedi or Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand.

So you hope that the script — by Simon Pegg (a.k.a. chief engineer Scotty) and Doug Yung — is up to the task of sailing this franchise to at least the heights of 2013’s Into Darkness (a redo of the Wrath of Khan episode with Benedict Cumberbatch which Trekkies apparently hated, but which did good box office).

Well, Star Trek Beyond generally is up to the task, despite a somewhat purposeless story and a slim script that doesn’t pack in many surprises. After all, we know by now that the Enterprise is on a five-year mission; the trick is making it not seem — as Kirk notes at one point, eyebrow figuratively raised — “episodic.”

Here, the problems start up after some initial character developments are put into play: Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) are on the outs after briefly dating (Bones’ advice to Spock: “When we humans say ‘It’s me, not you’ when breaking up? It’s you.”); Kirk is missing his deceased dad on his 30th birthday; and Sulu (John Cho), it turns out, is gay (though you might miss this passing nod to art-imitates-life; I personally thought the dude was his older brother).

The big upset comes with the arrival of a large constellation of warships likened to a bee swarm — turns out this is the army of Commander Krall (Idris Elba), and they quickly attack the Enterprise and take its crew prisoner. It’s up to Kirk and Scotty and Bones and Spock to rescue everyone and prevent what seems to be an unstoppable war machine from getting its hands on an ancient relic that holds infinite destructive power.

Or, as it’s usually called in Hollywood-speak: yada, yada, yada.

Honestly, all this setup is just an excuse for Pine, Quinto, Pegg and the rest to scamper around on another alien planet and trade quips and one-liners, which is perfectly fine and what you expect from a rebooted Star Trek entry. Scotty meets up with another alien who, at least, is fierce and female (Sofia Boutella from Kingsman: The Secret Service as Jaylah) and can take pretty good care of herself. She even likes to putter around her crashed ship playing Public Enemy’s Fight the Power and the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage at full blast. So there’s that.

We gradually learn more about Krall and why he looks so weird and likes to take prisoners, but the general thrust is finding the MacGuffin — the ancient relic thingy — before Krall recovers it.

The mission this time around is more sketchy than usual. It seems that Star Trek: The Franchise wants to keep propelling itself forward on the familiarity of its characters and its rabid fan base (being that this is the 50th anniversary of Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi enterprise). But they risk, perhaps, wearing out the charm of the TV series, which after all only lasted for three seasons before NBC pulled the plug due to low ratings.

There were honest-to-goodness Star Trek fans at the IMAX screening I attended: they had the “futuristic” Federation attire and everything. And these weren’t older fans, but young people who are clearly trying to buy into what can now be labeled a legacy brand, thanks in part to a new generation of Trekkies and Abrams’ less-than-reverent approach to all things Federational.

The appeal of the old Star Trek TV series is understandable, and universal. It was a cozy kind of show, where you were told upfront what the week’s character tics were going to be from Kirk’s opening log entry; the themes of universal understanding and tolerance were paramount; logic was the key to avoiding conflict, as Spock well knew.

The trick for Star Trek movies is to recapture the charm of those one-hour TV episodes that wore their thematic concerns so openly on their sleeves, while not appearing to be “episodic” or as thin as a TV show.

Star Trek Beyond barely gets by on its charm, but this is pretty thin atmosphere we’re entering, Captain.