Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Star Trek: Beyond

With J.J. Abrams devoted to Star Wars, Star Trek finally had an opportunity to move beyond the fractured, tattered version of Trek he had created. With Star Trek: Beyond, the differences are notable, but so too are the similarities.

When Gene Roddenberry created the Star Trek universe, he envisioned it as something akin to Wagon Train, but among the stars. However, with science fiction, various talented authors gave us a series that frequently spoke in analogies, comparing events to the Vietnam War or American race relations, or even heavy-handed anti-Communism. The films were less focused on these concepts, though oftentimes no less astute. The second film of the franchise borrowed copiously from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which made for a bumpy, moralistically vague film that over-relied on action sequences and pontificating than genuine narrative excitement. The third film is more akin to the 2009 film, but still suffers from an over-reliance on spectacle.

After all that’s come before, Karl Urban (Dr. McCoy) and Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) have grown into their roles. They better embody their Original Series counterparts. Unfortunately, Zachary Quinto (Mr. Spock), Zoe Saldana (Lt. Uhura), John Cho (Mr. Sulu), and especially Simon Pegg (Mr. Scott) have managed to divert so much from their sources that they’ve almost become parodies of those characters. The effects are solid, but there’s something excessive about the details put into the film. From the overly complicated design of the warp nacelles to the massive, expansive and obscene Starbase Yorktown, a far cry from anything ever created for the series and perhaps too lavishly detailed to feel realistic. The designers have clearly gone out of their way to make everything look really awesome, but at the same time sanitize anything that resembled the original series or films.