"Things have started to feel a little episodic," muses Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) in the opening stretch of Star Trek Beyond. After the forced melodrama of the last instalment, 2013's Into Darkness - which Trekkies voted their least favourite ever - it's understandable that this one felt the need to retrench, seeking safety in self-containment.Beyond is really Back to Basics. The Enterprise crew are whisked away to attend to shipwrecked survivors on a stony planet the other side of an unstable nebula. Before getting there, their ship is ripped apart by a bee swarm of hostile craft, working under Krall (Idris Elba), a soul-sucking reptilian tyrant who needs the other half of a WMD to pursue his vendetta against the Federation.Elba brings a fair payload of menace to this role, if not a lot of nuance, and it's only in the film's last act that his villainy justifies the billing. The new involvement of Simon Pegg in a screenwriting capacity is not a resounding triumph. The attempts at banter between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Bones (Karl Urban) fall flat as a pancake. Not many of the principal cast get chances to expand on the personalities they've set down previously.The effects? There's far too much swarming around with those bee attackers, an onslaught that fills the screen while whizzing around indistinctly. Better is the head-spinning vertigo induced by a gyrospherical space base, and fun is had with things like zero-gravity punch-ups, in a ticking-clock finale.This is the first spin of the rebooted franchise that intergalactic overlord JJ Abrams hasn't taken upon himself. Justin Lin, rescuer of the Fast and the Furious series, picks up the reins, and does as steady if impersonal a job as a robo-autopilot.Fans will be divided on whether the manic pace of Lin's set pieces quite hits the spot. While nothing in the film's story coalesces into a workable theme - or nothing beyond "unity good, individualism bad" - Lin does preserve the baseline amiability which Abrams risked jettisoning last time. Sulu (Jon Chu) is outed as gay, but also lifts the movie up and out of its underlit mid-section rut with a single plunging pilot-dive: you feel a prickle of the old awe coming back. Beyond makes very few promises it can't keep, but also goes halfway out on every limb it can find, risking next to nothing, sights permalocked on par.WHAT OTHERS SAYTHE actors carry the essence of Roddenberry's inclusive vision into the present. 'Star Trek Beyond' is designed to dazzle. - Stephanie Zacharek, TimeA HIGHLY entertaining blockbuster that pays respect to the franchise legacy. - Chris Agar, Screen RantTHE movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage, pausing for a punch-line. - Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AV Club..