Film reviews: Star Trek Beyond and Last Starfighter

Star Trek Beyond opened in New Zealand cinemas on Thursday
Star Trek Beyond opened in New Zealand cinemas on Thursday

The new Star Trek film dumps the allegory and meaningful storylines the franchise used to be known for in favour of full-noise action.

Fast and Furious director Justin Lin has taken over from JJ Abrams and his flair for fantastic action is put to good use.

As well as the storyline doing nothing interesting, the character arcs are also fairly ho-hum, especially compared to the 2009 film that rebooted the franchise with the new set of characters.

But what's far worse is that the crew is far less fun to hang around with this time. They still quip off each other for most of the movie, but it's never as charming as in the previous two efforts.

The action sequences are a lot of fun, however - even though a modern-era motorbike and Beastie Boys music are featured despite the film being set far in the distant future.

If you're fine with a fairly brainless couple of hours in the cinema with spaceship fights and men, women and aliens shooting each other with rayguns, Star Trek Beyond is pretty good.

Though if you're wanting to head to the stars while staying in the comfort of your own home, this week I recommend 1984's The Last Starfighter.

It's one of the best post-Star Wars films and while it's not as good as the original George Lucas trilogy or a lot of the Star Trek films, there's still a lot to love about it.

The '80s flavour of it is stronger than a lot of other sci-fi from that decade, thanks largely to it being set in the USA.

It follows a teen boy living in a small town trailer park with big dreams but few options.

He's highly skilled at a local arcade game and the whole community appears to be weirdly obsessed by his beating its high score - which turns out to be a test planted by aliens to see if a human could help defeat intergalactic bad guy Xur.

It's quite a silly film, with fake rubber masks and one of the earliest examples of computer-generated visual effects, which all adds to the charm.

Newshub.