I reviewed Star Trek Into Darkness back in May 2013, and although I gave it an 8/10, as a Trek fan, it didn’t live up to my wants and needs as a long term Trek fan!  But reading through that review, I don’t know if I’d give it 8/10 now, but anyway, I did, so it stays and let’s look at Star Trek Beyond!

The USS Enterprise crew explores the furthest reaches of uncharted space, where they encounter a new ruthless enemy who puts them and everything the Federation stands for to the test.

Let’s kick off with the Memorial for Anton Yelchin though, and this film has a LOT of Chekov in it and it feels great for it!  He plays Chekov brilliantly in Beyond, younger than in teh original series and rather a ladies man aswell, one scene on the Enterprise, as Kirk is doing a captain’s Log (monologue) we see Chekov being kicked out of a young ladies cabin, bare chested and top in hand and throughout the film, you get the sense he is rather the ladies man, more so than even Walter Koenig Original Series portrayal of Chekov.

He is a highlight throughout this film, he was fantastic to watch and he will be missed.   I sincerely hope they DON’T recast Chekov and give him a great send off!

Right, let’s get into the review, and just as I did with Into Darkness in 2013, let’s look at the good and the bad…

As with Into Darkness, and 2009’s Star Trek, this film looks gorgeous.

Simon Pegg has done a great job on this script, I was invested nearly completely from the beginning and it was a character showcase from beginning to end!

The characters have a banter and friendship that comes across easily on screen and in some ways, is more solid than in the original series.

Where as Into Darkness bought Section 31 into the reboot universe, this one brings the Enterprise series in, with NX class ships shown off and even the Enterprise uniform blue jumpsuits (a personal fave of mine).

Now the bad points…

To be honest, most of my points that niggled me in Into Darkness still stand…

but let’s reiterate them again…

Why is the interior of the Enterprise like a huge power factory now, instead of the clean small rooms we are used to from the original series and the TNG series like TNG, DS9 and Voyager.  The rebooted Enterprise warp core is fecking huge and looks like a turbine, not the sleek, throbbing beast we are used to from the old universe.

Why is the Engineering deck so fricking huge?  Yes the warp core is 7 decks high, but why is it in the middle of a refinery?

The shuttlebay, why does it look like an aircraft hanger (which in theory it should) and not like the clean bay from the original universe?

The outside of the Enterprise, I don’t like it, I’m sorry, I really don’t…   I know this is a new alternate universe, but why change the design, even subtely?  Bring it upto date yes, but the DS9 episode, “Trials and Tribbleations” proved that a CGI’d original series Enterprise looked fantastic, the Constellation class Enterprise, considering it was designed and built in the 60’s is a beautiful design, why is the reboot version looking like a whale?!?

 

Physics…   Throughout ALL the series and movies, we’ve heard that going to warp IN a solar system is bad…   but both of the reboots have done this, all the ships going to warp in earth Orbit…

ok, lets get into the story then…

“SPOILER ALERT”

The film kicks off as Star Trek should, with a captains log, but this is a captain that knows he shouldn’t be in the centre seat.  Kirk (Chris Pine) knows he’s there too early, he knows he joined starfleet on a dare (unlike Kirk prime (William Shatner) who joined following his dad into service), he has a crew, MUCH younger than they were in the prime universe and in a way, it shows.  They are much more hot headed, more impulsive and get into scrapes a lot easier than Captain pike or even, Kirk Prime would have been.

Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) are having relationship issues and everyone knows it. Leadign to a very real, very human crisis of concience for Spock after the passing of Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy) and a beautiful quiet memorial to him.

McCoy (Karl Urban) is the father figure on the ship, giving sage advice aswell as being the bar tender.  What really gets be in Karl Urbans portayal of Bones is actually the closest to the prime universes Bones (DeForest Kelley), as he was already older and more experienced, not only as an officer, but as a practiced Doctor.  In fact, karl Urban holds a lot of this film together, plot twists always revolvoe around his character to one degree or another, from McCoy and Spock being stranded together while Spock is injured, to McCoy and Spock leading a raid to free the Enterprise crew and keeping Kirk from doing something stupid (like quitting starfleet) or out of his depth and really enjoying flying an alien fighter jet. This may have something to do with reports that Urban, as he had little to do in Into Darkness, nearly didn’t return to the film, but he was a main plot part all teh way through.

There was also a big upset in the news about Sulu (John Cho) being openly gay in the film.  Now I actulaly really liked the way this was portrayed, we also know fromt eh prime universe that he has a daughter, adopted or otherwise, who grows up to join starfleet and end up as the helmsman of the Enterprise B in Generations…  “It wouldn’t be the Enterprise, without a Sulu at the helm!” Kirk prime exclaims.  But the very simple scene where Sulu meets his boyfriend/husband is beautiful, a nice simple cuddle and walking off with their daughter to spend time together on Sulu’s shore leave was not only tastefully done, but actually made sense.  A lovely little flash later in the film that i really liked was Sulu having a photo of his daughter on the helm, I dunno if that would be ok, but apparenlty Kirk is fine with it.

Ok, there are LOADS of new characters in this film, but lets just go over the main bad guy and the main good guy thats not a member of the crew…

First up (and HUGE SPOILER WARNING!!!), Krall (Idris Elba) turns out to be a brilliant throw back to the Enterprise era of Star Trek and is actually a NX class starship captain who was classed as MIA and has been living off the life energy of other species while he builds an army to destroy the Federation for abandoning him and his crew?   Ok, I might feel that way too in his situation, but he’s a SOLDIER, he knew the risks, especially as a MACO captain pressed into the role of an NX class starship captain.   Krall (really Captain Balthazar M. Edison of the U.S.S. Franklin, NX-236 and one of the first Warp 4 starships before the launch of the Enterprise NX-01 Warp 5 starship) seemed to have come to the conclusion that Earth Space Forces (later starfleet’s) ideas of peaceful exploration over conquering other races was a sign of weakness that needed to be destroyed.  A strange reaction, but it’s the centre point for the film, although it’s never REALLy explained how he got his regenerative powers or the technology his army are using, which urked me a little.

Next we have Jaylah (Sofia Boutella) and alien who’s parents were killed by Krall, allowing her to escape.  After escaping him, she finds the derelict Franklin and make it her home on the planet, scavenging parts from other crashed ships Kralls forces destroy in orbit.  She finds Simon Pegg’s Scotty in his escape pod (well, hollowed out photon torpedo) and saves him from other scavengers.  She’s a great character, but you never really feel like you know where she learned to fight or how she learned to make all the tech she has, even from the scrap.  thanks to the music library ont eh franklin she has an appreciation for good music, which also makes a cheesy moment near the end of the film and gets an amused smile from Chris Pines Kirk, but yeah, I never really felt overly invested in her character, hopefully she’ll be back in the next one though, maybe as a love interest for Scotty.

Ok, the script for Beyond was written by Scotty actor Simon Pegg, and it sometimes comes across cliched and almost a little rushed in places.  I enjoyed the film as an action film and romp, but I don’t feel liek this new crew could live upto a series as long as most series are now.  Of course we have Discovery coming early in 2017 and we know Star Trek “4” is coming, maybe in 2018/9, ut although this IS Trek, it’s not the Gene Rodenberry Star Trek I grew up loving, it’s still mising the exploration and especially the science that we love from the series…  and this is bourne out by the larger than needed refinery looking engineering decks, rather than the clean original series or functional TNG/Voyager starship engineering decks.  It’s a workable film and I’ll happily add it to my movie collection, but it doesn’t excite me like the series and original movies, but this is certainly the best of the three reboots!

One thing I did love and bought a slight tear to my eye though, was a scene of Spock going through Spock Prime’s personal items and the main one being a photo of the original cast, one that I actually have on my desktop, so I’ll share it here too to finish this review off…

A bold 8 out of 10, but i could take it or leave it, rather than rewatching religiously

~Lone

Well, that didn’t take long. Only a day after Oculus Store installed DRM to stop its exclusive games from working on anything but an Oculus Rift headset, the update has been cracked.

The update verified that the games were legitimately purchased, which is fair enough, but the sticking point for many had been that it also verified that you were using an approved Oculus device. This after the founder of the company once publicly said on Reddit: “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want.”

This admittedly was before someone actually managed to make such a thing a reality with a patch called Revive letting you play Oculus exclusive games on other headsets. The same creator who made that patch has now cracked open this latest update by simply disabling DRM in Oculus titles completely. However, this does also mean that there is no longer any checks on whether the game is a legitimate copy anymore either, something that the creator Libre VR was quick to say they didn’t support.

“I still do not support piracy – do not use this library for pirated copies.”

Founder of news website TorrentFreak, Ernesto Van der Sar, told the BBC “DRM as a means to prevent piracy is rather futile. If there’s a demand to use a product or access a service, people will often find a way around DRM and other technological blockades. History has shown many examples of how it mostly inconveniences legitimate customers.”

He also said that Oculus ought to learn from the movie and music industry and try to provide “great legal options” rather than trying anti-piracy measures.

“Oculus should focus on providing a superior platform and the best games instead of focusing on piracy at this point. It’s impossible to defeat piracy completely, but lessons from the movie and music industry show that providing great legal options work better than anti-piracy measures.”

Previously it had been said by the founder of Oculus that he didn’t care which headset players used to play their games – just as long as they still reaped the benefits of the sale. However, time moves on and it seems that someone has changed their mind.

The latest Oculus Store update comes with the standard tweaks and bug fixes, but according to reports it has also snuck in some DRM onto the platform. What this basically means is that now the Oculus Store will check to see if the headset is a Rift before letting you play – no Rift, no play.

The original statement from founder Palmer Luckey was said on a Reddit post a while back: “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware – if it was, why in the world would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers?”

Of course, this was before someone actually cracked on how to actually DO that. Revive was a hack that made Oculus exclusives playable on Vive. Luckey wasn’t a fan saying: “This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software.”

And it seems that now it’s actually happened. Not that it really comes as a surprise, as few other parts of the video game industry make their exclusives… well, non-exclusive or playable on another platform (at least not for a while).

It just seems that VR is evolving to match the current business plans.

Last night, after numerous rumours about their make, the first consumer graphic cards from Nvidia based upon their Pascal architecture have been revealed – the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080. Both are to be launched in around a month’s time, with the 1080 releasing at the end of this month on May 27th and the 1070 coming June 10th.

The main boasting points for Nvidia’s new cards are that they’re both supposedly faster than the current flagship cards, the 980 Ti and the Titan X. Nvidia says that the 1080 will be twice as fast as the Titan X in certain VR applications and 3 times as energy efficient. That sounds really appealing.

Both cards are also going to run cooler as well, leaving plenty of room for overclocking. This is all down to a re-design of the cooling system that Nvidia’s used since they released the Titan in 2013, but this new system will only be sold upon Founders Editions of the cards which are just that bit more expensive.

The GTX 1070 will retail at $379/£270 with its Founders Edition being $449/~£310; while the GTX 1080 will be sold for $599/£450 and its Founders Edition at $699/£~485.

For those of you who prefer its competitor AMD, they’re due to reveal their next-gen graphic cards in the coming weeks based off their Polaris architecture. They have claimed that they’ll be offering theirs at a more mainstream price, so it’s likely to not be as powerful but might gain audience through cost efficiency instead.

With the debacle that has so-far been the release of Oculus’ second Rift headset and pre-order shipping dates being pushed back as far as June and July in some cases, it’s interesting to find out that Oculus are shipping a small number of these headsets to stores for purchase already.

Teaming up with Best Buy, Oculus will be putting on demonstrations at 48 locations as part of the Intel Experience from May 7th. Additional stores will also be added later on down the line, and you can experience Dreamdeck (basically a bunch of VR tech demos) and Crytek’s The Climb. In the near future, they’ll be adding Farlands, a free game for the Rift to the roster too. To help manage it, Oculus Live allows you to schedule a Rift demo up to a month in advance.

However, as mentioned at the beginning there will also be some headsets available for purchase: “A small number of Rifts will be available for purchase at select Best Buy stores starting May 7 and online from Microsoft and Amazon, starting May 6 at 9am PST. Quantities will be extremely limited while we catch up on Rift pre-orders.” If you manage to buy one at retail having pre-ordered a headset, you’ll be able to update your order status afterwards, cancelling the pre-order but essentially keeping the benefits.

So maybe there’s a little hope for those who feel they can’t wait much longer for their pre-orders.