Star Trek Beyond - Beyond What?

The latest of the new timeline Star Trek movies came out, so of course I saw it.  I loved the first two with Chris Pine, Zachery Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, and Anton Yelchin.  I like that they don’t overwrite the canon of the original Star Trek universe, but diverge into an alternative universe, allowing for new adventures.

This latest installment is called Star Trek Beyond.  I wondered about the choice of that title.  After seeing the movie, I have some theories:

• Beyond expectations.  The early trailers for the movie did not look promising at all.  They were all but incoherent and the uniforms looked terrible.  When I saw the first trailer, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the movie.  But it’s Star Trek, so inevitably I gave it a go.  And I’m not sorry that I did!
• Beyond amazing action.  From space battles to phaser battles, the action was terrific.  Related to that, the special effects were very well done.  Without being specific, the scene with the motorcycle (yes, a real, internal combustion engine motorcycle in a sci fi movie) was one of my favorites.
• Beyond great character and ship designs.  For characters, I loved the look of the main helpful alien chick (the very pale one with black patterns on her face) and one of the crewmembers.  I found myself marveling at the variety that is possible, even when mostly limited to the human figure as a starting point.  For ships, the ones belonging to the bad guys weren’t necessarily super original in their look or the way they flew, but their method for fighting their enemies isn’t something that I’d seen before.  It was scarily impressive.
• Beyond dizzying.  The director seemed to love odd camera angles.  They were used rather often, making it look like people were standing on a wall until the camera rotated so that they were upright.  Doing that a time or two is okay, but the frequency exceeded what I enjoyed.  However, what was annoying when filming people was fantastic when depicting ships moving.  The reminder that there’s no up or down in space was subtle, but very welcome.
• Beyond convenient.  One of the struggles writers must have is trying to introduce things that are necessary later on in the story without making their introduction or usage seem contrived.  These writers (one of whom was Simon Pegg, aka Scotty) made a good attempt, but didn’t succeed terribly well.  That wasn’t enough to ruin the movie for me, though.  I liked the tech, items, and other things that were introduced.
• Beyond respectful.  One of the things that I have loved about this latest run of Star Trek movies are the nods and references to the original series.  As I stated at the beginning of this post, none of the old cannon has been dismissed.  Without spoiling anything, there was a really good tribute to Leonard Nemoy’s Spock, and a touching reminder of the rest of the original starship Enterprise crew.

I highly doubt that the people who named the film were thinking along the lines that I was, but Beyond is a very appropriate title!