Whenever
humanity tries to perfect itself, it inevitably leads to tragedy. This will be
just as true for the new breed of genetically engineered “GC” humans, but they
just do not know it yet. Their limitations will be become painfully obvious
during a not-so routine salvage mission in Ian Truitner’s Beyond the Trek (a.k.a. Teleios,
trailer
here),
which releases today on VOD.
In
the space-faring future, the elites have chosen to propagate with through the
genetic engineering services of Glen Crest Labs (GC). The resulting babies become
smarter, stronger, and less emotional adults. Non-GC babies become the same old
screw-ups. The crew of the Teleios assumes their latest salvage mission is
another case of GC’s cleaning up after non-GC’s, but then they arrive at the
Atromitos.
Out
of the entire non-GC crew, only unassuming Travis O’Neill and the synthetic
gynoid Lulu are still alive, but the cargo is gone. They assume O’Neill is exaggerating
his post-traumatic shellshock, but he is clearly not faking the multilingual
fluency he is not supposed to have. Officer Iris Duncan will be in charge of
his interrogation, because she is the closest the Teleios crew gets to empathy.
She will also exploit O’Neill’s pathetically human attachment to Lulu. He does
not say much, but she quickly figures out the cargo is probably much more
sinister than they were led to believe. Soon, Duncan observes signs of erratic
behavior within the supposedly perfect Teleios crew. The captain becomes a
bullying martinet, the doctor gets forgetful, and she is acting more than a
little twitchy.
As
titles go, could there be a lamer attempt to exploit search engine confusion
than Beyond the Trek? The original
title Teleios is far more fitting,
given its ambiguous Greek meaning for either perfection or completion, but “B”
comes much sooner in the alphabet than “T,” so here we are. Regardless, Beyond is much smarter than your average
kitbashed VOD releases. It really has something to say about human nature and
the perfectibility of man.
Sunny
Mabrey does a nice job as Duncan and Weetus Cren is quite impressive as the
profoundly messed up O’Neill. Christian Pitre and T.J. Hoban have their moments
as well, as the horny crewmembers, Anderson and Zimmer. Michael Nouri adds a
bit scenery chewing as the civilian authority back on Earth, but former New
York Met Lance Broadway somewhat awkwardly looks and sounds like a poor man’s
Jerry O’Connell while playing bossy Commander Linden.
Nobody
can accuse Beyond of
oversimplification. There is a heck of a lot at stake, all of which touches on
some big-picture philosophical concepts. You have to give Truitner credit for
shrewdly marshalling his resources as well. The ending would have benefited
from a bit of punching-up, but it is always hard to wrap-up genre films in a completely
satisfying manner. In this case, Beyond
is promising enough to wonder what Truitner might do with a big budget
franchise reboot. Pretty good overall, Beyond
the Trek releases today (9/5) on VOD platforms (including iTunes) and will
be exclusively available on DVD at Walmart.
