The Enterprise is our own leaky American ship as we love to envision her, stuffed with benign, theatrically accented foreigners all pulling together. “My wee Scottish gran said, ‘You can’t break a stick in a bundle’,” says Scotty (co-scriptwriter Simon Pegg) in Star Trek: Beyond.

The latest in the sci-fi franchise comes out of the gate funny. Kirk (Chris Pine), a one-man diplomatic delegation, tries to return an unwanted cultural artifact to a planet of angry gargoyles. It’s the 966th day in deep space. “Things have seemed a little episodic . . .” Kirk tells his log wryly.

When the crew pull into Starbase Yorktown, there’s an emergency to deal with: a captain needs rescuing after she and her crew crashed on an uncharted planet behind a formidable asteroid belt. All the wisdom of Starfleet Command is present (Shohreh Aghdashloo is particularly good as a wise commodore), but it’s too bad Star Wars‘ Admiral Ackbar wasn’t there to warn Kirk.

The great ship is ripped to pieces by an enormous fleet of spiky fighter pods, leaving the crew shipwrecked on a rocky planet, with Spock badly injured. Help arrives from an alien scavenger, Jaylah (Sofia Boutella). With black terrapin stripes on her clown-white face, she looks like ’60s star Ursula Andress done up by H. R. Giger. The lord of the planet is a two-legged iguana called Krall (Idris Elba). He’s a minor Star Trek villain, but he fills the résumé as an asthmatic heavy breather who can growl the r‘s in “Kirrrrrrrrrrk.”

The Trek series is now like any other superhero series, with a wobbly range between the realistic and the ridiculous. But the movie is sworn to fun, and it delivers, with plenty of sci-fi drama and the long-legged Jaylah pouring herself all over the captain’s chair.

Strange, then, that the most emotional moment is the new Spock contemplating a relic of the old Spock—a photo of a group of portly men and one woman, in polyester and turtlenecks.

‘Star Trek: Beyond’ is playing in wide release in the North Bay.

Wielding an electronic ghost detector that looks like a little rotating neon vulva, a triumphant Melissa McCarthy leads the female-power remake of Ghostbusters—a redo that has a chip on its shoulder over fans’ sniveling venom.

Learning that the Ghostbusters reboot would be cast with women, thousands of male fans whimpered about PC Hollywood. (Posts about “raped childhood,” a phrase swiped from a memorable episode of South Park, were splattered all over the net.) At the risk of validating the online fools, director Paul Feig includes scenes of the heroines having their ghost-hunting business dragged through the comments mire of popular websites, with libels like “Ain’t no bitch gonna hunt no ghosts.”

In this round, Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert is trying to get tenure as a physics professor. She fails when a book she co-wrote years before about the supernatural materializes on the internet. The book was uploaded and sold by her miffed former writing partner, Abby (McCarthy), now working at a lab in an off-brand tech school.

Abby’s new partner is a super-scientist who calls herself Holtzmann, a pretty, arrogant blonde weirdette played by Kate McKinnon as the kind of brat who puts her feet on the mayor’s desk. Joining the trio is the blustering subway worker Patti (SNL‘s lovable Leslie Jones) who saw a haunting at her station. The four team up to learn more about the afterlife while a bitter bellboy (Neil Casey) is trying to launch an apocalypse.

This new Ghostbusters is a patchy film that lacks the jittery, cocaine-laden quality of the writing, the dead spaces and the sudden maudlin episodes of the original. McCarthy, though, is a demonically talented slow-burn artist, and whenever the movie stalls, she slaps it back into action.

‘Ghostbusters’ is playing in wide release in the North Bay.