Not bold, not uncharted. Missing thrusters.

Rating: 6/10 (21 May 2009)

At some point many years ago, big budget summer films became devoted to the central theme of the Earth's destruction. This is now ubiquitous. Look at the summer lineup. Angels and Demons, Transformers 2, Terminator: Salvation, even the documentary "Earth". Usually there is a device that the bad guys want to obtain that can destroy the planet. The villain is of course mad, and wants revenge for some transgression we're about to have explained to us. Nearly everything follows the "Paradise Lost" mould that Wrath of Khan used so well.
Screenwriters don't seem to understand that the scale of vengeance doesn't have to be so massive to be effective, to create tension. Its about the two rivals in an opposition of mind and spirit, playing chess like warring titans, leveling mountains in their path. A nemesis might know everything that a lover knows, all of the vulnerabilities, only they're willing to cross the line and twist the knife, and say "I told you so". Eliminating this as a plot element makes the story mechanical. Who cares if the world is at stake if every soul in it is generic? Show me one soul worth caring about, and I'll teeter on the brink of my seat.
The actors in this seem to have been chosen because of their intrinsic youthfulness. Its almost the kind of stylization you'd find in Japanese manga, with the characters in younger form having bigger, more expressive eyes. No wonder that the story shows the new Kirk being delivered by a creature with larger than life eyes.
Everything is dialed up for the MTV crowd. Instead of the minimalist camera movement in the original films, there's a lot of orbiting and rotation around the characters. Everything is done to indicate that this is a modern action film, with average values.
To really deliver the point that we're in alien locations, the angles are more obtuse, even the lenses are fish-eye at times. Kirk drives a motorcycle, is basically Matt Damon as Good Will Hunting trying to become Buck Rogers. He gets into fights in loud bars, boozes up, and gets lippy with authority figures who try to drag him out of his loser lifestyle. Because of his latent Hero Gene, and nothing more, he ascends to greatness.
The writing only aspires to pantomime the original cast using recognizable phrases and plot elements. It doesn't expand the mythos, it just plays off of what the average fan will probably remember. No chances taken, and so its like patrolling the Galaxy in a pontoon boat, remembering a world so far away it must have happened in an alternate universe, where screenwriters had vision, and directors had balls.