First half better than the second, but overall great!

Rating: 8/10 (8 May 2009)

The cast is great! All the right people in the right parts. The first half was particularly inspiring for me. There were a number of exhilarating sequences. I am very particular about special effects, so most of the issues I had were there. Not the quality of realism, but the cinematic design. For instance, the Romulan vessel looked like one of those weird hair things that nobody knows exactly what it is for. And I didn't even know that the Romulans were Romulans until they said it. They really weren't anything much different than the Klingons. I remember Romulans being like Nazi or maybe even ancient Ramses-style Egyptian-like Vulcans - rigid, imperialistic and refined...that's how they should be. I think they could have done a much better job on the Orion slave girl. She looked like a bimbo painted green. They definitely switch things up a bit in terms of roles and relationships. Basically, I think they used the whole temporal thing to really, like someone else said, "reboot" everything in the Star Trek Universe. I could get knit-picky about little things, but I won't. The end seemed a bit anti-climactic to me. But I guess it was fine. My favorite quotes from the movie were Sarek telling Spock, "What is necessary is never unwise," and Bones telling Kirk, "A little suffering is good for the soul." If I were to have made the movie, I would have made it more like say Full Metal Jacket, where the first half was in the Academy and the second half was in action. They kind of did that, but I think they could have really put a lot more attention into Kirk and the others training at the academy. Its a short jump between Kirk in a bar fight and Kirk diving out of a shuttle screaming through the atmosphere to land on a tiny platform thousands of feet in the air. I would have liked to have seen maybe Spock and others drilling cadets in different venues, where they could have really made it fun and funny (like the astronauts in 'The Right Stuff').