If you want rather mindless action, you're right. If you like Star Trek and/or logic, search elsewhere.

Rating: 5/10 (12 May 2009)

J.J. Abrahams tries to relaunch the Star Trek franchise and that by itself is a good idea. Yet the realization went wrong in quite some ways.
Lets start with what is good: The special effects are the most impressing about this movie. Where as this sounds like a compliment, it's actually already quite a statement, as from here on everything goes down. As J.J. tried to "renew" the whole thing, he threw the old characters partly over board. The closest reincarnation from my point of view is Karl Urban as Doc "Bones" McCoy, which reminds quite often to the real one. On second place is Zachary Quinto's Spock, John Cho's Sulu and Anton Yelchin's Chekov, which are all very likable reminiscences of the originals.
Kirk, Uhura and Scotty on the other hand turn pale in comparison. Chris Pine overacts the whole "cool American"-stereotype hitting on everything with long hair and starting a fight whenever drunk. William Shatner had much more class than him. Zoe Saldana is just average in everything and barely strikes me as the "communication queen". And Scotty? Oh, please, forget Scotty in this one. Simon Pegg is annoying throughout the movie by barking his one-liners and failing as a comical relief. A pity, as he was much funnier in "How to Lose Friends". All in all i felt that the motivations of some of the protagonists were less than comprehensible.
The worst though is the screenplay. The story itself is okay, yet the details just ruin every entertainment to be had. Spock himself would have had a hard time watching this illogical mess. Okay, you say action movies don't have to be logical, yet still it hits my personal limit to be entertaining. This is not helped by heavy overuse of shaky camera. It seems that nowadays when something is shaky and far from comprehension, thats action! No, it isn't, thats just slack directors work. Aliens, Terminator, Die Hard ... all great action flicks much without that kind of modern cinematic prestidigitation.
So to summarize: If you like action and don't want to think, go for it. Yet this is not what Star Trek was about and that's sad. I wouldn't go so far to call myself a Trekkie, yet i like the old ones well enough to see that in writing quality this isn't near the real thing. And i don't think it was necessary to rewrite major events of the Star Trek universe to pull it off. We have seen a great relaunch of Batman without hurting it's existing universe, so i assumed that it should be possible to repeat the same with Star Trek. I was left disappointed.