Not worthy of the top 250

Rating: 7/10 (21 May 2009)

This movie did a lot of things right and will probably win a lot of awards because of it. But I don't think it's worthy of the top 250 here at IMDb, not even close.
First off, the CGI and direction in general was great. A lot of people including myself were stunned by the gigantic explosions and sweeping shots of gargantuan space ships hurdling through space. The only problem I had with the directing was the liberal use of the shaky cam during action scenes... a pet peeve of mine.
I'll also briefly mention the acting was pretty good and I didn't really see any weak link in the cast. I especially found Spock's whole inner struggle very believable.
Unfortunately, at about the halfway point of the movie, after getting accustomed to the unreal space battles I started paying attention to the story, and that's where it all went down-hill. The plot is riddled with many uses of the 'deus ex machina'. At the heart of every problem (and indeed, solution!) lies either a black hole, or far-fetched one-in-a-trillion coincidence. This would be even slightly bearable, if the writers had done any research on black holes whatsoever. Alas, scientific inaccuracies abound making poor physicists like me cringe in their seats.
OK, so maybe the scientific inaccuracies escape most people. But it doesn't matter. There are other glaring flaws in the movie. Once we know who the bad guys are and how to solve the problem (again, at about the halfway point of the movie), other things like smart dialog and character development get completely pushed aside to make room for neat explosions, unbearable one-liners and a corny motivational speech or two. In short, Star Trek goes from a fantastic movie to an average action flick.
So, to summarize, Star Trek did a lot of things right, but it wasn't without its mistakes too. I've focused more on the mistakes here because most people seem to think this is one of the best movies ever made, which I can not at all agree with.