End of an era

Rating: 4/10 (11 February 2014)

In "The Omega Glory," a Star Trek episode from the 1960s, the words of the US Constitution are repeated over generations, until they become mere sounds babbled by Yank(ees) and Com(munists) who no longer understand their meaning, nor why they are fighting one another.
This pretty much describes the handing down of Star Trek from Roddenberry to Braga/Berman and finally to Jeffrey Abrams. Abrams is a journeyman action director, not a visionary auteur like Roddenberry, and in his hands Star Trek is just CGI babble.
The plot of the film falls apart within minutes - usually it takes time travel stories at least one or two acts, or in the case of the original series episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday," a perfect loop even restores consistency. If a Vulcan tried to save my Romulan home planet with 'red matter' and failed, but we were both thrown 100 years back in the process, we'd just try again, succeed, end of film, even in the "new time line." We have 100 years to fix the problem in whatever time line. I certainly would not use the precious red matter to implode my near-savior's home planet Vulcan. The Romulan is psychotic, you say? I don't think a logical and highly organized warrior race would let psychotics fly its expensive space craft. End of film.
It's a pity because the new cast is pretty good. I would have hired Gary Sinise as McCoy, but Urban is nice. Quinto is a good Spock, but let's leave out the romance with Uhura, shall we?
It became even clearer with "Into Darkness" that Jeffrey Adams just does not get Star Trek as a cultural icon, and so Roddenberry's vision must linger for now, enfeebled into CGI action nonsense with puerile plots, while we wait for someone who understands the Great Bird's positive and sophisticated vision for humanity's future. In an episode of Voyager, the first officer catches a woman recently freed from a cyborg collective playing a piece from Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen on the piano, with a metronome. He asks her to abandon the security of the metronome and play the piece again as a human. That is Star Trek. This is not.