Fun and energetic, but let's be honest. It's not much of a Star Trek movie.

Rating: 6/10 (26 September 2010)

This movie is big, loud, exciting, fresher and more energetic than anything from Star Trek in well over a decade. That doesn't mean it's any good, though.
I could try and go into the plot, which involves time travel, an alternate time line and an assload of black holes, but let's be honest. This movie should really be titled Star Trek Muppet Babies. It's the original crew back when they were roughly the same age as the cast of Gossip Girl. There's really not much else to the story, aside from the best special effects in the history of the franchise. The plot isn't more than an excuse for the characters to rush around, get into fights and make funny quips. As a summer movie thrill ride, it's pretty good. In fact, it's better at that than the first big movie of summer 2009 (which now apparently starts in May), X-Men Origins: Wolverine. So, if you're nostalgic or just looking to turn your brain off for a couple of hoursyou'll probably enjoy this film
However, Star Trek has a great many flaws. To start with, this is probably the most scientifically ignorant story to ever come out of the Star Trek franchise. The original series was much smarter about science than this thing. Next Gen, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise and all of the other Star Trek films are smarter than this. Yes, even Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier doesn't disregard basic scientific fact and theory as blatantly as this movie does. Now, that may not matter to you. For me, when a film deals a lot with black holes and it's obvious that the screenwriters never even Googled the term "black hole" to know what they were writing about, it's aggravating.
This movie also has probably the single least interesting villain in the history of Star Trek on the big screen. The Klingons from The Search for Spock were better than Captain Nero (Eric Bana). Heck, even the stretchy-faced guys from Insurrection were more compelling. It's not Bana's fault. He can certainly act and he emotes as much as he can, but there's just nothing to his character.
I also have to make the same complaint about Star Trek that I make about many contemporary action movies. The fight scenes are frequently indecipherable. It's like someone took the footage and edited it together by throwing it in a blender and pushing "puree". Everything happens so quickly and the camera is so close in on the action that I can only get a vague impression of who's shooting who or who's punching who in the face. Maybe I'm just getting old and the kids today with their iPhones and their Facebooks and their Twitter can follow this stuff. I mostly can't.
This is also a pretty weird looking film, if you pay attention to it. For example, some of the areas inside the Enterprise look like the 23rd century while others look like a brewery or the floor of a factory. I mean, there's almost always some creative license when it comes to the interior of a space ship in the movies, but the insides of this Enterprise don't make a lick of sense.
As for the Star Trek Muppet Babies experience? Jeffrey Quinto and Anton Yelchin are passable versions of Spock and Chekov. John Cho's a fairly generic Sulu. Zoe Saldana is extremely hot and gets more to say as Uhura than the character usually has. Simon Pegg seems to play Scotty as a funny slacker. Chris Pine is charismatic as Jim Kirk but there's really not much Kirk-like about his character. I realize you probably don't want to watch a 20something actor do a William Shatner impersonation for two hours, but this Jim Kirk could have been a character from any of a hundred outer space movies. In fact, Karl Urban gives the hands down best performance as Leonard "Bones" McCoy and that's largely by doing a DeForest Kelly impersonation.
Star Trek is an entertaining film. I don't want to take that away from it. But the acid test for any Star Trek story isdoes the underlying story stand up if you remove any Trek connection from it? This movie fails that test. It's nowhere near the level of The Wrath of Khan or The Voyage Home. Its enthusiasm and the new look and feel it brings to Trek, however, definitely raises it above crap like Nemesis or Generations.
While adventure has always been a big part of any good Star Trek, it's always been about more than just shooting people with phasers or beaming people out of ships seconds before they crash. At its best, Star Trek has always grappled with issues of the human condition. This movie doesn't do that. But if it can breathe new life into a franchise that was driven into the ground through incompetence and a tragic lack of imagination, that's quite an achievement in its own right.