It had a ton of problems that were too distracting...

Rating: 4/10 (10 May 2009)

I hated it. It was funny and the action scenes were "fun," but it just tried entirely too hard to make everything awesome. It was like the writers hated having to write about young characters who were still in the academy and didn't know everything, so they just wrote them as many year seasoned awesome bionic hybrid Star Fleet officers who were completely awesome at absolutely everything, but who were also somehow very stupid (hey, let's watch stuff get sucked into that rapidly expanding black hole! this is fun! oh s***!) and erratic (you punched my security guard! now i'm going to maroon you on this frozen planet with crazy looking attack beasts!).
The writing didn't make a ton of sense in parts (after being marooned, kirk was like oh, a cave! oh, hi Spock! you're in the cave! oh, we're right next to a star base? why haven't you walked over there yet?) and was ridiculous (destroying the drill take one: let's the three of us parachute down to it, sword fight the guards, and then fire guns at it; destroying the drill take two: hey, we fired the ship's phaser at it and freaking exploded! it took three seconds!). And then there was the bridge of the Romulan ship which consisted of irregular shaped panels suspended dangerously over a mysterious chasm (be careful jumping to the science station or you'll fall to your horrible death!).
It would have been OK if it was a stand alone film, but they were working with many years of (usually) excellent Star Trek episodes and movies, and they should have given the canon, and the intelligence of the audience, a little more respect than that. They had enough money to make a really wonderful movie... it's a shame they didn't devote a little more to writing it.
Oh, and Vulcan being destroyed actually is a problem. They're going to need that at some point.