Some good acting, tiny bit of good writing, idiotic & infuriating plot

Rating: 2/10 (21 August 2009)

Overall, the film is a disgrace. On its own terms it is routine and dull. As a part of the Star Trek series, it is an awful travesty. In fact, it is not a Star Trek movie. It is a pirate job that uses the Star Trek name and the Star Trek characters and then goes off on a plot that is inconsistent with the plots of the TV shows and older movies that it stole from. On top of that, the plot stinks.
The plot is totally routine and predictable. Some crazy Romulan is mad at Spock for having failed, despite Herculean effort, to save Romulus from some implausible disaster. So the nut decides to travel back through time to get even with everybody, even people who had nothing to do with the disaster. Besides being simply stupid and hackneyed, this time travel aspect lets the writers depart from the Star Trek narrative, established through several TV series and several movies, both original and Next Generation. And depart they do, whenever they feel like it. The movie takes place when Kirk is a cadet at Starfleet Academy, so it happens before anything in the TV series or previous movies. But the unimaginative writers couldn't be bothered to work out a plot consistent with the all the rest of the Star Trek collection. Instead, they had to jazz things up by having Vulcan destroyed and Spock's mother killed, thus rendering impossible several episodes in the TV series and the old movies. The writers excuse this travesty by saying that the time thread was disrupted by the nutty Romulans' time travel. Well, isn't that cute? With that logic, they can do just about anything and claim they have produced a Star Trek movie. In fact, that is just what they have done. What they have created is a movie that steals the name and glory of the old shows and then does something not just unrelated but downright contradictory with its forebears.
There is some good stuff in the show. The young Spock is very good, very well portrayed by Zachary Quinto. He is the one character in the movie that has real character development. We also get a plausible explanation of McCoy's background, also portrayed by a competent actor, Karl Urban. The rest of the cast is pretty much a blow off. Worst of all, I think, is young Kirk. Yeah, Kirk is supposed to be cocky, but this guy is just a pain in the ass. Chris Pine grossly overplays the cocky part so that he ends up looking like weak slapstick. That may well not be Pine's fault. The director and the writers surely bear at least part and maybe all the blame. The other characters are shallow and not worth the time to discuss.
The plot is idiotic. I already explained the hackneyed time travel part. There are quite a few other stupidities, such as the following. There is the miraculous "red matter," one drop of which is capable of imploding an entire planet, yet somehow a large glob of it can be carried around in a very small force field in a star ship and then extracted one drop at a time with a hypodermic needle without damaging the ship or even the needle. Come on. The famous episode of Kirk cheating to beat the combat simulation in the Academy is overwritten and overacted so that it is neither plausible nor amusing, just silly. Worst of all, though, is the end of the movie. Remember, Kirk and all these guys are just young'uns at the Academy, not even graduated yet. By a totally stupid plot twist, they end up commanding the flagship of the fleet, the Enterprise, in the battle with the Romulans, even though they're still cadets, not even midshipmen. OK, let's let that pass. Of course, they are so brilliant that they take out the Romulan ship from the future by great derring-do. Idiotic, but we let that pass, too. Then when they get back to Starfleet, guess what? The whole team (except the young Spock, but hold on) is given permanent command of the Enterprise. No, we won't let that pass. I mean, GET REAL!! A bunch of kids commanding the fleet flagship? Yeah, right. Oh, I said Spock wasn't included. That's because at the very end, Spock waltzes on board and informs Kirk that he has noticed that Kirk has not yet chosen a First Officer (yeah, right, a bunch of kids are about to take the fleet flagship out into space without a First Officer), so he asks permission to fill the post. The brat Kirk nods OK, and that's it. Spock gets the job. No need to get approval from Starfleet or anything. The whippersnapper crew goes off merrily into the future, presumably remaining together for at least 20 years on the same ship - as if that ever would happen.
This is the kind of light stuff an unimaginative hack writes for 5-year-olds. As a pretender to be the prequel to all the rest of the Star Trek productions, it is trash, nothing but trash.