No where near as good as I was led to believe

Rating: 5/10 (18 November 2009)

This movie was "OK".
I am a Trekkie, and have been since I watched the first series air.
I have seen everything Trek over and over, and I admit I've been getting a little bored of it lately. I have never believed any of the series or movies have really captured the feel or the original series.
I grew up on Armed Forces bases, and one of the things I liked about the original series was that it felt military. I loved Kirk snapping orders MISTER! It gave the series a little legitimacy.
Then came The Next Generation, and while I liked the series over all, one of the dumbest things I have ever seen was the inclusion of children on the Enterprise. This was a military vessel, could be destroyed at any time, and the writers would have us believe the crew would take their children with them. I had to overlook that stupidity every time I watched.
At least DS9 was a little better even if it did over do the religion aspect (why would an enlightened race "worship" wormhole aliens?).
Voyager was different, but not as much as I had hoped. Then came "Enterprise" that basically drove the nail in the coffin of the Star Trek franchise. The crew was fine, as was the acting. Unfortunately, once AGAIN, the writers figured canon didn't matter. Now, on to this movie. "Not bad" is the best I can say for it. I could understand the story, and even go along with most of the things they did. But some things were just stupid. What's a young Kirk doing being able to steal an antique car, be able to drive it, be able to get gas to make it work? And excuse me, but Federation Starships being constructed ON THE GROUND? Stupid, impractical and impossible considering none of the large star ships were ever designed to fly in an atmosphere (excluding Voyager). Spock is barely even Vulcan in this movie. Writers just have to have their own way. If you come up with an alien in a movie, and he's very popular to the fans, and you have a new writer for the next movie he's just got to try and make the character something he's not. Sure, Spock always had his human emotions to fight off, and apparently now so do all the rest of the Vulcans. I know that it's always been alluded there were emotions buried under layers of logic in Vulcans, but not to the extreme that would have us believe in this movie. Spock was always the exception because he is half human, not the rule. And even so, he was damned good at burying his emotions, almost as good as other Vulcans. Spock's father admits he married his wife because he loved her? Shoot that writer and move on to the next.
The entire planet of Vulcan is blowed up REAL GOOD, and where's the Federation? They send a few ships to what they think is a rescue mission, and they get blowed up too. After that, there might as well not even be a Federation. Here's this giant ship, blowed up Vulcan and is currently working on blowing up the Earth, and not a single ship around to challenge it. Not a single one. You would hardly know that, at this period in time, the Federation was not on good terms with any number of races, including the Romulans, and the Klingons. You'd think there would be a few ships in the neighborhood to defend the seat of the Federation. As other people have mentioned, the Evil Villain had no good reason to have a hate-on for Spock in the first place, unless he had the IQ of a doorknob (like the writers). To top it all off, he could have used his massive ship to SAVE ROMULAN, but NNNNNOOOOOOO, that would make too much sense for these writers. No one ever accused Hollywood writers of having brains. Just don't get me started on the "red matter". Doh!
To top all these problems off , JJ weed smoker tells us (on the blu-ray extras) he didn't have the money for some of the sets he wanted to build, so what does he do? He uses an old power station to stand-in as the engine room for one Federation ship, and uses a freeking beer factory for a stand-in of the Enterprise engine room. This is the worst, stupidest, most moronic thing I have ever seen. Not only do these places not look anything like any engine room conceived anywhere ever, but other than just looking stupid they also make no sense. If you have a huge spaceship, do you waste reams and reams of space on "emptyness" or do you use every cubic centimeter to good purpose?
I have seen a LOT of bad scifi in my days. Many of these bad movies had very low budgets, and since they couldn't afford sets guess what they did? They used factories, water plants, dams and maybe even power plants and beer factories to stand-in for real sets. Well JJ, guess what you made this Star Trek movie look like? You made it look like you ran out of money half way through, and then went the way of the "B" movie.
Sure, this movie was entertaining. And there were some excellent spots. One of the things that really kills me is that they did not have to ignore canon. They were just lazy writers. It would have been simple for a true fan to work with this story, make the movie every bit as exciting as it is, but not beat the crap out of canon at all. I have to say a lot of "fans" are better writers than the people who wrote this movie.