Story good, science bad

Rating: 8/10 (10 May 2009)

Overall I enjoyed the movie very much, it was a good story which allowed the series to be "rebooted" rather than try to keep up with 40 years of back story, character history and confusion. Replacing the actors and some of the well know historical events was a challenge but it was well met. My only complaint is the science part of the fiction took a beating in this film, I try not to get too picky about sci-fi tech (dumping the warp core means warp drive stops right?) and the often used time travel plot device is getting real old in Trek. But I believe you have to acknowledge real universe physics and some things bugged me about this film that were just hard to ignore (science!). The basic plot about the Romulan twin home worlds being destroyed by a supernova was a big "HUH???" moment. If a star went supernova close enough to the planets to destroy them via shock wave then I can only see 2 possibilities; either it was their own star and preventing the shock wave from devastating the worlds buys you a day at best before the worlds freeze solid or it was a star that had drifted close enough to the Romulan home system to threaten them and then stopping the shock wave just means everyone dies from gargantuan levels of radiation poisoning and disruption of the orbital path as other worlds in the system get pulverized and stellar center of gravity shifts. The "red matter" was very vague stuff, where did it come from? Why did a single drop create a black hole? Where did the Vulcans get that much? Why did using 10,000 times as much at the end not create a super-massive black hole? Then there's the planet/moon Spock prime was marooned on which was close enough to Vulcan that you could watch the world die without optical aids yet wasn't affected by the black hole being that close by.