A comic book, not a drama.

Rating: 3/10 (13 May 2009)

Well, the Star Trek movie wasn't what we were expecting. (SPOILER ALERT)
Pros:
-My wife and I liked the actors who portrayed Kirk, Spock, and McCoy -- we could imagine them as younger versions without too much trouble. Much less so for Uhura, Checkov, Sulu, and especially Scotty.
-We liked a lot of the in jokes and back references. For instance, seeing how Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru, or Spock's hassles as a kid and his refusal to join the Vulcan Science Academy. How Kirk learns early (from Spock) to bait Spock when it suits his purpose. Spock's dad finally admitting that he loved Amanda. Iowa wild man farm boy.
Cons:
-We didn't like the frenetic intercutting.
-We've all seen movies with gratuitous sex and violence. But gratuitous plumbing? The cargo bay was filled with pipes and that sequence with Scotty in the tubes was so dumb it was offensive. The whole Scotty-as-comedy-relief thing didn't work for us. Neither did his Star Wars sidekick.
-The young Spock was distinctly pink in close-ups, not green as his cupraglobin-based blood would make him.
-Physicists have long maintained that a black hole smaller than a pea could, if it intersected with a planet, collapse it to nothing in a matter of seconds. But such a black hole would have to have the mass of 100 planets, so a ship with malicious intent would have to be able to tow 100 planets worth of mass. And of course the ship would be sucked up too. The business of drilling a hole was nonsense. A black hole would sink through bedrock far more easily than a knife cuts through soft butter.
-The transporter effect reminded me of a silkworm cocoon. Everybody knows transporters don't work like that.
-No Star Fleet officer would strand another on an arctic planet. Especially not on Delta Vega, a desolate planet near the edge of the galaxy, containing only a lithium cracking station. (This is used to manufacture the dilithium crystals that moderate the flow of power from the warp drive antimatter converters). Oh, but wait, this is a different Delta Vega, one that just happens to be in orbit around 40 Eridani, close to Vulcan.
-Star Fleet vehicles do not burn 10-foot-deep holes into ice when they land.
-Spock and Uhura? Come on -- Spock is only interested in romance every seven years.
-I was perhaps most offended by the bad guy's ship. Everybody knows you can't have warp drive without separating the engine's nacelles from the rest of the ship, since they produce toxic radiation while in use. This ship, with its absurdly non-functional pointy barbs and no nacelles, should win the Silliest Starship award. The Romulans make nice starships. They wouldn't make a ship that looks like a porcupine.
-And speaking of Romulans, since they share relatively recent common ancestry with the Vulcans, they look like Vulcans. They don't look like Vin Diesel and tattoo themselves like 21st century rogue bikers.
-A green Orion slave girl as a cadet at Star Fleet? They hadn't yet been emancipated.
-Red matter? Looks like blood, and is removed with a huge hypodermic? Get real!
-Spock's "pinwheel ship"? Who would design a ship to spin around as it flew? What were they thinking???
-Slow-moving, easily destroyed missiles launched from the Romulan porcupine ship? More nonsense! The Romulans had a very formidable plasma weapon at that time.
-The Enterprise didn't look right, or sound right.
-The Enterprise was on a five year mission in the original series, three years of which were (presumably) covered by the original three years of shows. This means that somehow in the first two years the crew went from being fresh-faced cadets to mature travelers.
In summary, this was a comic book, not a drama. We were deeply offended. We've seen the future and we know what it's like. And don't give us any of that alternate timeline crap, we know better.
This is somewhat tongue and cheek, but we really were disappointed.