Just as illogical as Star Trek has always been

Rating: 6/10 (8 May 2009)

I was really hoping for a major rebirth here and sadly it's pretty much "Star Trek: Nemesis" the remake (with a bit of "Enterprise" thrown in for good measure) and I haven't prejudged this film.
This film was designed to be a way of resetting the original characters so we can get new tales about them without having to worry about the huge mass on continuity (not that it bothered many Trek writers in the past anyway).
Time travel is rarely done well and here it makes no sense at all.
If this is a model of time travel where there is one universe which is changed by time travel without paradoxes the solution was simple. Instead of worrying about Earth young Spock should take his mega fast space ship from the future straight to the problematic star and sort it out before it ever becomes a problem. Romulus is saved, Nero will then never go back in time and everything will be back to normal.
If this is a model of the universe where time travel changes nothing but navigates people from one alternate universe to another, while it's a terrible shame that Spock and Kirk don't get on, they aren't the same people as the other Kirk and Spock so the Leonard Spock should be more concerned with getting the pertinent information to this version the crew so they can remove the threat to this alternate Earth than making sure his younger other self's friendship with Kirk get's back on track in the universe he now finds himself in.
Instead we seem to have a hybrid of the two. With Kirk being the Captain of the Enterprise and Spock being his friend and science officer being key to some future (so much so that Leonard's Spock is willing to gamble the fate of whole worlds on making sure this happens)but where Vulcan, Romulus (not to mention Amanda and Kirk's family) can not be saved (for reasons not explained).
Most the changes that Trek obsessives seem to be niggled by can be explained by the film but this major plot conceit can not.
The plot doesn't provide a tight enough mechanism to accomplish what it sets out to do.
The worst Star Trek stories follow a pattern, a cosmic whatnot causes a chain of events which threatens a large group of characters (usually the Earth or the Federation) which can only be solved by a fist fight and male bonding.
This is one of those stories.
The acting was great in places (terrible in others), the effects wonderful but the story makes no logical sense and that impacts on how much emotional investment you can put into it.
It's essentially the same film as "Star Trek: Nemesis" (itself a virtual remake of "The Wrath Of Khan" and seen by some as final nail in the coffin of Trek as it was).
The only thing that's seems to have changed is the general mood of the cinema going public.
So as a rebirth it's as successful and as much a failure as the rebirth of Doctor Who (the new stories are just as bad as the ones that were aired when that show was cancelled).
It's back but everything that made it go wrong before has come back with it but the bulk of the audience are so obsessed with bright colours and loud noises that they don't really notice (it will make a lot of money but that doesn't make it a great film).
Ironically the only Star Trek film to get close to exploration side of the Star Trek mission statement was "The Motion Picture" which is a vastly superior film to this one and largely dismissed by Trek fans and casual viewers as being sterile (and even that had a cosmic whatnot which was halted by a degree of male bonding, only the fisticuffs were verbal in nature in 1979).
This film is missed opportunity to do something truly radical with the Star Trek idea.
Hopefully if sequels happen the crew of this Enterprise will get back to exploring the universe and forget about trying to blow things up and jumping around and smacking people in the chops.