Action packed movie with absurd, cartoonish characters

Rating: 3/10 (24 November 2016)

Let me get this out of the way first - J.J. Abrams is not a good director. Period. I don't care that younger viewers enjoy watching his movies; he produces flashy bilge an nothing this guy has done since CLOVERFIELD is original, nor good.
Now let's get to J.J. Abrams's "reimagined" STAR TREK, which is full of unfunny homages (there's a hot, green lady on the bed) to characters who act completely out of character (see Spock with emotion impulse control issues, Uhura the pompous slut and Kirk the hotdogger who bumbles his way from one crisis to another and escapes by sheer luck).
The plot. Okay, "Nero" seems like a rather Earthy name but let's just run with it. Using the plot from the Next Generations movie NEMESIS, Nero has a supersized ship that all but wiped out an entire Federation fleet so he can get to Vulcan and destroy it using a big drill on a cord from his ship (why not just nuke the planet from space?) and then dropping a small black hole into the center of the planet. Check that off, Spock's home world destroyed and now ON TO EARTH, because we always have to include Earth in every damn Trek movie these days.
Nero's beef with Vulcan, Earth and the Federation? His world was destroyed when Spock from the original time line we knew in the original films (see great Trek movies like ST 2, 3 and 4) went back in time (more borrowing from earlier Trek movies) to save Nero's race (Romulus, which was also the planet of the bad guy from NEMESIS) from being annihilated by a Super Nova. Spock gets there too late to save Romulus and Nero's wife and children die in the planet ending explosion. Now since Spock had a time machine on a ship, couldn't he have just gone back again and gotten to Romulus earlier, before the explosion? The way the old Spock explains it to the newer, idiot Kirk never really makes sense. Anyhow, Nero gets a hold of time travel, goes back to wipe out EVERYONE since he can't have his family and race.
Along they way there are the intros to Scotty, Bones and other characters but you're still scratching your head trying to figure out WTF they are doing in this film. It feels like they threw a bunch of stuff together for a last-minute homework assignment, put some flashy space battles in along with groan inducing one-liners and said "RUN WITH IT, THE PROLES WILL LAP IT UP!"
And people DID lap it up, calling it "very cool" and "fun" and "action packed" but nobody except longtime Trek fans and most semi-coherent adults saw what it was, overblown cinematic garbage.
The pinnacle of the absurdity of this movie is when Spock, as acting commander of the Enterprise, jettisons Kirk in a giant bubble down onto an ice world (hope he doesn't freeze, oh and that there is air to breathe down there) because he was a treat aboard the ship. Why not just lock him in a holding cell? I think they had those on the old Enterprise from the 1960's series. Ever heard of them? This moment gets more absurd because Kirk just happens to land on the one planet in the entire Universe (not Galaxy but Universe - see mathematical impossibility) where old Spock happens to be stranded.
Illogical, Confusing, Stupid.
This is not a new, exciting remake (unless you want all action, useless characters and no plot), this is shake in some old Trek movie ideas, get new actors/actresses with terrible lines and throw in a lot of lasers and explosions. The only reason it gets a 3 is because of the action. That's all about this movie can offer for the $9 you paid for it.