There's no continuity with REALITY

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2009)

I worshipped Star Trek: The Old Show, and I like Abrams' efforts to reboot the series.
All of the actors did a fine job of capturing the spirit of the original characters without doing imitations. Example: I love Shatner's Captain Kirk, but I also love Chris Pine as Kirk.
Especially during the first half of the movie, the tone and rhythm of the script were great. Kirk had great, Kirkian lines, and Spock had great, Spockian lines, and so on with the other characters. Certainly, the characterizations were a bit different than in the Old Show, but the plot explains those differences. And, really: if George Washington characters in historical movies can evolve over the generations, why not Kirk and Spock? So, for me, the new Star Trek works fine as a "reboot of the franchise." The problem is that it's a mess of a movie. Because I want the Star Trek franchise to live long and prosper, I'm thankful that non-fan reviewers are being kind to the movie, but I'm amazed.
First, the character of Nero, the bad guy, is completely underwritten.
He used to be a miner, his wife and kids died in a nova, and he has a ship that looks like a bush. Other than that, we know NOTHING about him. We don't know whether he used to like to take his kids hunting dragons, or if he drinks tea with Romulan wiggle worms, or whether he collects rocks from planets he's destroyed. There is nothing distinctive about him.
Second, the plot makes no science fiction movie sense, let alone scientific sense.
Nero destroys Vulcan. Spock, who knows about time travel, has come back in time and seen Vulcan destroyed. He ought to be talking about trying to use time travel to keep Vulcan from getting destroyed. But he never does. He just uses time travel to give the young Kirk and young Spock fatherly advice, without ever discussing the possibility of using it to prevent civilizationicide.
Third, in the second half of the movie, the captain-crew relationships aboard the Enterprise make no human, naval or Star Trek sense. This Kirk is rowdier than the original Kirk, and that's fine, but we don't ever see half a scene with Kirk even pretending insincerely to get along and obey rules. If he were really like that, he couldn't serve on a Somali pirate ship, let alone get through three or four years of military training. Also, toward the end, Kirk publicly mutinies, Spock dumps him on a Vulcan ice moon, and then, at some point, Kirk psyches Spock into losing control so that he'll turn command of the Enterprise over to Kirk. And then, at the end of the movie, he and Spock are all luvvy duvvy. Sorry, but that's not how boats, ships or human beings (or Vulcan-human hybrids) work.
If, say, Abrams' first assistant director had mutinied the way Jim Kirk does here, is it possible that he could ever work with that first AD ever again? Is it possible that the producers would let either him or his mutinous, out-of-control first AD stay in charge of the movie? I doubt it.
Individually, each of these problems might not be that big of a deal. But the overall effect is to make the action in the second half of the movie seem random. We know that stuff will blow up because it's the time in the movie when stuff should blow up, and we know Kirk and Spock will end up getting along at the end, because that's the time in the movie when people get along, but the action makes no actual sense.