The worst part is that it didn't have to be this way.

Rating: 1/10 (13 November 2009)

Honestly, if you told me that Michael Bay had written, directed, and/or produced this garbage, I wouldn't have been surprised. This movie was basically a two hour action cartoon (sorry for rating so low if you're into action cartoons), with well-known characters from the Star Trek series. I refer to movies like this as having "porn" plots, because the ridiculous and often nonsensical plot is only an excuse to show you the action. I'm going to just go ahead and outline my specific qualms with the movie point by point.
1. A time travel plot, really? Aside from being severely overused, having taken place so far back in star trek history, this plot rewrites basically all of Star Trek. Five series, ten movies, a cartoon, and countless video games, toys, comic books, novels, and conventions should have been clues to the makers of this movie that people liked Star Trek as it is. It might not have been such a big deal if there weren't MAJOR changes made to the time line that are going to affect the entirety of Star Trek from now on. As far as I can tell, making an alternate time line ONLY serves to alienate the main Star Trek fan base. The plot could have been virtually anything else, and still kept the die hard fans.
2. Characters were one-dimensional and untrue to their originals. I don't really know what to say, so I'll just rant. Kirk was unlikeable and just a stereotype. A bad boy loose cannon jerk who plays by his own rules, rides a motorcycle and gets into bar fights while taking advantage of women and displaying a clearly broken moral compass? Really? Kirk? Really? I mean Kirk was always known to bend the rules and kiss the girl, but in this movie, he's like an extreme version of the Fanz. And what's going on with Spock? He's the most emotional character in the movie. It doesn't make any sense at all. And a romantic subplot with Spock and Uhura? Lord have mercy! The only character that seemed to be even remotely based off the original (and incidentally, the only character I really liked) was McCoy. He was hilarious. I feel like JJ Abrams was just taking advantage of an existing franchise to make money :(
3. The movie had nothing to do with Star Trek. The plot is entirely interchangeable. If you had changed the names of all the characters and changed the names of their home planets, this could have easily been a Star Wars movie. Or a new sci-fi franchise altogether. If you paid close attention to all the star trek episodes and movies, you see that each plot is a moral play where the main characters either have to make a tough choice with big consequences, or they learn an important lesson. And the best part was that they never got too preachy about it. They also managed to balance science fiction with action, comedy, and sometimes a bit of romance. The point is that the plots were always at least a little complicated and well explained. It just didn't feel like a Star Trek movie at all.
4. Star Trek XI was an animated feature. Oh yeah. It's not listed as an animated feature on IMDb, but it is. Really, if more than 50% of a movie is rendered on a computer, it should be labeled as an animated feature like the Pixar movies. Don't get me wrong, everything looked really cool, but the qualification is that it all looked really cool for a cartoon. I have the same complaint with the new star wars trilogy and 90% of the new action movies. The original Star Wars came out in 1977, but the effects they used are still mind blowing by today's standards. There's one simple reason for this: It looks real. The use of models and real pyrotechnics puts you inside the movie, like if you reached through the silver screen, that exploding console would actually burn you. The use of animatronics is what gives fantasy creatures their believability. I don't think anyone complained that the aliens from the alien trilogy looked fake or weren't absolutely terrifying. So what's the deal? This movie obviously had an enormous special effects budget, so they should have used it to show the world what models and pyrotechnics and puppetry can do in 2009, instead of showing us the same old tired CGI that we see in every movie these days.
5. It didn't have to be this way. This movie clearly jump-started the franchise, but it also reinvented it. Also, it brought in a bunch of people who weren't previously Star Trek fans. But it also alienated a sizable portion of the existing fans. The saddest part is that the movie had the potential to both please original fans, restart the franchise without reinventing it, and bring in new fans. The biggest difference is that Star Trek XI had several times the budget of any previous Star Trek movie. This could have been a huge action movie without destroying the Star Trek time line, and even with keeping the characters more like they were. It could have been a regular old prequel. It seems like the reason that they used the alternate time line was just so they didn't have to keep it true to form. There was absolutely no reason that the franchise had to be ravaged like that. Star Trek Generations, for example, was made on a 35 million dollar budget and it grossed about 120 million (1994 dollars). I wonder what they could have done if they had four times the budget. Would it have been a good Star Trek movie, true to the original franchise, with awesome special effects and a new fan base? Well, with the precedent having been set for Star Trek to be nothing more and a CGI explosion love fest, I guess we'll never know.