Good as a standalone movie, but does not fit in well with the rest of Star Trek

Rating: 8/10 (16 May 2009)

Taken as a movie in a vacuum, this installment of Star Trek is pretty good. It's fast paced, the visuals are good and most of the characters are well cast. The story line is a bit weak in some places and there's absolutely no excuse for that. Overall, the movie is quite enjoyable.
However (you knew this was coming), Star Trek has been around for 40 years and you can't ignore the past -- bail out know if you don't like spoilers. Throwing out the entire time line that has been built up since 1966 was an unnecessary and ill-conceived event, unless the planned sequel somehow restores most of the previous time line. Moreover, they even did a bad job of changing the time line by having the events at the beginning of the movie occur at a stardate later than the beginning of the original series with the 30-something year old Kirk. (TOS has stardates going back to 1312.4 and the movie starts years earlier at stardate 22...something or other.) Likewise, there is no excuse for using the near-Enterprise-A version of the ship instead of something that resembled the original more, since the construction of the NCC-1701 Enterprise is before the time line change.
There are numerous other things that happen that don't make sense. Star Fleet would not give command of its newest star ship to a 25ish cadet. Scotty is older than Kirk, not younger ... and that happened before the time line change so the movie just got it wrong for no good reason. Likewise, Chekov is much younger and would not have been around to navigate a newly launched Enterprise. The Enterprise had much of it's layout and structure already defined. It could have been made more "realistic" in the movie but it should not have been dramatically changed. And finally, the whole Spock-Uhura thing makes less than no sense.
There was an outcry when Star Trek V had a series of improbable events that did not fit in with everything else that had gone before. Now it looks like a minor transgression.
Again, taken separately from the series and the other movies, this one is very good. However, given the wanton destruction of almost all that had already been established (and for no good reason!!!) , it is not possible to give this movie anything better than 8 out of 10 and that might be a stretch.