Shallow action-romp

Rating: Null/10 (3 September 2018)

I'm a very casual Star Trek fan, and such I had great interest in this movie as an entryway movie into the franchise. Alas, while J. J. Abrams has directed a lot of films I've really liked, this is definitely not one of them.
First of all, I don't like the characters. I'm not hugely familiar with the original TV series, but these still ring false to me. Kirk (Chris Pine) is too brash even for Kirk, Spock (Zachary Quinto) is oddly way too emotional, Scotty (Simon Pegg) engineers very little, if anything at all, and so on. While there were some nice additions and changes - I liked Uhura (Zoe Saldana), for example - they were often in minor roles.
The film is also riddled with plot holes. Which is not that surprising because it is a time travel story - it's hard to avoid plot holes with those - but quite often these plot holes and oddities were there just because the film wanted for its main characters to shine. We have a huge Federation, but it's still a bunch of academy cadets that end up doing everything. Granted, that was pretty much the case in the TV series as well, but in here those crimes are especially egregious.
And while the battles and the special effects do look nice, they're still oddly married to the limitations of the TV series. The ship of the main antagonist almost looks like it came from a particularly fancy student film. That's how cheap looking it is. And that's just from Abrams and his crew trying needlessly to imitate the look of the original shoestring budget TV series.
Not a fan. I did not like the characters, I did not like the plot, I did not like the look. Hopefully the sequel ends up introducing some radical changes.