Disposable entertainment

Rating: 5/10 (29 May 2009)

I'll state the good stuff first. The cast is first rate and so is the direction and special effects. The film also added some much needed back story to Uhura.
The bad news is to enjoy the film, you'll have to check your brain at the ticket counter. The film has too many plot holes to list, but besides that the time travel plot device to "reboot" the franchise was at best lazy and at worst destructive.
My biggest problem was that the revised time line took away so much back story of key characters, especially Kirk. In the previous trek mythology he was an accomplished and seasoned "professional." In the new version he is a wet-behind the ears kid who wouldn't be anything if not for his starfleet captain father. I guess in this new time line nepotism is somehow virtuous. The other character's back stories aren't as bad, but they all seemed to be thrown together without much thought to if it made any sense. This all strikes me as unnecessary. There was plenty to explore in the existing back stories of both Kirk and Spock without changing the time line.
The plot also suffers from the number of characters. TV shows like the original Trek do well to explore the characters of an ensemble cast as they have 25 hours or so of programing to fill each year and need adequate material. Movies, on the other hand, generally have time to develop one or two characters really well. In the case of Star Trek the writers tried to do too much in too little time. The movie would have been much better had it focused on the development of a few characters-- say at most Kirk, Spock and Uhura-- and just left the other characters to be introduced in at a later movie. I'd even go as far as to say the the introduction of the Enterprise was unnecessary and might have been better left for the next movie.