Dumbed down for the masses

Rating: 4/10 (14 May 2009)

I wanted to like this movie, but there was just so much wrong with it, that any attempt to suspend my disbelief would be futile.
Here's what I felt worked well in the movie:
The comedic elements (which was shocking because the comedy that these writers put in Transformers was completely awful). Especially funny was the origin of McCoy's nickname. And even though the multiple injections he gave Kirk was silly, it was still funny and elicited genuine laughs.
The Enterprise looked beautiful, and in fact almost every set looked fantastic.
The cast did a good job playing their parts, more or less. Especially good were Pine as Kirk, Urban as McCoy, Saldana as Uhura, Pegg as Scotty, Greenwood as Pike, Nimoy as Spock, Cross as Sarek and Tahir as Robau.
They kept the Academy scene brief; not turning it into Starship Troopers.
Here's what I felt didn't work so well:
Quinto as Spock just didn't capture the character very well. Maybe he just isn't the best actor, but I felt like he was unable to convey what Nimoy could do just with his eyes. It would be hard to top Nimoy because he was always the best actor on TOS, but I felt that Quinto fell quite a bit short.
I really like John Cho but they really didn't have to cast a Korean guy to be Japanese; are there really no good Japanese actors out there that weren't dying to play the part of Sulu?
Bana as Nero was nothing special. Shinzon in Nemesis did a much better job of playing a furious Romulan than this guy, and that movie was pretty bad.
Yelchin as Chekov was nothing special, either, though I disagree with a lot of others who that he was a completely wrong choice.
All of the action sequences, although they looked very nice, moved too quickly to follow. Too many fast cuts and bright flashes to truly get a sense what was happening. Reminded me a lot of the action in Transformers.
The musical score was not nearly as good as other reviewers have stated. It felt very out-of-place on numerous occasions (I did like the scene with Sabotage, however).
And now what was just awful:
Pike promoting Kirk to 1st Officer was just stupid and never should have happened.
We as an audience being given no emotional attachment to the planet Vulcan before it was destroyed made it considerably less weighty. We were meant to feel more for Kirk's father dying than for the death of an entire planet of beloved Vulcans.
Spock subsequently ejecting his new 1st officer from the ship was another lazy plot device. The ensuing scene on the ice planet with the animal chase scene was pathetically reminiscent of Star Wars, which led to the very random encounter with Spock Prime.
Ummm, how does a black hole send two ships through time? Every molecule in each ship should have shattered and been compressed to near- nothingness. Nimoy explaining that event made me say, "Wow, Leonard Nimoy just sold out!"
The scene where Scotty is trapped in the water tubes was just silly.
And the ending where they dump and detonate the warp core to escape was lame. The old Trek would have come up with something intelligent, instead of making a huge, pretty explosion to save the day.
Anyway, I have little faith in the future of this franchise as long as the same writers and director are involved. There was definite potential here which was squandered with lazy storytelling and lazy directing. The look was certainly fantastic, as were some of the acting performances, but it was not enough to offset the numerous failures. It is possible that the sequel could be better, but I fear they will follow the same dumbed down and mass appealing direction that so many movies have moved to nowadays. Action movies can work very well when there is heart and good storytelling behind it, and unfortunately, this had little of either.
4/10 (Edited from a 5 after further reflection)
As a reference, I love TOS and the first few movies, thought TNG and Voyager were mediocre except for a few good stories here and there and a few good actors, never saw DS9 or Enterprise, and I never went to conventions or anything, just always liked the positive spirit of the show.