loud, fast and dumb

Rating: 2/10 (3 January 2016)

Where to begin. How to compare the reboot to original trek and whether to compare it to TNG?
Firstly, what made trek trek? Above all, star trek had at its core a humanistic theme and vision. It was often a story of how to tackle 1 or 2 specific current day issues without the pragmatic constraints of our current day world. It was often hopelessly idealistically naive (from our point of view) but always thought provoking and sometimes (mainstream) ground-breaking. This is what set the star trek franchise apart from generic sci-fi and space adventure like Star Wars.
Sadly, this movie utterly failed to capture that essence of trek.
The first 20 mins of opening sequence are a beautiful and somewhat emotional alternate/new back-story to Captain Kirk. If all the movie were like this it would get 9 or 10 stars from me. From there on however this movie primarily trades on nostalgia quotes and references in-between modern cgi explosions and fisticuffs. By the middle of the movie this is starting to wear thin and you are starting to notice the omnipresent lens-flares. A pointless scene shot in an obvious distillery marks the low-point and realisation that this is all it has to offer.
This is a cheap, popcorn action flick trading on the beloved franchise in name and nostalgia only. Worse than that, the time taken by the shallow and transparent throwbacks leaves the characters feeling very 2 dimensional and there isn't any room for a plot worth speaking of (except by the many plot contrivances). It manages to have less gravitas than the average stand-alone, high-budget, Hollywood action movie.
In short; it's just loud, fast and dumb, exactly what classic trek was deliberately and notably not.