Awful on multiple levels

Rating: 3/10 (25 November 2009)

I could barely stomach watching this - I am not a big Star Trek fan, but I was willing to give the movie a chance. The moment they pulled the red matter crap I about turned it off. Look, suspension of disbelief is all nice and good, but there are lines you just don't cross, not without turning it into fantasy or space opera (and it was neither). The ending was the worst of all - no sci-fi that has EVER taken itself seriously has ever pretended that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was actual, physical speed - it violates fundamental laws of physics. Would you take a sci-fi seriously if it said gravity stopped working, just because you said so? Or if it said people could magically breathe in space with no other explanation? I doubt it, and yet that's how badly this breaks it. Star Trek's always been hazy on warp, but it's never been so stupid as to pretend it was an actual normal speed that just happened to be FTL until now.
Worse, to solve the problem they jettison the core(s) (which is the very thing KEEPING you in warp in the first place), and use the explosion to go faster. Excuse me? You're already going faster than light. The energy emission from the core explosion cannot possibly be faster than you're already going.
You have to realize, to even watch any sci-fi you're automatically suspending disbelief. Suspending disbelief to extremes is fine in fantasy since you can technically explain everything as magic unless it contradicts something you explained earlier. You can't do that in sci- fi, the writers simply are incapable of thinking more creatively than "faster makes you go faster".
And of course, there's the whole issue with Nero's motivation making no sense at all, and that is a *character* issue.