We Still Have Faces in the Future!

Rating: Null/10 (14 September 2009)

This generally did not feel like Star Trek. But at least we learn that people will still have faces in the future with the great number of camera close-ups!
It did take my breath away when it finally pulled back some and gave me a chance to see the bridge of Enterprise. I also enjoyed Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov and found him to be the most humorous part of the movie.
The plot follows a young Kirk from his roots as an Iowa farm boy, to Star Fleet Academy, and to Enterprise. He becomes competitive with a Vulcan, Spock, and he befriends Bones, and then he pushes his ship against improbable odds like a madman. The film dislikes anything as rational as probabilities (which always annoyed me in some Star Trek episodes, but certainly it isn't true of all of them).
It includes the use of black holes as weapons, talk of red matter, time travel, cool Vulcan educational machines, flashy modern computer consoles, & distant tracking of human vitals.
Artistically I thought the plot was too unbelievable: (1) Kirk gets promoted too swiftly. (2) Spock and the Vulcans are humanized so much I wonder whether they wanted to capture much of the essence of the Vulcans.
There was one good scene of the Vulcan philosophy explaining the stoical views of the Vulcans. Spock is told the importance of controlling his emotions as a way to free himself from being a slave of his passions. But most of the movie belittles Spock the way a drunk idiot would do at a party; I just wish the old Spock would have been there to bite back the way he always used to do against McCoy.
I was disgusted with the treatment of the Vulcans and found them so overly humanized that the film makers might as well have done away with any 'aliens'. I thought about walking out at one point.
The supposed alien races were so cuddly and so obviously marketed to please human audiences and their biases that the movie was a major letdown for me. But perhaps it's good for people who don't like the ethos of Star Trek and its ability to put our humanity into perspective, to inspire scientists to love our mastery of nature in the future (but without turning us into slaves of our very power), and its emphasis on cultures and ideas different from our norms. This Star Trek had none of that and merely fed us mirrors of ourselves.
I suppose a better comparison would be to Star Wars, but I didn't see any interesting 'bad guys' or fantastic powers and the humans are weaker than the Jedis, so Star Wars is also far superior in every way in my book.