Plot hole.

Rating: 5/10 (9 May 2009)

Plot hole! Big, giant, gaping, universe-destroying plot hole! For every ounce of praise that can be heaped on this movie, there is one simple yet massive retort: plot hole.
For starters the tag line, "the future begins" is misleading. This is NOT a prequel. This is an alternate reality. Unlike the remake of "Batman" this is not a stand-alone remake of everything. There is the Spock we know from the original franchise come back into this alternative past. This leads to a plot hole.
To be fair this is a good action movie in as much as "Troy" was a good action movie, and like it the mythology is butchered. There is very good emotional conflict in the movie and even a sense of subtlety behind it. The acting is even very well done. The opening sequence leaves no doubt of that. Urban is a fantastic McCoy. The skill of the actors is by far the best thing in the movie.
The shooting was abysmal. The usage of shaken-scenes is horrendous. If not for the explanatory dialog, i.e. "they're launching torpedoes," I would have had no idea what was happening. Instead of the smooth, hyper-visible action of the "Matrix" series we're left with our heads against a jackhammer.
Finally, the ruination of this movie if not the entire series to inevitably follow is the writing. The comedic timing was excellent. The stow-away sequence is a gem. However, the writers seemed to have a problem deciding to restart from scratch or link this to the original franchise. Their compromise is sloppy. Character development is modest at best and unfortunately any novice to this universe is going to require exposure to the universe that was also abandoned.
There is also a fair amount of triteness to all of this action. The scene of being chased by an animal in the snow, only to have the animal eaten by a bigger animal (and in the end it's afraid of fire) wreaks of the "Phantom Menace" debacle.
The biggest fault of the writing are the plot holes:
*Time travel. The most trite waste of time in science fiction. Overused, under explained, and sloppily done almost every time - this is no exception. Bad guy comes back in time to change the past. However, by changing the past he precludes his own actions and that of his futuristic counterpart. On the other hand, maybe he doesn't change the past but instead goes to an alternate universe. That's fine, but then what's the point of blowing up someone else's Earth and Vulcan if it won't have any effect on your own future and won't have any effect on them? Moreover, why wouldn't someone in the future come back to stop you from messing with their future?
*Kirk never finishes the academy. He's not even commissioned. Moreover, he's a stow-away. When push comes to shove, surpassing all sense of rank, he's made second in command. Somewhere on that ship are a lot of angry lieutenants. If anyone in the military actually makes major before they're done with boot camp let me know and I'll believe this.
*Why would someone be carrying so much 'red matter' to destroy the universe many times over if they're going to just make one black hole? Why didn't he blow up his ship to stop all of this in the first place? *How do you show up late to a supernova?
*Why would you make someone a captain fresh out of training?
*Why didn't someone just shoot the drill? Why do you need to lower a drill? You can't drill into San Francisco with a drill you lower into the atmosphere because you're not in geosynchronous orbit and the drag on the drill and the cable by the atmosphere would shake it around a lot.
*Sulu fences like Jet Li. Who carries a sword into space anyway?
*If you can transport people and things traveling great distances at warp speed, why even go to planets anymore?
What is with all the pipes in the engineering spaces? What is with the water pipe big enough for a person and the turbine at the end?
*If in the span of a few seconds Spock's ship travels in time 25 years after the mining ship, why then in the several seconds that it took the mining ship to emerge did it appear all at once rather than over the course of several years?
*How do you create a black hole in a planet that can be seen from another planet, but at the same time the second planet is not also destroyed? Black holes aren't holes that can be traversed.
The casualties are too numerous, not to mention my sense of equilibrium and my wallet. I think this movie could have been done much better and without violating anything involved in the series that preceded it. More effort should have been taken to have the science make sense and to connect this to the original franchise and create a true prequel. Either that or this should have been a stand-alone without the reliance on the original franchise for character and plot development.
I fail to see the point in caring about an alternate version of the franchise. These aren't the characters that have existed for the last several decades - this is an alternate reality. This isn't a reboot. This is a parallel. The origins of Batman, Superman, Wolverine, Dracula, and on and on have been redone time and again. In each, they are the same person in their own encompassed universe. You care about only one at a time and compare the universes. This movie leads you to believe it is the origins of everything that supersedes it; however, it destroys it instead.