Watch it in 2D - You'll be 33% less disappointed

Rating: 3/10 (19 May 2013)

They should have called this "Star Trek: The Wrath of Yawn".
This movie single-handedly takes the trifecta of bad filmmaking. It is simultaneously: 1) An uninspired sequel, 2) an unnecessary remake of a classic, and 3) a 3D mess. So I'm giving it a 3 out of 10.
I liked the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie, even though I couldn't really follow the plot. This time, I followed the plot just fine, because I've seen it dozens of times on cable in the past 30 years.
The witty repartee between crew members is well done, but everything else falls short. As with Iron Man 3, it's very obvious that most of the action scenes are intended to exploit 3D, which means that clarity and visual coherence mean nothing - all that matters is that a bunch of stuff comes flying at you.
This makes it impossible to appreciate the effects or immerse yourself in the story. Most of the spaceships look uninspired on the outside and preposterously cavernous and complex on the inside.
There was an audible groan when people in the audience realized this was just a rehash of Wrath of Khan.
There are a lot of things wrong with this movie, so you have to dig deep to find the worst one:
Forget that Kirk got his command back about five minutes after he lost it, following a scene pulled straight from Godfather III (not to mention dozens of space-based video games).
Forget the preposterous chase of a Millennium Falcon rip-off through a rebuilt-Death-Star-like maze.
Forget that Scotty somehow single-handedly sabotaged a double-size, weaponized Enterprise rip-off (oh yeah, it was automated for a skeleton crew, that explains it).
Forget that Nimoy Spock made a pointless cameo that broke the fourth wall by practically saying "Here's what we did in the original movie..."
No, the worst part of this movie is the whole Khan backstory and motivation.
In Star Trek II, it was very clear why Khan was so ticked off, and it was possible to empathize a bit with him after he and his crew were left abandoned and forgotten on Ceti Alpha V.
This time around, Khan was thawed out just so they could get a super-genius's opinion on how to start a war. Say what?
And Khan is a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer, but he's only doing it to expose RoboCop as a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer, so he's sort of a good guy?
And the whole chain of events is started by a StarFleet employee who is willing to kill himself and dozens of other people just to cure his daughter from a terminal disease. Who does that?
There are no cool Khan pectorals on display here - real or otherwise. No flowing Fabio hair. No quotes from Herman Melville. Or maybe there are, I don't know. No cool hippie/groupie crew for Khan to interact with. No rich, Corinthian leather. Everything that made Khan's wrath great is absent from this film.
I was really looking forward to this movie. Now I'll be completely uninterested in the next one. It's clear they're out of ideas.