Star Trek for the masses? More like Star Trek for morons.

Rating: 2/10 (17 May 2013)

Where do I start?
I'm a huge fan of the original movies and I admit, I enjoyed the 2009 film. Why? Because the well got dry and it seemed there wasn't anywhere left to go with the franchise. So, seeing as Abrams alluded to everyone that by taking the franchise back to where it all began and altering the time line, it was his intention to re-tell stories from the original "series" and breathe new life into them. Naturally, I thought he was talking about the original "TV series" from the 60's. Fine by me, because the original TV series was cool, but it's pretty much outdated.
This latest movie has shown me that it's obvious he just wants to do the "films" of the 80's and 90's all over again, but in his own image, which is... an abundance of lens flares and people who are only good at looking pretty on screen. And that, in my opinion, is not what Star Trek is about. He even stated in an interview with Jon Stewart recently on The Daily Show, that he never was a fan of Star Trek as a child because he didn't get "the philosophy" of Star Trek. This movie is proof that he still doesn't get it. If he wants to make flashy sci-fi movies with no depth or substance, fine, there are plenty of scripts out there for him to make this kind of bland movie that attracts dimwitted people. So please Mr. Abrams, leave Star Trek alone, you are only making it worse.
Abrams might be trying to get "non-Trekkers" to enjoy the franchise, but in order to do so, he is replacing everything that made Star Trek what it was in the first place. I'd love for more people to get into Star Trek, but not at the expense of my enjoyment of it. This movie has nothing more to offer than Transformers did, snazzy special effects and a story line riddled with plot holes and love/hate relationships between the characters that seem forced and unauthentic.
Which brings me to my next point. Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof. Where did these men learn to write? They use the technology of Star Trek only to advance the plot or create tension when needed. For instance, a transporter that the enemy uses can transport him light years to another planet, but the transporters on the Enterprise have a hard job locking onto a person on the planet they are orbiting, a hand-held communicator that can call someone in a bar on Earth from the Klingon home world light years away, infiltrating a top secret military base with a shuttle craft without being spotted by sensors, and the list goes on.
The last part of the movie they just got so lazy that they re-created the whole death scene at the end of Wrath of Khan, but mirrored it by reversing the roles. And if that's not enough, the writers blatantly do a copy/paste of most of the dialogue like "If we go in there we'll die, the radiation will kill us" and "The decontamination process is not complete, you'll flood the whole compartment."
Later on they even forget that the attributes that makes Khan's blood special, and which is needed to revive Kirk, also flows through the veins of the other 72 augments sitting in cryogenic tubes in McCoy's sick bay, the same cryogenic tubes that McCoy himself says earlier in the movie he could not risk opening without possibly killing the person inside, which could have been a solid reason to send Spock chasing after Khan in a foot- chase through downtown San-Francisco to retrieve a sample of Khan's blood, but instead, they have McCoy open a cryogenic tube and remove it's occupant in order to freeze Kirk so he can preserve his brain functions, I believe his exact words were "Get this guy out of the cryo-tube, keep him in an induced coma." but still, poor McCoy doesn't realize he could use that person's blood to revive Kirk. So now we are led to believe that McCoy, the same McCoy who based most of his arguments on ethics throughout the series and movies, is perfectly capable of opening one of the tubes, risking another being's life in the process, all to save another man? A little unethical if you ask me. These guys obviously don't know what the hell they are doing when it comes to writing Star Trek movies.
This movie is, in my opinion, the worst in the entire series. Yes even "The Final Frontier", because at least Shatner had the guts to go where no other writer or director had gone before or since with that movie, by doing a story about God.