Sadly let down

Rating: 3/10 (1 November 2013)

I'm not going to bore any readers by going over the whole film, as this has been done by many other reviewers.
Suffice to say, I AM a Trek fan, although hardly a Trekkie, and I've enjoyed most of the canon, with the original series and Enterprise probably being my favorites. To be frank, quite a few of the movies were pretty clunky, as was a great deal of TNG, and Voyager is, well... a bit dull, mostly.
The first 'rebooted' movie I thoroughly enjoyed, with the spectacular SFX combined with a great cast, an excellent and intelligent script, perfectly timed bursts of comedy and a good few cheesy homages to the original.
So I sat down to this sequel with a great appetite. Unfortunately what I got was mostly a great deal of flash and bang, with what seemed clumsier and far less elegant SFX, a great deal of shouting, and not much else. I too ended up with a headache, as well as being completely flummoxed by the total lack of sense in the story exacerbated by vast holes in the script, not to mention the truly awful wholesale recreation of vignettes from previous movies, stitched together like a cheap bootleg, rather than any kind of homage. And to top it all, most of the great characters, who are all still present, are given nothing to do while Kirk shouts like an angry baby and Spock looks utterly confused. Cumberpatch is good, but frankly Khan he ain't. And what that character was doing there in the first place is a complete mystery... even given the 'changed time-line' plot excuse, the Botany Bay would still have sailed a long time ago. Awful. Truly awful. PS, you get points for how many movie rip-offs you find in this one. I got a bonus for War of the Worlds.