Dreadful direction

Rating: 5/10 (27 May 2013)

Star Trek has always been a franchise of intellect over action, not that action hasn't been a necessary element in storytelling. I fault JJ Abrams directly for this disappointing, and least effective, addition to the TREK pantheon. The cast was wasted on a storyline that had been told twice before--Khan and his ubermenschen--and a total waste of the great Benedict Cumberbatch.
If this movie had been cut to 1 hour 30 minutes, it would have been much better. For instance, the airlock-to-airlock sequence went on far too long with the dodging of debris and the faux tension that they wouldn't make it, let alone the cuts to Scotty (Simon Pegg) on the hangar deck; the gratuitous lingerie scene between Kirk and Carol Marcus; the race to realign the reactor and subsequent saccharin dying scene stolen from a previous film; all of these signs of a lazy director.
Fie on you JJ. I had thought perhaps you would elevate the Star Wars movie you were directing, but no, you demeaned TREK. You damaged the franchise, and it will be difficult for it to regain credibility after your disastrous mismanagement of "Into Darkness". I should have been so much better, it had the cast and elements of the script that could have made it so. This was a clichéd POS, and only because it is Star Trek do I give it a rating as high as 5.