The ships are shooting at each other. I think that's abundantly clear in any of these things.
The difference is that in Abrams's version, it looks dangerous and as if people might get hurt.
Trek's never going back to the kind of stiff formality that it had degenerated into - in terms of characterization (as Marina Sirtis once said, "We don't converse, we hit our marks and declaim") or visually. That's a good thing, whether it's Abrams calling the shots or another modern director.