Posted this elsewhere, thought I'd add it here. A bit late to the party but here's my take.
JJ Abrams was 11 in 1977 , and 16 in 1982. I would take a stab and say two of his favourite films are SW:ANH and ST:WoK. Because he's remade both.
We'll put aside SW, that's been done. But all 3 ST films in the JJverse (or Kelvinverse as it's being called here) are revenge pics in which the Enterprise gets wrecked. Every. Single. One. This is getting dull, no matter how well they are made.
First: revenge. The motives of all 3 (Nero, Khan, Krall) are piss poor and unenlightened and shows highly intelligent men incapable of change over a number of years. Just like the original Khan. Is our world shaped by such men in IRL? Even bin Laden had other motives. To even fit the concept into ST09 they had to have Nero & crew floating about for 20+ years. They need to drop this trope. Now.
Second: the Enterprise. In TOS and TNG, the Enterprise was their rock, their platform, their fortress, from which they could sally forth on adventures both silly and serious, knowing they had a safe place to come back to, a shield and haven. But in every film since WoK of SFS, I guess, the ship has become largely expendable, or at a minimum under serious threat. What we didn't see was how well it served them for the 3 years of the 5 year mission (more on that later). I get why they did what they did, but to an old school fan like me, tearing it apart like that was a travesty, and makes me less invested in ship and crew (yes, I'm odd like that).
Other points. Kirk's bored? I thought he was going to start singing Bowie's 'Rocket Man'. When he was younger that was all he ever wanted, and deep down probably still feels he has debts to pay to his father and Pike. Spock reconsidering? I get that with the passing of the original, but at least his seeing the photo of the old crew helped him realise he needs to stay with them, for them and himself.
Okay, that's the bad stuff.
When it was good, it was really good. Yorktown was spectacular (if poorly defended). Individual scenes sparked and sparkled (like the Franklin racing underwater). I really liked Jayla. Great to see Uhura doing more than opening hailing frequencies, a step up to be much approved of. All the other crew were good, and I'm quite sad about Yelchin.
Pegg and Jung did a fantastic job on the script as a script, I just didn't much like the actual broad story arc, as stated above. If it's based on the script Orci & co were working on, I'm not so sure how the next one's going to go (co-writers doing ST4). There were some good individual lines and a really good balance showing all the main characters. The bad guy was just another bad guy, and even trying to underline his motive at the end didn't do much for me ("The Federation done done me wrong!"). Maybe the next time they could have a natural disaster as the 'villain' or something else, or a planet/empire, rather than a Big Bad individual.
There's much more to say, but this is long enough. I gave it 4/5.
