Old movies, yes. Because they are movies made with the same sensibility, intelligence, and themes as the other movies and the series.
If only... TWOK managed to get the TOS-feel across very well...
Star Trek manages that even better.
Not at all.
If the movie itself isn't saying it, it's the people who made it, and all the press with their bullshit about old fans and why presumably they don't like the new movie, and all the idiots who've watched it.
And it's doing so by saying the franchise that came before is dull and not worth watching.
What bright future? All I see is a horrifying dystopian future. Building a ship in space is a. more cost effectively, b. more efficient, c. the last two doubly so as all the space docks, space stations, (and with it space hotels, and space tourism) should be around for several centuries, and d. SAFER.
The only way for a ship to be built on the ground is if c. isn't true, and the people are either:
1. totally apathetic to space, no care to go there, live there, do any tourism there, and not even work there. Thus the government had to build the thing on the ground to get people to go there.
2. have an irrational fear and complete wrong idea about how dangerous or rather not space is; making the future humanity either uneducated morons, or deliberately miss-educated victims.
3. a combination of both.
All three scenarios, incidentally would produce a humanity that would never boldly go where no human had gone before, and would never build a Federation.
It would also be a dystopian horror that I don't want to get anywhere near to.
Nope. The movie adds nothing to our favorite characters, it puts in front of us brand new characters that just happen to be carrying the same name. They are, however, completely different characters in an alternate that barely have anything to do with our favorite characters.
Kirk born in battle - bullshit.
Kirk's Kobayashi Maru is utter ridiculousness. The way our actual Kirk did it, was not outright cheating but taking the Maru test multiple times over trying to crack it and eventually reprogramming the scenario because he refused to accept there was a no-win scenario. He was commended for it for originally thinking. He did not do it because he was a rule breaking asshat.
The Enterprise getting built - horrifyingly wrongly. (See above.)
Kirk got the Enterprise through serving on multiple ships slowly getting promoted from ensign to lieutenant, to lieutenant-commander, etc. to finally captain. He got the ship because he was assigned to it, like any other captain getting assigned to a ship. In the movie, he basically hijacked the ship with "the crew" conveniently being there at the same time totally unrealistically, because it is supposedly "destiny" (even though the so-called "destiny" is completely different and thus not destiny at all from the way he really was meant to get it.)
Thus putting stake through the heart of Star Trek, which is secular humanism. We achieve more, because WE work hard and struggle to get there, and because WE work to change the world. Not because some thing from on high like a god or destiny forces us to get there. It takes the positive message of Star Trek, rips it to shreds and tosses it out the window.
Spock's loss? You mean like Vulcan and his parents? You mean the planet we didn't see any of the iconic cities being destroyed of, basically making it look like meangingless barely inhabited planet? The "loss" that only moments after we got more jokes to trivialized it? Comparing that to oBSG casino-planet scenario that everyone's diriding, it makes oBSG look like nBSG in comparison. Great going; the crew is bunch of asshats that happily joke moments after billions of people died. Apparently it doesn't matter, it's only Vulcans that died, not humans. Oh, well, joke away, nothing important here.
Yeah, again, dystopian horror that I don't want to get anywhere near.
This movie, however, that revels in saying, "All the previous stuff was boring, and slow, and bad, but I'm flashy and spiffy" not really.
Wrong. The previous movies have contained alot of mumbo jumbo about pseudo-science that was not believable anyways. Star Trek at it's purest is an expression of Optimism at the event of Tragedy, Light glimmering within a seemingly dark universe. Not this "pseudo-science" that TNG, Voyager, and DS9 reeked of. No, Star Trek was simply created for us to create a future brighter than we could ever imagine.
The sole reason of Nimoy joining the reboot is simple: People have forgotten what Star Trek stood for. Star Trek was never about mumbo-jumbo that only the exclusive could understand, Star Trek is a symbol of Hope in times of desperate need of it.
Star Trek is about showing us the secular humanist ideal: we improve ourselves, get better, stop killing each other, build a better place. And that includes science, it is an integral part of Star Trek and any good Science Fiction story. It's not called SCIENCE Fiction for nothing.
The movie however did the exact opposite. It took the heart of Star Trek, and drove a stake through it.