The Official STAR TREK Grading & Discussion Thread [SPOILERS]

[hmbnimbus]

Hi, long-time reader with only a couple of posts to my name but I felt having watched the movie with my brother last week, I should air some of my own opinions now that I've had time to think about what I saw.

I'll start with the cons first:

REALLY, REALLY ANNOYING CONS THAT MADE ME WANT TO THROW STUFF AT THE SCREEN:

- Product placement of Nokia phone..... groan

- Engineering section - Did they just run out of budget?!?!!?!? Seriously, it looked awful, especially with a concrete-looking floor, massive pipework that seemed to be far more aesthetic than purposeful... and just.... it looked wrong, all wrong.

LESS ANNOYING CONS BUT CONS NONETHELESS:

- When Vulcan and Earth were being attacked by Nero.... er..... no planetary defences? At all? Particularly considering what the Xindi Superweapon did? No ships or defence platforms?!

- Little ship-to-ship combat - I thought the opening scene was really good but after that, there was only the brief encounter between Nero's ship and the Enterprise.

- Too much going on in terms of Nero's ship - this isn't a Star Trek-only fault, all modern action movies seemed obsessed with super-fast, overly-detailed scenes where often it's difficult to tell what's going on.

- Scotty's Sidekick - No..... just..... no.... please.... this isn't Star Wars.

- Parachutes?! Unless I missed something, surely jetpacks / anti-grav packs would have become used by then.....no?

- My brother points out one thing - new fans will be confused as to the original story and old fans are potentially alienated to the new story... I think Abrams attempted to please everybody... but as my Grandma says: "try to please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody."

ENCOURAGABLE PROS

- Resetting the timeline isn't a bad idea in my eyes, certainly allows scope to re-tell some stories from another perspective and may just allow Star Trek to live again. Might even bring in a new fanbase. Which isn't a bad thing, is it?

- The ship (bar Engineering) looks superb, especially externally.

- Uniforms, technology and 23rd Century Earth look great - certainly feels Star Trek-like and captured the spirit of this era.

- Winona Ryder is killed off early.... ;-)

- I loved the scenes on Vulcan.... shame about the extermination of Vulcan itself - but as a surprise it completely caught me unaware. Again, the potential for new stories here is good (what will happen with V'Ger in the future etc.)

PROS THAT LEFT A BIG GRIN ON MY FACE:

- Casting - I adored the casting - Chris Pine had me convinced he was a young Kirk and Zachary Quinto played Spock to a tee. Infact, everyone casted in their roles performed brilliantly, though it was the Kirk and Spock who blew me away. Brilliant.

- The scene with the U.S.S. Kelvin was fantastic, I honestly thought that the Kelvin itself could have passed for the Enterprise itself (in terms of the bridge and internal decor)

- The effect for going to warp - sharp, quick and lacking colour - perfect in my eyes

- Enjoyed the end scene with Nero's ship being pulled into the gravitational distortion with the Enterprise trying to break free - also enjoyed the Kirk / Sulu fight above Vulcan and also Kirk fleeing from the monsters on the planet (whose name escapes me). Very much captured the old essence of TOS.

- The interactions between Kirk and Spock were masterful, in terms of character development these two really grew on me. You felt for both of them (in terms of their loss) and it seemed natural that they should be close companions.


EVALUATION

Some things really, really annoyed me and I feel that this film had elements more akin to Star Wars than Star Trek. But we forget that Trek is older than most other sci-fi around today, it was Trek itself that had oversized weird monsters and faux intensity in the 60s - in terms of returning to TOS roots, it certainly achieved that. Equally though, I wish film-makers would understand that not everyone likes 100mph action constantly... we like a story to be told, more than anything.

I thought the story in terms of Nero's involvement could have been better developed and I pray in any sequel that's made we come across a more recognisable ST enemy, with a more detailed storyline. With initial character (re)development out of the way, hopefully this will be the case in the follow-up.

I have high hopes for a sequel that will improve on some very obvious flaws as well as continuing to strengthen what good there is in this film. I voted it "above-average" as there was too much that was NOT "Star Trek " in this film...a few too many alterations that annoyed me. Surprisingly enough, most of the changes I disliked weren't really related to canon, more a case of poor production and set-design.

Finally, I want to see the Enterprise get the ship-to-ship battle it deserves, we always seem to be denied this in the films and the series... they have the ability to do it fx-wise, so please, please do it in the next one. I'm not asking for 2hrs of space combat, just some more clear cut fighting scenes involving 23rd century ships that fans old and new can recognise - not odd futuristic ships that no-one can relate to.

Anyway, thanks for reading (if you have done, that is).

I understand I've jumped about from point-to-point and probably displayed a complete lack of coherency...just like the film itself.... but one thing I've always been is an eternal optimist. It's why I will always love the idea of Star Trek and why I always see room for improvement as I am optimistic that with refinement, this great franchise can be born again to fans both new and old and enjoyed as such.

Bazza

 

[indranee]

the movie was incoherent to you?

 

[hmbnimbus]

the movie was incoherent to you?

I was joking, ya know?

 

[indranee]

oh okay. too early in the day for me I suppose! I'm a bit incoherent in the morning myself

 

[hmbnimbus]

oh okay. too early in the day for me I suppose! I'm a bit incoherent in the morning myself

It's ok, going back and reading my own review, you'd think I was the one who'd just woken up...

Emotional involvement, it appears, affects my ability to illustrate my opinions properly.

 

[indranee]

no, it was fine. thanks for the review. glad you enjoyed the movie!

 

[Minuialeth]

Thanks for your review, hmbnimbus

- Resetting the timeline isn't a bad idea in my eyes, certainly allows scope to re-tell some stories from another perspective

I hope, I really hope that they are not going to do that. As much as I love TOS, I don't want to re-watch old TOS stories or ST movies with different actors portraying the characters and cooler SFX. I don't want to watch "The Wrath of Khan" rebooted, I don't. I want new adventures.
Frankly, as much as I like the new actors, if they rehash an old story for STXII, I won't spend my money to watch it in a theater. I'll wait for a cheap release of the DVD.

 

[Praetor]

Thanks for your review, hmbnimbus

- Resetting the timeline isn't a bad idea in my eyes, certainly allows scope to re-tell some stories from another perspective

I hope, I really hope that they are not going to do that. As much as I love TOS, I don't want to re-watch old TOS stories or ST movies with different actors portraying the characters and cooler SFX. I don't want to watch "The Wrath of Khan" rebooted, I don't. I want new adventures.
Frankly, as much as I like the new actors, if they rehash an old story for STXII, I won't spend my money to watch it in a theater. I'll wait for a cheap release of the DVD.

QFT.

To me, the reason for rebooting (especially the way they did it, establishing that this is an alternate, not revisionist reboot) is to revisit the characters and setting, not simply rehash TOS plot for plot.

This is why I cringe every time someone suggests Khan (or Kahn ) for the next film.

The ONLY way I will support the reiteration of any TOS story is IF, and only IF, the writers can support the idea that a given TOS story could be dramatically updated so as to be differently relevant, or was in some ways a missed opportunity in the first place.

For example, the mystery of the parallel Earths and the Preservers was something that could be more deeply explored, but I wouldn't necessarily want a direct adaptation of any one episode that dealth with it. There are, I think, a few stories that could be remade with broader scope, but again wouldn't want a direct rehash of the original episode. I would want new and different. "The Doomsday Machine" comes to mind. The basic concept for that episode is one that could be rethought and made into a good movie, without having to adhere to the script of the original episode. (However, I think XI was enough of a disaster movie that the next movie should be something different.)

A simple remake as an update in casting or effects is not enough. We've already had TOS-R, thanks.

 

[Noname Given]

I went back at the theater to see the movie once again and I enjoyed it as much as the first time, even though the first time, people were yelling and applauding as each well known character would appear on screen (also when Spock did his Vulcan pinch).

And I'm pretty sure this time, the cut was different. Somehow there was two or three neat cuts in the sound when changing scenes. I can't put my finger on it the those cuts were badly done. I wonder if distributors or theaters can or will do something to a movie they're showing.

It's three weeks (and many showings later). Often film will break and theatres will re-splice it back together themselves - that's another reason people who have a real interest ibn a given film try to see it close to opening night.

 

[Ovation]

It is also why DLP (digital projection) is becoming increasingly popular--this kind of damage does not happen (other glitches can occur, but they are far less frequent).

 

[Trent Roman]

Well, that was dumb.

I was recently dragged off to see the new, so-called Star Trek film. I had been unimpressed by the generic nature of the trailers, and having no interest in yet another prequel instead of something that actually moves the story of the Trek universe forward, probably could have skipped this one altogether, but the friends wanted to go and couldn’t imagine not bringing the local Trekkie along. In terms of background, I grew up with TNG, enjoyed, to varying degrees, DS9, parts of VOY and latter ENT seasons, but I never managed to get into TOS retroactively—too much cheese, too many retrograde social values—so I approached the film free of any nostalgic bias for the characters or the period.

What one thinks of this so-called Star Trek might depend on the matrix in which it is evaluated. Compared to other summer action films, this is basically an acceptable film; it is no better or worse than other pretty-people-blowing-shit-up outings like Wolverine and Terminator to either side of it, or a mindless antecedent like Transformers, tellingly created by the same people. By the standards of the Star Trek franchise as a whole, however, it is a marked failure—it shares none of the qualities one has come to expect of a product bearing the Star Trek brand, and pales before its progenitors. If one had to come up with a single word to characterize this film, it would be ‘stupid’. ‘Shallow’ would be a close second; while it’s not a requirement, it would have been nice to have seen some semblance of meaning of thematic exploration somewhere between the set pieces, some kind of message being communicated to the audience beyond ‘it’s okay to be an asshole as long as the movie gods love you’.

What passes for a story in this film is really just a bunch of towering contrivances, magical thinking and plot holes strung together by a series of fights of varying necessity. Pacing is really one of the only things this film has going for it, in that expect most viewers are too busy reeling from one scene of chaos to the next to have time to reflect on the utter senselessness of events. Really, between the staggering coincidences required to make the plot function and the pervasive sense of events being animated by a form of destiny rather than causality, it’s questionable whether this film even qualifies as science-fiction in the narrower sense, rather than something more along the lines of space fantasy like Star Wars. Certainly what new ‘science’ this film brings to the table is ludicrously poor, one of many aspects that the producers either never bothered to think through or else felt that ‘dramatic’ license outweighed any frivolities like intelligence. But what can we expect from a movie where plot holes are the second most recurrent feature and where credibility dares not speak its name?

Listing the plot holes would require something essay length, so I’m not even going to bother. A lot of people have already done so, from what I’ve seen looking around the forum; it’s just such a shame that some are so large as to actively prevent the enjoyment of the film at critical scenes because of the bodily harm it does to the audience’s ability to maintain suspension of disbelief, and you just want to throw a shoe at the screen. The meteoric rise of cadets through the ranks, for one—all these people in the background are what, chopped liver? The entire sequence on the ice world, for another, from shooting Kirk off the ship (???) to the senseless predators to the super transporters. And, of course, the supposed climax on the massive killer ‘ordinary’ mining vessel which apparently doesn’t even have shields (beam anti-matter bombs! Torpedos! A squad of security officers! No, two guys with pop guns. Here comes the shoe!).

The movie’s ending sucks donkey cock, and not just because the final sequences feel like they would be more at home with Pinky and the Brain than Kirk and Spock. Making Kirk the captain—when he hasn’t even graduated, let alone worked through the ranks—is the stupidest, most asinine, gag-worthy moment in a film full of such idiocy, and only the fact that it was the ending of the film and this atrocity would only last a few more minutes keeps one from walking out of the theater then and there. What in flying hell makes Kirk deserving of such a position (besides the fact that Stafleet apparently sends out ships with only one experienced officer per division?). Kirk succeeds in stopping Nero’s attack not because of any qualities that he may have, but because he has been stupendously lucky time and again. While Spock’s regrouping option was unconstructive, his initial insistence on following the Romulans made no sense either; it’s only because he ran into future Spock and present Scotty, both conveniently marooned on the iceball Kirk gets ejected to, and because of the sudden, stupendous incompetence of a ship and crew that has defeated entire fleets, that he wins out in the end. After his spectacular ineptitude and behavioral problems across the film, Kirk should be sent to remedial school, not put in the captain’s chair. The sheer amount of Kirk-worship from the film-makers is so cloying that I fully expect that the DVD will have a deleted scene to the effect of Abrams and Co. giving Kirk and handjob on the bridge.

The ending also tries to be all bright and cheery, as though the producers suddenly remembered that Star Trek is supposed to be an optimistic view of the future, and try to spin the events of the film as a victory. But it is not a victory; it is, at best, a mitigated failure, recognition that as bad as things are, they could have been worse. A founding member world of the Federation has been destroyed and billions of people are dead; there is no cause to be happy, and the cheeriness here is actually rather ghastly when one considers that it comes when one considers the civilization-level trauma that has just been inflicted on the Federation and the society-wide mourning that ought to be taking place. But there was really no way to snatch a tidy victory from the overall defeat the Federation has suffered the moment Vulcan was sacrificed in the name of demonstrating change, stemming from this trendy attitude in our contemporary media fiction that blowing shit up means you’re being ‘edgy’ and ‘relevant’. In truth, however, it is easy to destroy: any idiot with a gun or a mining vessel can kill; the real challenge lies in creation, and this is something almost entirely missing from this so-called Star Trek.

It’s often been said that Trek films, like Bond films, get a lot of their zest from the villain. Nemesis, for instance, was uplifted for having a complex villain in Shinzon; First Contact, for the sheer creep factor of the Borg Queen (by comparison, weak villains like Sybok, Rua’fo and… whoever was the bad guy in STIII, make those films all the more forgettable). This so-called Star Trek suffers from having such boring, vapid bad guys—a bunch of tattooed Romulan skinheads with no personality, no sense of motivation, history or community, and, judging from the laughable ‘climatic’ shoot-out, graduates of the Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship. They do have the ability to leap great distances; shame they used their powers for evil instead of becoming Grasshoppermen, the high-jumping superheros. Nero is particularly insipid, moping in the shadows, emerging for senseless acts of violence which may be meant to be intimidating but just come off as terrible cliché. The whole Khan “My wife is dead so I will blow shit up in revenge!” archetype has been recycled so many times, in Trek films and elsewhere, that we’re left with little more than the scummy residue at the bottom of the pile; one might as well not have bothered telegraphing Nero a motivation as simply have him be EVIL! all the time. One is surprised that Nero wasn’t rendered via cartoon, or else simply a line because that’s how much dimension and credibility he has.

Still, it isn’t as if any of the other characters in the film are brimming over with depth and personality; if Nero is basically one-dimensional, it’s in a movie capped at two-dimensions per character. Kirk is probably the biggest offender—in more than one meaning of the word—in this regard; the nominal hero of the film is such a thoroughly unlikeable jackass, without even the appeal of a sleekly rendered anti-hero, that one spends most of the movie cheering on the many individual who beat up on him because it’s generally well-deserved, and otherwise hoping that something terrible will happen to Kirk just to see him get his well-deserved come-uppance. Brash, cocky, arrogant, needlessly antagonistic, sneeringly defiant for the sake of being defiant, self-centered and self-satisfied, lecherous and voyeuristic, and enamored of his own roguish self-perception; someone needs to remind this alpha male wannabe that being top dog still doesn’t make you any better than a dog. It’s a shock this pugilistic braggart managed to get through three years at the Academy before being drought up on disciplinary charges, let alone avoided being expelled. The movie tries to tell you that Kirk is smart—apparently he scored well on his Starfleet SATS, but telling us something about a character means nothing if it isn’t translated onscreen, and Kirk’s problem-solving abilities appear limited to ‘shoot’ and ‘punch’.

Of the B-ranked characters, which is everybody other than Kirk and Spock, everybody but Uhura gets a least one scene where they get to further the plot; McCoy smuggles Kirk on the ship, Sulu fences with minions on the drill, Chekov performs transporter feats, and Scotty… also performs technical feats, but gets a lot of screen time to complain and be comically endangered. In that respect, this so-called Star Trek feels almost like one of those films based around squads, with the exception that these squad members don’t get killed off once they’ve made their unique contribution. Chekov and Scotty can be basically grouped together as one-note gag characters, supposedly technical geniuses but the focus is on their funny ‘foreigner’ accents and slapstick comedy. I’m not actually sure why Chekov is now a prodigy; granted, it gives the character something to do, but once Scotty is thrown into the mix it feels redundant to have two tech-wizzes in the group (as their respective transporter operation feats hint at); their specialties should have been nailed down more clearly. McCoy, once part of the big three, gets broken down to the role of loyal buddy to Kirk; whereas ‘his’ scene arrives earliest in the film, however, he also feels like the most useless character bar Uhura once the ship is actually underway, making no further contributions to the story. Sulu’s scene is also an early one, and he too, fades to irrelevance and the film proceeds, but thanks to Cho, at least one gets the sense that Sulu has an existence outside of the plot, which isn’t the case for most of our backup line.

As the resident Trekkie, I was on the receiving end of a friend’s rant regarding this film’s treatment of gender before I could mention that I hadn’t yet seen it. Having since seen the film, I’d say she was right. Uhura is the only female character of note, and she’s a useless character who gets hit with more than one sexist cliché. In Uhura’s first scene in the movie, she gets hit on, then a bunch of assholes hold a barroom brawl over her while she ineffectively pouts at them to stop, and outside-the-box gets dangled as extra incentive for our jerkwad of a hero to join up. Then she gets a stripping scene in which the audience in put into the position of the voyeur, and drops a quick comment about a transmission for aforementioned voyeuristic jackass to overhear. Her next scene with Spock is essentially her best one, since it demonstrates (as with her reaction to Kirk) that she doesn't put up with idiocy gladly, and can dish out as well as she gets. Then there an artificial vindication when she confirms her early comment, and in that she apparently can distinguish Romulan from Vulcan where the regular comm. guy can't (since, of course, languages don't significantly diverge over thousands of years of separate development), which rapidly becomes meaningless because everybody else apparently has universal translators, and is her only contribution--if you can call it that--to the plot. Afterwards she does nothing but stand around the bridge in her miniskirt and occasionally suck face with Spock to satisfy the shoehorned romance requirement of modern cinema. We're told a number of times how great her talents are, but those skills never translate into action onscreen, making the praise essentially irrelevant to the story. Much like her progenitor, she's the most ineffectual character of all the revamped TOS crew. This is all the worse, and makes the callous motivations all the more transparent, when you consider the difference between the character's profile in the marketing pushes and her actual role in the film, which is object of desire in the first half and furniture in the second. It’s a shame, because here the producers had a chance to break up the Good Old Boys’ Club of the original series arising from 1960s casting practices; they could have mixed things up further with regards to gender, sexuality, more aliens, etc. Instead, we get a film that is not only fails to be progressive by contemporary standards, but is actually regressive considering that it ignores improvements made on the fronts of gender and other issues in Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

Spock is probably the best rendered character; in part, this is helped by the fact that the character himself is so reserved that, in the hands of a skilled performer, one expects to watch development in his eternal life being made manifest largely through subtle signs. But he’s also the only character to have experienced any kind of growth or learning curve during the movie, which is at least something. There not much to say about his relationship with Uhura—the only thing this film really adds (rather than subtracts) to the mythos—because it is, itself, a non-entity, thrown in, one expects, just to meet the romance quota. What does she see in him, he in her? We can only guess, because the movie certainly can’t be bothered to discuss it beyond some tonguing on the transporter pad; and like everything else about this film, remains shallow. It probably wasn’t the best idea to make the emotional focus for much of the film’s events Spock, because of his undemonstrative nature; then again, doing otherwise would have meant actually engaging with the difficulties of something like losing your planet of birth and seeing your chosen culture reduced to the point of extinction, which is obviously too heavy for this flighty film.

Indeed, the only moment of true emotional resonance comes in the opening minutes of the film, which is really the best part of the movie (perhaps because James Dean Kirk isn’t there yet to play hero?). True, there are contrivances in everything malfunctioning just so that he can still ram the ship but has to stay there to do it, and Nero is pops up basically to say, “Hey, folks, I’m EVIL!”, but there’s real tenseness in the scenes, which purposefully keeps things in constant motion so that you don’t stop and reflect on these things. It’s such that, even as one recognizes the manipulation, you can actually sympathize with and feel sorry for the elder Kirk and his wife, sharing their last communication over the comm., he getting mere moments to experience what he will miss, she essentially witnessing his death as it happens. If the rest of the film had managed to make one involved enough to ignore the obvious faults, it would have made a much better movie, but even this movie can’t be a constant sequence of fistfights, shootouts and falling, and absent characters or anything else to care about during the periods between the action sequences, exposes itself for the mindless pap it is.

On the technical side, the acting from the main cast is hit-and-miss. Chris Pine does nothing to make his asshole character any more sympathetic, and most of the time is simply parodying James Dean and Marlon Brando. Yelchin plays Chekov with puppy-dog enthusiasm, but he and Pegg’s performances are basically extended caricatures, particularly disappointing from Pegg who’s done such great work elsewhere (comedies, true, but his Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz roles were a lot mellower than this manic delivery). Urban’s McCoy started off that way, all growly and curmudgeonly for its own sake, but at least he mellowed out as the film went on. Saldana does a basically adequate job with the scraps she’s thrown. Quinto’s Spock is good, managing to land a performance that isn’t just a repeat of Nimoy yet still quite Spock-ish in tone; but I know from Heroes that Quinto can make even over-the-top characters seem nuanced and believable. But it was John Cho that surprised me the most—I’d never liked him in his comedy roles and dreaded the result of casting a comedian as Sulu, but he did a far better job here than anywhere else I’ve seen him, making the best use of his scenes to make Sulu more than the one-note characters most of the others were reduced to. (On the topic of comedy, I should say that Pine’s comedic moments were the ones I enjoyed most, outside of the rest of his performance; he has good timing. I’d be curious to see him in a straight-up comedy.)

It’s a shame that one of the things the movie should have gotten right given its budget—the SFX—is undermined by unimaginative cinematographic vision. I don’t know whose idea it was to shine a light in the audience’s face every thirty seconds (more often than plot holes!), but they should never be allowed near a camera again. And for once that the film had the opportunity to create some truly impressive vistas, what we get instead are deserts and iceballs on the outside, a lots of dirty, industrial sets on the inside (who knew engineering resembled an abandoned warehouse?). Too bad, because the bridge, corridor and transporter room sets are sleek and well-rendered, which shows they had the technical skills to pull off something more impressive than a bunch of holes in the ground in a vain attempt to ape Galactica’s grit factor. Trek is a good future; it should be shiny, not run-down.

Ultimately, I’m pleased to see that this terrible movie is doing well and wish this inept caricature all the best going forward in the rest of its theatrical run and in DVD sales. While this movie was a major letdown at best, and any sequel from the same team likely to be no better, the film keeps the franchise in the public eye, and a revitalized franchise might eventually lead to quality Star Trek on our screens, big or small, at some point in the future; a product of intelligence and integrity, with characters and depth, thematic and emotional resonance, something forward-looking instead of mere rehash. Here’s hoping.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[cyberengland]

Well, Trent Roman, I am extremely glad that your opinion of the new Star Trek is in the minority of opinions both here on the poll in this website. Also, I am glad that the millions of fans whom have seen this movie disagree with you. The success of this movie guarantees that Star Trek has been revitalized and the Franchise is fully back on its feet. I rated this movie as excellent, and I will be one of the first in line where I live to buy the DVD when it is released.

 

[Minuialeth]

The ONLY way I will support the reiteration of any TOS story is IF, and only IF, the writers can support the idea that a given TOS story could be dramatically updated so as to be differently relevant, or was in some ways a missed opportunity in the first place.

I'm not sure how I would take a TOS story with a different take because some things are different in this alternate timeline and yes, some TOS stories would have happened differently. I often think about what is changed when I watch a TOS episode.
This would have to be really well done and thought of, a very solid and clever plot.
If the writers as smart enough, IMO they won't go there.

"The Doomsday Machine" comes to mind. The basic concept for that episode is one that could be rethought and made into a good movie, without having to adhere to the script of the original episode. (However, I think XI was enough of a disaster movie that the next movie should be something different.)

Saw Doomsday Machine again a couple of days ago and like you, I first thought it could make a great movie with the nuCast but I think it's a bit too close to STXI: a huge ship destroying planets.

 

[Minuialeth]

Well, that was dumb.

You felt it was dumb, that's not the same thing as the movie being dumb. People making a generalisation of their personnal opinion is tiring.

I was recently dragged off to see the new, so-called Star Trek film. I had been unimpressed by the generic nature of the trailers, and having no interest in yet another prequel

Too bad because STXI isn't a prequel. It can't be since it's set in an alternate timeline.

In terms of background, I grew up with TNG, enjoyed, to varying degrees, DS9, parts of VOY and latter ENT seasons, but I never managed to get into TOS retroactively—too much cheese, too many retrograde social values—so I approached the film free of any nostalgic bias for the characters or the period.

Of course, the people who happened to like the movie (which isn't flawless, I think everyone agrees on that) must have seen it through their fan's rose coloured glasses.
Except that, reading the very beginning of your post and the words you use ("dragged off", "so called", "unimpressed") you weren't free of any (negative in that instance) bias either!

As for the rest of your review...I wondered several times if another version of the movie had been released in France.

 

[Australis]

Ahhh, Trent, you've turned out to be the bad kind of negative person, the one that uses words to belittle people who did like it as being some kind of naive dweeb. If you didn't like it, fine, and you raise salient points, but the 'downside' words let the whole thing down.

I thought better of you than that.

 

[Roshi]

Yay! 600!

 

[KimMH]

Trent Roman's opinion of the movie is as valid as any other poster's here. I look forward to his/her thoughtful well reasoned posts and think we should refrain from calling him/her negative. Not liking the movie and saying it was not particularly great does not a negative person make. I personally liked the movie for many reasons but recognize it has deficencies. pointing those out is not a bad thing.

 

[Ovation]

Trent Roman's opinion of the movie is as valid as any other poster's here. I look forward to his/her thoughtful well reasoned posts and think we should refrain from calling him/her negative. Not liking the movie and saying it was not particularly great does not a negative person make. I personally liked the movie for many reasons but recognize it has deficencies. pointing those out is not a bad thing.

The review does have more than a few hints that suggest anyone who does like the movie is not all that bright, though. It's not as overt as some others have been, but it is there nonetheless. The criticisms could have been expressed just as strongly without such implications.

 

[KimMH]

I did not feel particulary condescended to although uber fans might feel slighted. TR directed most of the hints of foolishness to the film and it's creators, I felt. Maybe I have thick skin because I'm old. Or maybe I'm old because I have thick skin. *goes away to ponder*

 

[Ovation]

I did not feel particulary condescended to although uber fans might feel slighted. TR directed most of the hints of foolishness to the film and it's creators, I felt. Maybe I have thick skin because I'm old. Or maybe I'm old because I have thick skin. *goes away to ponder*

Well, some examples:

By the standards of the Star Trek franchise as a whole, however, it is a marked failure—it shares none of the qualities one has come to expect of a product bearing the Star Trek brand, and pales before its progenitors. If one had to come up with a single word to characterize this film, it would be ‘stupid’.

The use of "one" as a pronoun here, as opposed to "I", implies that the expectations Trent has of Trek are the correct ones. Ergo, if you don't share them, you're obviously not the same "quality" of fan he is.

it’s just such a shame that some are so large as to actively prevent the enjoyment of the film at critical scenes because of the bodily harm it does to the audience’s ability to maintain suspension of disbelief, and you just want to throw a shoe at the screen.

Another presumption that it is not possible to enjoy the film, as, clearly, suspending disbelief enough to do so causes "bodily harm". "You just want to throw a shoe at the screen" supposes that everyone does, rather than just him.

Making Kirk the captain—when he hasn’t even graduated, let alone worked through the ranks—is the stupidest, most asinine, gag-worthy moment in a film full of such idiocy, and only the fact that it was the ending of the film and this atrocity would only last a few more minutes keeps one from walking out of the theater then and there.

Yet more vitriol implying that the only reasonable response is his own.

I could highlight more, but this is sufficient to make my case.

I do not care that Trent did not like the movie. I don't know of any film where absolutely no one disliked it. I do not care that he found it particularly bad (as opposed to merely disappointing). I object to the implication that not sharing his views (and the implication is quite clear given the way he chose to express his objections as something broader than his own views) is a sign of being unreasonable.