Why after so many fan films do they still think that merely having a space battle and yelling technobabble is exciting? Especially when the battle is presented in such a bland and static way. I got to the end of the battle scenes and thought "Okay, that's the whole thing done." and then checked and there were still five minutes to go, most of it Alec "acting".
Let's compare it to the ST09 opening, which is actually the only Star Trek movie to open with a space battle. That whole sequence is basically a three-act short film on its own.. The first act is the Kelvin and Narada beginning to fight. The second act is Robau handing over command to George Kirk and going to the Narada. The third act is Robau's death and George's sacrifice. Each one of those acts intensifies the stakes while actually making them smaller. First, it's the whole crew is in danger, then it's George having to take command and the captain heading into certain death, and then it's George's pregnant wife. There's no fate of the Federation stuff, just a simple human story told with great energy and emotion.
What does Interlude have? Extremely boring action that I have no reason to care about. They try to raise the stakes by having Ramirez be injured, but they never explained before this point who he is or why he's important. If I hadn't seen comments here I wouldn't have even remembered that he was the admiral from Prelude. The Artemis was the more interesting ship simply because its captain had way more screen presence than Alec, but then so did the coffee cup.
And what exactly does this tell us about the larger story? Prelude was all about how Garth was this amazing leader and the Ares-class was an awesome ship. This story shows Garth heroically running away, leaving his comrades to die, and two Ares-class ships being unable to win a fight so one has to blow up. They're not doing a very good job of selling either of them. I think I'd defect to the Klingons at this point.
