One thing I really liked about the bridge..

[Sabataage]

I sure this has been gone over before, but deserves reiteration...

One thing about the new Enterprise bridge I greatly appreciated: the large number of support crew in the background.
Instead of four principles and one extra (silently tapping buttons and waiting to get killed by some energy being), you have at least ten people moving back and forth through the camera frame, exchanging information and heading between stations, on and off the bridge. These backgorund crewmembers have overlapping conversations while working on their own set of duties and solve problems, completely independent of whatever the main cast is dealing with.

It gives you an idea of just how massively complicated it would be to run a starship, and it’s a welcome step away from the automation you see in TNG. This is something I’ve long desired to see, even when I was a kid.

At ten years old, I knew there was something wrong with only five or (at maximum) six people running the entire ship. You saw these other crewmembers in the cooridor or in engineering but you never understood what the hell they did since it seemed like Geordi and Data (and Scotty on TOS) could take care of pretty much everything themselves. Here their in the background of every shot.

 

[Sector 7]

I have not seen this addressed yet. I thought I was the only one who felt that way. Much of it was due to budget restrictions in the TV series, but I wanted to see more people in the larger budgets of movies. People who actually did something.

 

[flightmech73]

At first I was thinking that bridge is a bit much because of my being used to the same formula since tos. I finally got to watch my dvd today and ya know I was thinking the same thing. I watch NASA tv allot on the comp and the control room has so many stations. And today I thought of that and if there's that many for a little shuttle why wouldn't there be a whole lot more in the bridge. Now I like it because it finally seems functional.