Really?? TWOK has the return of Khan, who comes across more dangerous and threatening than ever.
Whereas I find him far
less dangerous and threatening, because he's gone from a cunning, devious mastermind with plans of galactic conquest to a scenery-chewing madman whose goals have shrunk to vengeance against one man, and whose obsession blinds him and leads him into bad decisions so that he practically defeats himself. I feel TWOK squandered the potential of the character. STID's interpretation of Khan was, to me, a far better realization of the potential of the character created in "Space Seed" -- at least prior to the climactic action, which didn't really work well for me overall.
It's got some of the most artful and intelligent dialogue of any Trek film.
And also some of the cheesiest melodrama, like Scotty bringing Peter Preston's bloodsoaked body to the bridge, and the "KHAAAAAAAN!!!!!" moment, which I find completely embarrassing to this say (and yes, I found it even worse when they copied it in STID -- that film is certainly not flawless).
And it's TSFS whose dialogue I enjoy the most. There are a lot of lines there that are downright poetic -- Harve Bennett crafted a really nice script for that one. I don't remember the dialogue in TWOK standing out as much.
And it's a tense and exciting submarine movie in space, featuring a battle between two Federation starships.
Whereas I find the action scenes to be ponderous and tediously paced -- and I'm saying that as someone who likes ST:TMP. There are a couple of moments where both Kirk and Khan are alerted to something the enemy is doing but then just stand there staring off into space for ten seconds before reacting -- what the hell? And the exteriors are just ships lumbering around slowly like hippos in the mud. What you find tense and exciting, I find sluggish and dull.
Even if the movie does nothing for you, it should be obvious why the
rest of us love the heck out of it.
What should be obvious, what's been known for so many centuries that there's a saying about it in Latin, is that
de gustibus non est disputandem -- there is no arguing over taste. Different people like different things, and it's generally useless trying to convince other people to like the things you like or to hate the things you hate. There is no objective right or wrong here.
To get back on topic here, we've seen that there are one or two people in this thread who like the
Lost in Space movie, even though most of us found it a failure and critics and mass audiences tended to agree. There are surely people who like seasons 2-3 of LiS too -- heck, there must've been, or the show wouldn't have maintained good enough ratings in season 2 to rate a third year.
But those people weren't the target audience for
Star Trek, and that's the real point. For a long time, most SFTV had been aimed at the audience that LiS was going for, but there had been nothing for more adult or more sophisticated audiences except the occasional anthology, mostly
The Twilight Zone and
The Outer Limits. So if ST was trying to compete with LiS, it was only in the sense of offering an alternative approach to SFTV, appealing to the viewers that LiS wasn't made for, as opposed to competing for the same audience.
Maybe we need to understand that about Abrams Trek too. It's made for a new audience -- not trying to compete with or replace the original in its fans' hearts so much as to provide an alternative and broaden the appeal of the overall franchise. I'm flexible enough to enjoy both versions of Trek, but then, I'm flexible enough to enjoy both ST and LiS (at least the first season), or to enjoy both the Nolan Batman and the '60s sitcom Batman. Other people prefer just one over the other, but that's okay. No franchise succeeds by appealing to only one fan, or one category of fan. The wider you can cast your net, the better it is for the success of the franchise as a whole. So maybe instead of arguing over which version of a franchise is better, we should be glad that there are so many options available. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations and so forth.