I'm trying to figure out how this has taken Trek's spirit...in all seriousness. Regardless of super-human feats, which Trek has done for years, I think the scale of the Yorktown and the Swarm work very well in the film's overall story,See, what I hated about Yorktown - apart from the fact that (gravity angles aside) it looked completely indistinguishable from Tomorrowland and that Nova planet from Guardians of the Galaxy - was its scale. It was so gigantic, so huge, that it made the humans within it look utterly insignificant. And even if I buy the excuse of a space colony instead of planetary colonies for purposes of neutrality (never mind that there are M-class planets everywhere in Trek ripe for colonization), why would hundreds of thousands of people want to live and work there, rather than on planets?
It may be that if the shows had had bigger budgets, they would have gone for similarly gonzo-scaled colonies. But, call me old-school if you like, one thing I actually like about Trek is how it tends to keep things fairly small and human-sized, even when it explores the infinity of the cosmos. I freaking love that when Kirk and Picard meet, it's in a rustic mountain house, and that they chat while riding horses. Indeed, I think its human scale is a key part of its core humanism - even if that scale was previously imposed by budget limitations.
But when you've got a space colony so massive that it utterly dwarfs the Enterprise, and when the Enterprise is torn to shreds by thousands of bee-ships and yet the majority of the crew seems to survive because magic, and when Scotty can pull himself off a cliff from the tips of his fingers, something I'm sure most professional athletes couldn't do, that human scale is utterly lost, and with it, to me, is taken Trek's very spirit.
First of all, one of the things that has been driven in to my head over 10 years of post high school education is that humanity isn't special in the sense that we think of ourselves. Indeed, many depictions of Earth within the span of the galaxy is meant to dwarf us in relationship to the rest of the universe.
That's the whole point of science fiction is to take these fantastic places, these huge galaxies and bring them just a little bit closer, but to never loose site of how large they are. In my opinion, given Kirk's arc, Beyond does this very well. It scales the action, the scope of everything, up so that we feel for Kirk, his sense of being small, and lost in space. Commodore Paris states it as much.
Then the Enterprise comes crashing down. The scale is suddenly taken from quite large, culminating in the threat, to bringing it down to Kirk's level, where it is very personal and he has to surive by relying upon his human connections. So, the film starts out large, yet, but then it scales it down to a very human, very personal, level.
Also, as an aside, how often have Trek threats been huge compared to the heroes? TOS did it all the time and started with "The Corbomite Maneuver." What episode is TNG most famous for? What about Sisko's heroic moment of starring down a fleet of Dominion warships in the wormhole? The Xindi weapon? V'Ger?
Scale isn't the problem. It's focus on the characters and whether or not that works for the individual audience member.
