IN SPAAAAAACE
So aside from a flimsy plot and some painfully bad astrophysics Fail, Star Trek was cracking good stuff. Funny, involving, sweet nods to Old Skool (arghhhh I got sort of teary-eyed when future!Spock went "have always been your friend") and mainly some amazing performances from all involved. Karl Urban is endlessly squeeful, I can't praise him enough, and the Spock/Uhura ship... I didn't see the great chemistry, but it wasn't eye-scorching either, which is about the best I can say of any relationship anywhere nowadays (although I, for one, am greatly looking forward to the Kirk/Spock slashy revival). And Sulu had a katana. It was all around an excellent character piece.
Of course there's a but. Can you see it coming a billion miles away? Yeah.
I couldn't quite put my finger on what my problem was until the last few obligatory lines, when they went on about seeking out new lives and boldly going where no one has gone before, and I sort of realized that no one in this movie did any sort of going anywhere or seeking out anything. All they were about was Defending the Earth from hose Who Would Harm hem. And the Earth didn't even moonlight as any place worth Defending all that much, with its incompetent patrol officers and its Nokia phones and its bullies in Starfleet Academy starting bar fights. So it was, y'know, nice, but all terribly humdrum. We're action heroes in action space doing action, you can tell that our bad guy is bad because he has bad tattoos and a bad jacket and his ship is lit in shades of green and that we're in the future because people have funny hairdos and our starships explode a lot but I'm not sure if they ever, um, go anywhere where here aren't Romulans to shoot at. Pike called Starfleet a "peacekeeping and humanitarian armada" or somesuch, conveniently leaving out its supposed actual function which is a science and exploration institute, a place to find self-realization in a better world, and that sums it up pretty well. So what sets this movie, this franchise, apart from any other Action Heroes in Space thing? What about Star Trek is supposed to be innovative, distinguished or even interesting?
So it's a fun movie, it'll get me watching some old episodes I imagine. But as a kickstart to the franchise it falls completely and painfully on its ass. It simply has nothing special to offer. And that's a shame, but I reckon I shouldn't be too surprised.