Star Trek
The Original Series of Star Trek to me is a bit like Fruit and Fibre cereal. It's tasty and enjoyable and you have the feeling it's good for you but ultimately it's for old people. The new Star Trek film is more like Treasure Flakes (recently featured on hit TV show The Apprentice): exciting and well-packaged and more aimed towards a younger audience but probably not as good. In essence the same thing, that will seem familiar to anyone who is a fan of good old F'n'F (a.k.a. ST: TOS), but newer and shinier.
Much shinier. My first real gripe with the film is that their attempts to make the film futuristic is to give any available light source (e.g. exploding suns, fluorescent lightbulbs, police officer helmets) ridiculous lens flare that dazzles and amazes. Or distracts, your call.
The first hour of the film is intensely enjoyable. The presentation of old as shot through new eyes was brilliant and a lot better than I expected. There is superb characterisation, great action and the restyling of the Federation, the Vulcans and Romulans is great, if a bit pointless in places (why does the Romulan spacedrill have endless decorative spikes all over it? What purpose could they fill? Illogical.). I liked how every character you know from TOS is given their own little showcase with a handy guide to "How They Behave". In the end though, because there are so many prominent crewmen, they all take a backseat to the stars of the show: Kirk and Spock. I understand the reasoning for this, but some characters (Bones in particular) are given short thrift because of it and besides some classic "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a blank" lines they're not given much of a way of a look in.
When the plot takes over in full force it falls a little flat I felt. The moment you see Leonard Nimoy you have to be subjected to a long chunk of Silver Age of comics-esque exposition explaining what the hell is going on. As great a reboot as this is, I really didn't see the need for a time-travel story in a film like this. Time travel introduces a whole new level of complication not required and such stories were never really dealt with successfully in any series of Star Trek in my opinion. I admire the fact they kept techno-babble to the minimum but I can imagine a lot of audiences being wholly turned off by the slew of sci-fi mumbo-jumbery needed to explain this particular plot. Even with some fairly large explainy bits there are still some things left unanswered. For example, what is red matter and how does it work? When the Romulan ship is sucked into the singularity during the denouement we are supposed to assume that is was destroyed, yet earlier in the same film it passed through such a singularity it escaped unharmed, just time displaced. This does not make sense within its own continuity. Shame on you, J.J. Abrams.
In summary: use of Beastie Boys music = good. Samurai Sulu = good. Aliens that don't all look the same as humans: good. Repurposing and representing old ideas and making them cool = good. Notion that this reboot, with some differences to TOS, does not preclude its existence = good. Knowing nods to fans of Star Trek = some good, some alienating. Times when Kirk is left hanging off a cliff face = too often. Film in general = deserves to do well.