Let's talking about some of that casting. Zachary Quinto as Spock? Loved him. So much so that I didn't even have a few moments of 'now to get used to someone else playing Spock'. And, I have to admit, I also kind of got that for Karl Urban playing McCoy. With the others, while I thought many of them did well, it was more on the strength of the scripting that I got the idea that these were the characters from the original series. For the most part, that's fine. I'd far rather someone coming fresh and playing Kirk or Scotty or whoever their way rather than trying to do an impression of the original actor. I suppose the one I got the least vibe of their original self from was Uhura. Of course, at least one scene that seemed important in term of her characterisation, the cinema screwed up the sound for.
I like that Captain Pike got a happy ending - alive and well. It would have been a tired cliché for Kirk to find him near-dead and doing some kind of 'go on without me' or sacrificing his almost-dead body at the last minute to save everyone.
I know it's a little twee, but I like that the Nokia tune has survived into the twenty-third century.
Now that Kirk's only got his mother left and Spock's only got his father, do you think they ever talk about setting them up?
24th-century Romulans have no sense of OH&S. An accidental jostle on one of those platforms could send you plummeting to your death. (Since they're the last of their kind, you'd think they'd be more concerned about losing people.)
Speaking of 'last of their kind', I'm rather glad that even with the changes to the timeline, Spock's not.
Wonder what Temporal Investigations made of all this? I kid, though. The time-travel plot made a pretty good part of the story itself, and so much of the point of using it is to make a fresh start to the Star Trek story. Wondering why the various time cops of Trek didn't step in, or how X worked when in Y episode they said this is not what I need to be doing. I enjoyed the film enough that I'll leave it to someone else to worry about all that. Besides, when it comes to time-travel, Star Trek self-admittedly makes up the rules as it goes along.
The older Spock made it sound like they'd all been caught up in the black hole as soon as it happened, and thrown back in time by subspace gravimetric tachyon compression magic. But the first part, when Nero asked the Kelvin captain the date, made it sound like he was on a prepared, dedicated time-travel mission.
'I have been, and always shall be, your friend.' Awww.
Yay! Admiral Archer and beagles!
(Hang on, doesn't all this mean that the only previous Trek series not retconned away is Enterprise? The one that so many fanboys and fangirls don't like? Heeheeheehee.)
Oh, yeah. And the reincarnated Chekov didn't remind me much of Walter Koenig either. But he was a pretty fun character.
I like those red cadet uniforms. Actually, those grey ones that the not-cadets at the Academy wear are pretty spiffy too, if a little drab.
It would've been easy to contrive a 'moment of honour' or 'sudden gasp of the big-leagues' every time one of the 'main characters' - currently mostly cadets or low-ranked - took on the role we know them for. Which made me love McCoy's 'tell me something I don't know' when he got handed the chief medical position all the more.
I used to be able to pluck a correct stardate or future calendar point out of the air, something which now confuses me when I think about it too hard. So I may be wrong, and I didn't get there till the last one in the film, but it seems that 'stardates' are just like regular AD years now. Yes?
Simon Pegg as Scotty really was a lot of fun. (Sandwiches in the future. Heh.) I even liked his little friend.
Yes, I admit that if I were in charge of credit cookies, there would be one where the beagle came back. (So it might be a good thing that I don't make Star Trek movies.)