Ara Backstory:
Star Trek is a big part of my life. It's what my family would do together when Dad came home from work. Watching TOS is actually the first thing I can remember doing, ever. Instead of reading children/young adult books, I read ST novels. This makes me a great dork, I know. But while I may have read the blueprints for Constellation-class starships, I don't have them memorized. ^.^
CHARACTERS
The good:
Kirk, Spock (young and old), Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov all made me very happy.
Kirk was appropriately campy and womanizing, mixing seriousness and genius with humor.
Spock very much looked the part. I liked the control laced with humanity that he showed - even if he can't do the eyebrow thing.
Scotty made me smile, squee, and bounce in my seat every single time he opened his mouth.
Sulu was adorable, even if his character was surrounded by cheese, but that's more of a plot point than a character point.
Chekov was so ickle and cute: "Ooh, ooh, I can do that!" ^___^
The not-so good:
Bones, 75% of the extras, and all the villains.
McCoy got better as the movie went on, but he rubbed the wrong way at the beginning, and it stuck.
Hello, I'm a Romulan. I was super cool when Mark Leonard played me, but now I'm a great big freak with tribal tats, a hick accent, and a seriously unpractical "mining" ship. Oh yeah, Spock blew up my planet, so now like a great big sissy loser, I'm going to fuck with the time continuum.
PLOT
Parts of it didn't suck. Generic bad guy comes to destroy a planet, Federation has to stop it. Pretty basic. Then we get into the finer points: Oh, God! We have 43 years of background already written... how are we supposed to know what to do and not disappoint the rabid, obsessive fans? I know! Time travel. We'll pull a mini-Crisis and re-set everything back to factory settings. No one will think that's a super-cheap cop-out.
OH!! And while we're at it, we'll make Stephen Hawking cry. Ooooo, black holes! And RED MATTER! Yes. That sounds scientific. At least in First Contact when the Borg began to go back in time, the Enterprise wasn't effected because it was "caught in the temporal wake" of the Borg escape pod just as the timeline began to change. This movie didn't even make any apologies as such for when the OMG Evil Romulans with Tats began changing the timeline willy-nilly without effect. The science of it all had holes big enough to drive trucks through. I may have injured Hunter's hand, squeezing it whilst I wept.
EXTRA BITS
The special effects rocked. The makeup did not. Spock's eyebrows were ... questionable, and Sarek's ears were two colors - they didn't match his skin tone well when coloring them. Costuming was ... meh. I didn't like the mesh that the shirts were made out of, but the trousers and boots were nice. Irritating point: the damned doors didn't "swish" when they opened! And there were several choice explosions, but no one fell over railings on the ship! I was very disappointed by that. ^_~
OVERALL
I believe that that cast, that director, and a completely different writing crew could make a splendid movie in the future. If I find myself wallowing in wealth, I may watch it again at the cheap theater (big screens are better for nitpicking), but I wait hopefully for the DVD and the possibility of bloopers and outtakes.
