Ok.... First my take is this. Good Flick, BAD Trek. Still was enjoyable and I look forward to another swipe taken by JJ Abrams with this cast.
Don't keep reading if you haven't seen it and don't want to hit any spoilers:
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First off lets get the Bad Trek out of the way. First up? Time travel. This device of story telling is pretty much always going to be bad. There are very few examples of good time travel stories and this isn't one of them. The use here is just plain fraught with problems most of which concern the Villain. Spock fails an attempt to save Romulous from a super nova. A random Romulan mining ship guns for him in an act of revenge for his failure. As a part of this encounter both Spock and the mining ship to fall into a black hole accidently and get zipped back through time to emerge 25 years apart? That is bad. The idea that a random Romulan mining ship would be damn near invincible a few decades in the past just takes it from there. The idea that Vulcan and Earth had ZERO other defenses than that provided by the scrambled academy cadets truly stretches this whole mess to the breaking point. This element of the story is dog meat. It is a plot device pure and simple to accomplish two things. Drive the crew of the Enterprise together, and give them a clear slate for future stories without the baggage of the Trek franchise history. It accomplishes both so despite being dog meat it is at least useful dog meat.
Alternatives? All pretty messy. Personally I would have suggested leaving Nimoy's Spock in his own time. Give him a role in the cause of the events leading to the destruction of Romulous significant enough to drive a surviving Romulan element a reason to go after him personally... and via time travel since the idea here was to give Trek a new slate to work from. At least an intentional run to the past by an advanced Romulan military vessel would have explained its nigh invulnerability to older technology... as opposed to the invincible mining ship we were subjected to. A super nova as the cause of the destruction of Romulous was probably a poor choice. They set the table for a social revolution led by Spock in TNG and it could easily have been something that backfired into a destruction of that world by civil war. They even had set up Romulan technology to be centered around controlling singularities which could have been spun to time travel with some liberal techno babbling. All wasted... oh well.
Next up on the bad? The silly(er) use of transporting. Rodenberry was pretty honest about the transporter being a device of convenience and it was a technology he specifically limited in his stories to avoid having it become an impossible story element to deal with. They blast people willy nilly all over the place in this movie at levels they didn't use even in the far future of the Trek universe. In the end I suppose it did what Rodenberry originally intended it to do. It moved the story along without tedious travel by ship. However this particular use of the transporter has plot killing implications for ANY story JJ pursues in his new cannon.
In addition to the transporter use problems they have a serious continuity issue with the time it takes Enterprise to reach Vulcan and the time it takes to get back to earth. Apparently the Villain ship is at least as fast as the Enterprise as it can't catch up before it reaches earth. The trip out seems to take a matter of minutes once the ships leave Earth at Maximum warp. Yet all kinds of convoluted shenanigans happen before the Enterprise even goes in pursuit of the enemy ship headed for earth. Yet they apparently arrive only shortly after the enemy ship plunges its mining laser of doom to Earth.
Alternatives? Don't kick Kirk off the ship in the first place... go ahead and let Scotty be on the ship already and as I already suggested there was no need to put Nimoy's Spock into the alternate universe timeline. As for the continuity of timing, it would have been simple to show the trip out to Vulcan would take a while. This would have provided time to show the crew getting to know each other on the ship doing their duties. Additionally establish that the villain ship was slower thus allowing time for the power struggle between Kirk and Spock to determine the course of action for the Enterprise.
Next up, neither Vulcan or Earth have any defense in this movie other than academy cadets manning whatever ships are left due to a frontier conflict the federation is involved in. This already in-plausible small force is swiftly reduced to just the freshly constructed Enterprise. And I mean there is NOTHING else. This is a somewhat largish hole in the PLOT and considering the action nature of this movie it seems odd they did not take advantage of the opportunity to show more big splashy combat sequences. Of course having the mining ship fend off all comers would have simply exacerbated the whole problem of just why it was invincible. To make it worse it appears it would not have really taken that much to take the laser drilling thing out as despite the ships invincibility to federation ships, the laser itself is apparently easily taken out with handheld weapons once Kirk and crew do the ultimate sky dive to reach it at Vulcan. Lets not talk about why exactly they had to use the mining laser in the first place if the actual weapon being employed was a black hole... all you would have to do with that is get it close enough to the ground for the gravity to start pulling it in. All of this is fine for a no brainer action flick. But that is not the history of the Trek franchise. Trek has, for the most part, established good chops in using 'science' to underpin its story lines through the various incarnations. This particular pile of crap would have been bad on the infamously weak plots of the wrung dry Enterprise series.
Alternatives? Assuming we went with the idea that the Romulan bird was an advanced military vessel from the future then there would have been little problem with having massive defensive struggle with stopping it. The ticking clock could have been provided by some convoluted process needed to spit out a black hole to destroy the planet with. Think Borg episodes in TNG where it went to sector 1.
So how can I say all this and still say it was a good flick? Because it was. There are numerous holes in pretty much any Sci Fi movie and past Trek (even the good ones) have been no exception. For example there was nothing here much worse than say Star Wars, or Chronicles of Riddic etc... It was action packed fun. It just did not capture Trek very well in terms of what was driving the action. However the casting was good. The acting was good. And it sets up a true blank canvass on which to move forward. Doing any Star Trek movie was going to be hard. Doing one that basically took all that has gone before and saying 'Do Over' was a very tall order. Yet I say for the most part mission accomplished. It was messy, and it was fun. Long term I doubt this film will fare well... but if they fire out some good Trek on the now blank Canvass then I think its shortcomings will be overlooked in light of the new opportunities it hopefully has opened.
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