You know, I'm enough of a realist to be able to ignore lens flares if they're coming from shiny ships shooting shiny lasers at things. I still can't get enough of cool space ships in cool space battles (there weren't nearly enough in this movie, hell even most of the ship-to-ship action scenes were them sitting there shooting, from different angles)
But most people who've critiqued the film in this thread have been entirely correct.
I realize it is JJ Abrams' take on Star Trek, so it's going to be ****ed up-implausible like Alias, and explodey shiny like Terminator 3. That's fine. But so much fail took it to a new level.
For me, the lack of a coherent message really broke the movie for me. Through the course of the film, despite being filled with great actors, none of them were really tied up in anything to deliver any kind of evocative message. Kirk's dad died, so he's a rebel. Great, that's cool. He also never exhibits fear, so we know he's never afraid of failing. No emotional investment there. Spock, who is repeatedly shown to be taken to the brink of emotional outburst after being goaded re: his heritage, is only upset about his planet for a full three minutes, and then goes back to being Spock as if nothing really happened. Everyone else fell into minor roles that didn't really carry with them anything.
The clearest message I could find is that of "choice" ; the whole "destiny vs. free will" thing which is superlatively highlighted in the clearly visible alternate universe (which lacks anyone with a goatee =\ ) but the film did nothing to show how to apply that. Instead, they only referred to it in passing with Kirk going from being a rebel without a job, to a rebel on a spaceship. If the ability to carve out your own destiny is the message, Kirk's example implies the best way to go about this is to be a complete dick to everyone until they back down and let you take control. While for various contrived plot reasons, Kirk was right in the end, his methods would fail without the series of deus ex machinas.
Other than that, you have a villain with highly questionable motives, the Romulan star inexplicably blowing up, "Real" Spock somehow thinking a blackhole was the best solution, and the ensuing time travel (sans whales this time) **** up.
This is to say nothing of various other Trek inconsistencies ("Cardassian Sunrises" circa 2260, transporters at warp, giant spiky talon death star mining ships - with decks that you have to jump between, black hole physics et al, the lines they made Leonard Nimoy say, etc.)
For a stand-alone movie, it was nothing more than a gutless action-flick with a good cast. For Trek Canon, it was worse than Nemesis. The Art Dept. should be praised (again, don't really care about lens-flares; we are looking through the narrating lens of a camera after all) as everything looked clean, crisp and cool. The cast should move on to new and better things. Abrams should stick to his own creative devices and not try to superficially reboot cult franchises. More Orion slave girls should be in film. And naked.
