The Xindi circumcised the US by cutting a large trench into Florida with a giant laser.
You’re a gentleman and a scholar.
It was totally a quarry. Iowa is set on top of some lovely limestone, gives us some very nice drinking water. My parents’ property used to be a limestone quarry, gives us a nice view in the summer and the possibility of sledding off a 60 foot cliff in the winter. Good times.
Hanging out in interstellar space, five light years from the nearest system?
Space is BIG. You could hide entire planets in the dark gulf between the stars and no-one would ever know they’re there.
Besides, they had nothing to do in this timeline except wait for Spock.
You’re the one assuming that the guy who wants to destroy the Federation does it by randomly shooting the Federation headquarters. It’s pure stupidity to assume he chose it by chance. If you wanted to destroy the US, wouldn’t Washington DC be an obvious target? You want to hate this, I get it. And you’re really stretching on this one. 
They were waiting. What’s so hard to understand about that? I’d assume by the way that they were somewhere in the Klingon Neutral Zone, since they came out of hiding in preparation for Spock’s arrival and (as Uhura heard) destroyed 49 Klingon ships that presumably detected them in their space.
Say’s you.
Nero was shooting at Annapolis by that metaphor. DC would be Paris.
Well, they coulda gone home to Romulus and told them about the impending supernova, or they coulda got rich betting on sports or something. How Nero kept his crew’s loyalty for 25 years (my girlfriend pointed out that seemed to be no women aboard his ship) is unexplained.
Besdies, if they wanted to destroy Vulcan and Earth (and presumably Andoria and Tellar as well), they certainly had the power to do so already. Just go to each planet and trash all the major cities. Don’t worry about the contemporary defenses - by all indications you can brush them off with trivial effort.
How and why were they in Klingon space, anyway? Aside from throwing it in as a nod to similar references to the first and fourth films, that doesn’t make any sense.
Starfleet is the Federation’s military; it just has alot of non-military functions. In addition to being the Navy it’s also; the Coast Guard, NASA, NOAA Corps, State Department, etc. TOS always portrayed Starfleet as being very close to what we think of a military. Much more than TNG or VOY. It’s not unreasonable to assume that military customs and protocol will become much less formal over the next couple centuries. Having a 4th yr cadet (remember Kirk did 4 yrs in 3) skip five ranks and go straight into commanding a flagship is moronic.
Fair enough. Star Fleet is the body that beats back Romulan expansion and I certainly think they’ve earned enough casual Romulan enmity to be the target. Although Federation HQ in Paris would have been equally valid.
How he got the position for the duration of the emergency is explained in the film. As for how he got it after the fact, I assume it was political pressure to reward the dudes who saved the freaking federation.
He wasn’t shooting at Federation HQ. He just happened, by apparently the merest of coincidence, to drop the drill in it’s general vicinity. When the planet goes, it’s all moot anyway.
I’m not assuming the character chose it by chance. I’m assuming the film’s producers chose it on purpose for reasons that have nothing to do with the plot.
With all the options available to them, they chose to wait? They don’t need the red matter to effectively destroy a Federation with relatively inferior tech. They already demonstrate more than enough firepower to accomplish the goal on their own.
Notheless, he didn’t drive too well without experience; I’d thing he’d need a little practice before he could command a starship. 
I think it’s pretty clear that the drill was dropped near San Fran because it was the Fleet base.
I don’t understand why that’s so hard to believe.
And, as I mentioned before, it was the same locale as ST4, so it could also have been a reference to a past movie (like the apple Kirk’s eating - which seems really out of place as well, but we all know why it’s there).
You’re assuming the producers made the right decision for the wrong reasons? I find that unlikely. You have no evidence for that claim, but if you’d rather believe they hit a bullseye without looking, hey who am I to stand in your way.
They wanted Spock to see it. An obvious choice would have been to accelerate at relativistic (non warp) speeds until time dilation brought them 25 years ahead. Perhaps that’s what they did.
Nero wanted defense codes from Pike before attacking the Federation Homeworld. He evidently felt he could take Vulcan, but the Fed HQ was a bit much.
That’s poetic license. I don’t have a problem with it.
Well, if you really want to get geeky about it, Paris is where the executive branch of the Federation is based but San Francisco is home to the legislature. It’s also the site of Star Fleet headquarters (not just the academy), which means it’s the base for a large part of the Federation’s scientific, exploring, and diplomatic functions. It’s much more than the Federation’s Annapolis, and Paris is much less than the Federation’s DC.
Either way, Nero never sees his wife and child, so it’s kind of lose-lose for him. To an unhinged Romulan, revenge might seem like the best option.
This is actually a reasonable complaint! Still, everyone they might feel they’d have no place in what to them is the past. Their world is gone. All they have is each other. (Cue strings.) As for no women, I don’t know, maybe going through the black hole turned them all gay.
How, after seeing the movie and reading this thread, did you miss the fact that Nero wanted Spock to watch the destruction of his planet? It seems like you’re going in circles - deliberately.
At least in the case of Earth, they weren’t able to do this until they captured a Star Fleet captain from the right era. Now if you argued that it was silly for that captain to have information to render Earth completely defenseless you’d have a good point, but you once again chose to ignore a major point plot - emphasized in the movie and discussed in this thread - in order to have an imaginary plot hole to complain about. That’s what I call straining.
I don’t really care if it was a show for SFHQ or not - the only reason it introduces a plot hole is the reasonable expectation that Starfleet Academy would have weapons close at hand with which they could attack the drill, which was demonstrated to be quite vulnerable to attack. Instead, the Academy guys just gawk and stare and do nothing.
I see no indication of it, and Nero is quite specific that they’d waited 25 years. I get that Romulans are supposed to passionate and all, but this is just stupid.
This is arguing over the minor details of a massively-ill-conceived plan. Nero has 150 years to warn his people about how to stop the supernova, but he’s concentrating on blaming Spock for not stopping the supernova?
Never mind. Have at it.
Bryan Ekers, I am genuinely curious about several of your criticisms - and wholeheartedly I respect your right as a fanboy to complain. Indeed the canon was trashed, although I personally thought it was a pretty good, very good, reboot of the series.
Anyways - why don’t you bring up these same complaints about the series itself? Certainly there are more than enough examples of unnecessarily elaborate planet-destroying mechanisms, jaw-dropping coincidence, and implausibly capable unhinged-yet-coldly-calculating-loyalty-accruing supervillians who monologue and gloat instead of using their moment of advantage until the computer systems come back online from temporal particle interference.
While I thought the character development needed serious work, and felt Kirk was utterly underwhelming, it was still terrific fun.
He, and his entire crew, stay unhinged for 25 years? I suppose maybe if they’d thrown in some nonsense about how what you were feeling at the moment you went through the black hole stayed with you (thus, if you were angry, you would stay angry)…
But apparently Nero doesn’t want to watch Spock watch the destruction of his planet, which seems odd. What’s the point of that? Why not just trash Earth and Vulcan right away and when Spock emerges, he can find both planets reduced to smoldering ruin. Heck, record it on video so when you capture Spock, you can make him watch it watch it on an endless loop?
That’s like the commander of a stealth bomber hesitating to attacking a World War I trench because he doesn’t know the password. Just attack, already.
If the plot point you’re referring to is Nero wanting Spock-prime to witness the destruction of Vulcan, it’s undermined by events in the movie itself. It takes no strain, or even effort, on my part to point this out.