Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.
After reading your post, it doesn’t sound like there’s any reason for me to see this movie.
What happened? When did movies turn into short attention span theater? Do people (both movie creators as well as viewing audiences) not see these problems? Don’t they bother anyone younger than me? 
To be fair, the TOS and TNG movies lacked a lot. STV was about as bad as a ST film can get, but I also hated or at least strongly disliked IV, III, VI, VII, X, and half of TMP (yes, I liked Insurrection. Mostly. I am the one.). But TWoK was probably one of the best sci fi films ever, so making a good movie can be done!
Also to be fair, the new Trek films, for all their faults, are extremely well produced and put together. Pretty much every individual shot is beautiful. The acting is great, the effects are top notch. It’s just as a coherent whole they leave a lot to be desired.
Regarding Star Trek II, it probably helped things a bit that they modeled it off of a different genre, specifically Age of Sail stories (hence Starfleet suddenly acting a lot more like a Navy than it did in TMP). IIRC, Nicholas Meyer basically decided to model the whole thing off of Horatio Hornblower, keeping only the necessary elements for it to be Star Trek (the characters, the setting, etc.)
Compare the battle in the nebula to two ships seeking each other out in a thick fog. Actually, if they had used the nebula in this film to set the battle where Enterprise got destroyed, it might have worked better than just the huge swarm of bees.
Speaking of the bees, I don’t know if anyone mentioned it, but I think it’s a nice touch that Jelah used that as a best-word-she-could-find to refer to them. She landed on the planet when she was a child, and much of what she knows she learned from the Franklin’s computers. So, lacking a word in her own language to describe them, she picked the best concept from her studies of English and Earth culture, Bees.
And considering that everybody else I’ve seen talking about them refers to them collectively as a Swarm or individually as Drones, “Bees” is actually a pretty good word to pull out of a rummage bag.
To be fair, the Beastie Boys was also a call back to the opening of ST-09 where Lil’ Kirk steals step-daddy’s Corvette for a joyride.
It’s not the particular song choice that’s the problem.
IIRC, it’s a reference to William Shatner’s unique method of pronouncing the word “Sabotage”, sort of a sideways reference. I don’t think Pine!Kirk has been presented with the opportunity to say the word out loud, so maybe they’re saving that joke for much later.
Also, according to a deleted scene from the first film (which also featured James’s older brother, George “Sam” Kirk), the car originally belonged to their birth father, and the boys consider their step-dad claiming it as his own to be kind of an insult.
I wonder if they’re gonna try to put Sam back into this continuity. The fact that his scene was written out has lead to a fan theory that Abrams!Kirk is actually Sam, rather than the second son like Prime!Kirk.
Finally saw this with the wife.
Ugh, that was horrible. I may need to give up on this franchise.
Stupid plot, too much camera spin, too many idiotic or implausible decisions, too much predictability, too much spectacle at the expense of a believable and engaging story.
And no, no one is going to fucking think Beastie Boys is Classical music, any more than McDonald’s cheese burgers will be remembered as high cuisine.
I’m a big fan of whiz-bang Space Opera, so I thought this movie was top-notch when viewed as such.
On the other hand, a civilization powerful enough to create a series of interlocking “ring cities” encased in a dyson sphere that is apparently fully oxygenated… this civilization doesn’t have much to really worry about, right? I never thought the Federation was that advanced technologically.
Rule of cool, man. Rule of cool.
I thought the classical music line was a shout-out to #4, when Spock called Jacqulinne Susann one of “the giants” of 20th century literature.
Plus, you’d be surprised how folks view culture a few hundred years down the line. Wasn’t Shakespeare kind of a Joss Whedon of his day, that is, a fairly prolific producer of pop culture? Yet, a few hundred years later, we treat Shakespeare as if, well, it were Shakespeare.
I thought McCoy’s line “Is that classical music?” was funny was hell.
Was this a good ST movie? No, of course not (but you could say that for every ST movie other than TWOK). But I thought it was a good dumb summer popcorn movie and enjoyed it on those merits.
It’s possible I have less patience for this (“good dumb summer movies”) than I once did. But I disagree. For me, this was a bad dumb summer movie. Not the worst Star Trek movie; I think Nemesis sill “wins” that one, but not good. Not by a long shot.
Of course given the Rotten Tomatoes score, and gross revenue, it’s clear my opinion is in the minority. But I doubt very much this movie will have any lasting cultural value.
[hijack]
My issue with the “Classical?” joke is that it persists with the erroneous notion that popular music artists in modern times are somehow the equivalent of Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc., of the past. They are not. Mass-marketed commercial music in modern times is something relatively new, created with the advent of recording technology and mass communications, and its antecedents lie in folk music, not Classical. Modern Classical music* is still being written and performed all the time, but because mass media only have the patience for stuff that reaches a huge number of people, like Big Macs, most people have no idea that there is an admittedly small but very passionate audience for Classical and Modern Classical music.
Not that most people could recognize a Beethoven symphony (past the opening of the Fifth and “Ode to Joy”) if it bit them on the ass.
*Yes, we need a better name for this.
[/hijack]
If they could do that, you would be correct. But Yorktown is not a Dyson Sphere, it is a largish space station. Dyson Spheres surround entire stars, not the relatively small 16 mile diameter area that Yorktown encompasses.
So did I, when Futurama did it back in 1999.
Right, maybe **JohnT **is confusing Dyson sphere with “sphere shaped” colony. I did think it was interesting they built it to look like it was made of rotating rings, even though they were evidently using pseudo grav. Aesthetics, I suppose, and it’s nice they have the wealth to build cool looking things and not just generic utilitarian structures built by the lowest bidder.
They’ve had pseudo-gravity since before the Federation existed, although I’m not sure if they got it from the Vulcans or if Earth developed it on their own.
Replicator technology means they are an immensely wealthy society all by itself. But I think this time-line is even more advanced than the original. Starbase Yorktown is at the very edge of explored space, but it is way more advanced than the Starbases in TOS, or even the TNG era.
Dyson sphere or not (and I said “dyson sphere” as more linguistic shorthand than anything), the technology involved in creating such a thing is, as said above, Culture-level.
There was also the lighting issue - I don’t see where all the light comes from, especially since nothing ever seemed to cast a shadow. This was another reason I thought DS… looked like the light source was inside the structure and not outside.
I’m so glad this was made. Stuffy old songs about the buttocks.
