This rant may contain spoilers - if you haven't seen Star Trek yet I advise you not to, but if you still want to then probably don't read this.

 

OK so I saw Star Trek last night and hated it. After a small rant on facebook I think I didn't really get across why. The main reason was lazy, nonsensical plotting and lack of internal consistency.

 

I can sum up the film thus - Macguffin (so many Macguffins!), explosion or other brash special effect, rousing music, trite emotional speech, lens flare - repeat until brain dead


Teleporters work to transport someone across the galaxy from Earth to the Klingon planet but won't work between two ships in line of sight because "there is too much space debris in the way" oh really

 
London 2256 - I hope I'm wrong on this but I think it said London 2256, so yes it's an alternative reality but they then later say cryostasis was invented before FTL & these are 300 year olds in Cryostasis - erm so that means that they were genetically engineered in the 1920's - OK fine sure, cryogenically frozen in the 1950's OK sure, wait there's a scene where we see the evolution of spaceships from the original moon landings through the shuttle to the Enterprise - so did this happen earlier than in our universe? Perhaps they sent these guys into space when they were in their 70's? perhaps their magic blood kept them forever young? They were sentanced to death so how did they end up cryogenically frozen - I seemed to have missed that explanation, if indeed that was every explained.

 

Magic blood - these people were 300 years old, apparently, was this secret magic blood? this technique had never been used again? Why did they need Khan's blood when they had 72 other genetically engineered people on board presumably also with magic blood - if the other 72 didn't have magic blood then why was Khan different? what was the deal with the cryo tubes in torpedoes anyway was Khan's escape plan to be caught by the spaceship sent to kill him? was Scotty the only person that thought to look inside the torpedoes? Did Khan make every single torpedo himself? Why did no-one notice that the other 72 cryo tubes had gone missing - I may not have been paying attention at this point so perhaps this was explained but if so I blinked and missed it, why didn't the head of Star Fleet sneak off in his top secret ship and kill Khan himself without running the risk of sending someone like Kirk who we established earlier in the film has a congenital problem with following orders. If you can pinpoint him using the Macguffin of teleporter trace why not just teleport a torpedo or a hundred torpedoes to where he is and blow him up that way, oh right because you want to start a war. Wait you want to start a war now when you only have 1 Dreadnought?

 

Let’s use the Klingons in the lazy way that Worf was used in TNG - they seemed to only exists to get their butts kicked to show that this enemy is able to kick a Klingon's butt and the Klingons are a warrior culture so this enemy must be really scary, however later we'll be able to defeat him almost easily in basically a fist fight after showing that he couldn't be defeated in a fist fight

 

Communicators that do less than i-phones and are not touch screen, you couldn't update them?

 

"Cold fusion" in a suitcase, that needs to be set manually inside a volcano - really what was the plan there? tip to the scriptwriters - look up cold fusion on the internet and see what it is, what it isn't is a magic bomb that freezes liquid rock - if you’re going to have a Macguffin that freezes volcanoes why call it cold fusion?

 

Why was it necessary to have the Enterprise on the planet under the sea? were the teleporters not working? the main part of the plan seemed to be to fly a shuttle into a volcano so I see no reason why the ship needed to be on the planet except to be there to break the Prime Directive for plot reasons.

 

Are we really saying that Teleportation is Simplex? We can't teleport someone up to the ship because of "fourth or fifth lazy spurious excuse as to why we can't use Teleport this time" but we can teleport someone down

 

Why were people surprised that the Admiral's daughter was teleported to the Admiral's ship?

Some of the action sequences were cobbled together from other films - helicopter gunship defeated by fire hose? fight on top of a moving "thing" (what was that exactly?) - seems every film at the moment has a fight on top of a train - the Lone Ranger, Wolverine, Skyfall to name but three

 

The Dreadnought class ship is usable with minimal staff, good job they don't need to be even vaguely intelligent or be able to recognise stowaways, or communicators, or people shouting "open the door" over and over again - a note to all guards never ask "why is there a countdown?" shoot to stun the person who is obviously up to no good

 

Did they not see Glaxy Quest? the engine is broken and the only way to fix it is by kicking it? but first by running through a series of rooms that only seem to exist to be an obstacle course to increase narrative tension Really? without irony -seriously?

 

Special radiation that kills you without a mark on your body without all the classic signs of radiation poisoning, good job there's a "decontamination" chamber that magically sucks up the radiation - again advice to the scriptwriters do a quick google search on radiation sickness or in fact radiation

 

I could go on and on here but suffice to say that this film required a caption at the beginning - "Turn off brain now"

 

OK as a friend said - "It's Star Trek, not an academic paper!" - Yes I understand that, I'm aware of suspension of disbelief but there is also something called verisimilitude, there's an internal logic to such films and there are much more intelligent ways to plot this film. Is my problem that the film is silly? no not really I can enjoy silly films, is it that the science is of the woo woo variety? no not really although that's annoying - if the film is entertaining it would be a minor niggle. Is it because the plot doesn't work, hell I could forgive even that, if it didn't work in one or two places but every 5 minutes I was thinking "That makes no sense"!! Add all those things together however and you start to see why I hated this film.

 

What is wrong with this film is that it's dull, it's lazy and it expects its audience to be idiots.