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[TheExodu5]

Am I missing something?

Will still don't really understand Krall's motivations. They don't really make much sense.

Why does he have an army of bees at his disposal if the original inhabitants left the planet? Why does he need the weapon when he could just attack with his fleet of bees anyways? Why does he have no idea Jaylah took over the Franklin?

It also bugs me that the weapon is just clearly a plot device. We don't know how they got it, why it exists, or why it's so important. They just have it so that the villain had a reason to target them.

 

[Grenouille]

When the villain suddenly turned into Idris Elba I wondered if a gaffer had somehow managed to write the last part of the script.

 

[BronsonLee]

When the villain suddenly turned into Idris Elba I wondered if a gaffer had somehow managed to write the last part of the script.

I'm surprised they didn't morph him back to human sooner

 

[xandaca]

Liked it. Very pleased to have a Trek movie with a real theme again (the difficulty of living up to an ideal, and the idea that building an ideal can mean leaving people behind) and there was a genuine affection for the series running throughout rather than Into Darkness (which I enjoy as a stupid action movie, but definitely not as a Trek movie) using its Trek elements as window dressing. Bones and Spock, as everyone says, were great, Chris Pine is achieving a good balance between respecting Shatner's work and making the character his own, and Sofia Boutella was tremendous as Jaylah. Hopefully she'll come back. On the downside, almost everything related to the plot - aside from the nice Enterprise-referencing background details - was pretty stupid, from Krall's lack of personality to his somehow having a swarm of mining drones large enough to engulf a starbase and starship (and said starship's total inability to defend against them, even though surely they were small enough that the deflector array could have handled them?), while the movie's pace never quite felt like it got out of second gear. All that said, the destruction of the enterprise was very powerfully done regardless of how much sense it did or did not make, the character work was mostly great, and Spock discovering the photo of the old crew was a lovely, lovely touch. 7/10 for me.

 

[JonnyDBrit]

I'm surprised they didn't morph him back to human sooner

Mildly related to this and after weeks of thinking about it, I kinda feel like the movie would have been improved by Uhura landing with Scotty. The characters don't interact too much directly - similar to how the Kirk/Chekov team works because of how relatively fresh it is in any depiction of the two - but they'd work well given the context of things. Scotty fixes the ship, Uhura uses its communication capabilities to coordinate reuniting and rescuing the crew. But also, she could spend some of the time going through the Franklin's old logs, giving some proper space for the reveal of Krall = Edison. Because I realise part of what makes his motivation come off weak is that we don't get a real taste for just what it is that broke him. The Enterprise crew are trapped on the planet a couple of days, and most of their scenes involve an active plan on escaping that, in the end, pays off. There's no sense of what is meant to be this crushing isolation that Edison had as one of only three people to survive after the rest of his crew has died out, and every potential rescue is a stranger, trapped as they are, that they might well need to feed off to survive. Because there's like, what, three logs that pass by in the span of a minute, mostly just for the reveal?

Spacing that stuff out, and getting to see Edison go from a man willing to at least try his hand at a new life, to one broken, humiliated, and angry at what he's been reduced to, would have been vital to making him a classic.

I mean in contrast, Khan in WoK was similarly marooned on a barren world, abandoned by the Federation, and what that did to him is regularly reinforced through the movie, particularly in one of its most famous scenes. It contextualises what is ultimately - and quite deliberately - a petty quest for revenge, so that we understand it and accept it, even if it is not the thinking of a rational man. But then if we try to build up the villain from the beginning we can't be all mysterious with who he is for most of the movie, can we?

 

[Branduil]

I want to say at the beginning that I don't think this was a bad movie, I mean all the parts were there, in the technically correct order, but man what an empty movie. The one-dimensional flanderized versions of the TOS characters simply cannot stand up to the scrutiny of more than one movie. I just can't make myself interested in their shallow characters at all. Kirk and Spock's friendship is basically an informed attribute at this point, where they constantly have to remind the audience "boy we sure are a good team huh" since it isn't remotely onscreen. I find Quinto's Spock particularly tiresome at this point; rather than coldly logical with a warmly humanistic undercurrent like Nimoy's, he just seems like a perpetually constipated and aggravated uptight jerk.

Also, Idris Elbalien's backstory was laughably absurd. Why does every nuTrek villain have the same damn supervillain backstory of "muh revenge because of this thing in the past that I completely misunderstood and irrationally hate the entire modern federation for." The reliance on this same stupid motivation for every movie ruins any potential thematic resonance.

So yeah, I can't say I'm upset this will be the end of this variation of the franchise. They've utterly mined this shallow mine for all its worth.