[mousepod]

I'll keep it brief, just to get my thoughts down.

It was a Star Trek movie, with characters from the original series. They made the movie about Kirk, Spock, Bones etc because they are characters that we love and are familiar with.

I disagree that it was an alternate universe from moment one. In many prequels, the backstory is rewritten. Sometimes it's to make sense out of sloppily written existing backstory, and sometimes it's dramatic license. Either way, that didn't bug me at all. I rather enjoyed the first chunk of the movie, the same way that I've enjoyed the various iterations through the years of say, Batman. But in every origin story of Batman, his parents die. That's the thing that "made" him Batman.

So when they introduce McCoy and he's bitching about his divorce, I slapped my knee and chuckled, "That's why he's so crotchety! Good for the writers!" When adolescent Spock is taunted by the young Vulcans, I appreciated the duality that the character was being handed by the script. Again, I was delighted by the writers' choice.

But then, they blew up Alderaan Vulcan. And then I realized that they hadn't just scrapped the backstory, they scrapped the whole shebang. Past, present, future.

Again, to bring it back to comic book terms, it was as if there was a character I really liked and they promised for years that a great writer was going to write his origin story. But that origin story negated not only the hastily written backstory that had stood for years, but had also completely negated any of the adventures that I'd enjoyed so far. And that, to me, is cheap shenanigans. Why bother using the characters from the original series if you're going to change them all? The only answer I can imagine is that the last Star Trek movie only grossed $47 million so they went back to the original well to revive the franchise. If it had been done artfully, I might have been happy. But it was ham-handed and sloppy.

An illustration of my point: in the 70's, there was this great DC comics character called Swamp Thing. He was a scientist developing a plant serum that, through no fault of his own, was involved in an explosion that somehow fused him with plant matter, making him a weird human/plant hybrid. The original issues of that story, created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, were very cool and, for the time, pretty forward-thinking. Decades later, when Alan Moore (the guy who would write Watchmen) was brough in to "re-boot" Swamp Thing, he rewrote the origin and in this case, the scientist dies. Somehow, his essence, his soul, or whatever, is what animates the plant. The comic took on a whole other dimension - examining what it truly is to be human. If one looked back at the previous (pre-Moore) Swamp Thing stories, they take on an extra layer of poignancy, because the character isn't what he thinks he is.

With Star Trek, it's more like the crappy "multiple earth" concept that DC comics used to make the heroes perennially young. How could The Flash (or Green Lantern or Hawkman or Superman or Batman...) be the same superhero in the 1940's and the 1960's? Easy! They weren't. Those stories took place on a different world.

So this movie sacrificed the entire Star Trek universe as we know it for a mediocre story about a rogue Romulan... miner? Nice work, guys.

This wasn't how Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Chekov, Sulu et al met... this movie is how similar characters with the same names met. And I felt like a victim of bait-and-switch halfway through. And I don't like it. Not one bit.