[mousepod]

I'll admit that it was a fun movie. With 36 hours behind me, I think it can nail exactly why I had such a visceral reaction to the movie.

As a wanna-be writer, I tend to focus on story-telling. I can forgive gaffes in real-world logic, as long as they follow the internal logic of the movie.

I expected to see a movie about how the officers of the original series originally met up, so when I was presented with a time-travel anomaly, which is a standard sci-fi gimmick, I was waiting for the "fix" that also inevitably occurs when the gimmick is present.

Kirk's dad dead at the beginning... ok... maybe that was a backstory rewrite... that didn't bother me. In fact, it was cool seeing young Luke Kirk driving the speeder convertible across Tatooine Iowa.

But when they blew up Alderaan Vulcan, I knew that there was some serious fixing that needed to happen if this prequel would actually be a prequel.

So I waited for the writers to dig themselves out of a the hole that they had made.

When Kirk finally meets Obi-Wan Spock on Hoth the icy planet, after he saves him from the Sand People some ugly monster, I thought, "Finally. They'll fix the anomaly. Or at least figure out a way to bring back Vulcan."

So for the last half of the movie, I sat there and watched as Earth was threatened by a Romulan with a mining ship. I wasn't as forgiving as I was of the dumb crap during the first half of the movie. I just couldn't believe it. They had created a whole new backstory to Star Trek (which was fine by me), but then threw in a time travel anomaly to explain why it still fit in the canon. And the time travel stuff was poorly done, to boot.

If Earth-2 Spock hadn't come back, and Nero had exacted his revenge on Earth-1 Spock, then I might have let it go... but the showdown wasn't a showdown and the anomaly served only to let Abrams and crew reboot the series.

So I felt manipulated and cheated. And I was mad.

Perhaps when the next movie comes out and I revisit this one, I'll soften and enjoy it more, but for now, I think that above all, this movie was sloppy and pandering from a story-telling perspective. And that's the worst thing you can do in a movie.