Biggest Issue With Star Trek (2009)?

My biggest issue remains the whole of Engineering, it looks like a factory and something that couldn't possibly be inside the Enterprise.

The cadet thing didn't bother me too much because there was an excuse in story - they were responding to a crisis on Vulcan, using cadets to crew ships because nobody else was available. So there were next to no "real" officers available to man those posts.

Seems reasonable to me.

I agree but I also disagree . This isn't the first time this happened. During the prime reality, in DS9 episode "Valiant"  - the episode about a group of Red Squad cadets in control of a Defiant class starship. On his deathbed, Captain Ramirez gave Cadet Tim Watters a battlefield commission  as "acting" captain, who used that rank to also promote others as well.However, this happened after all the regular officers were killed in combat.


in Star Trek( 2009) Other officers should have been given first officer rank over Kirk first.Despite those rare circumstances, this isnt the first time this happened. Keep in mind that Captain Pike knew Kirks dad, and respected him. He figured his son would have his same qualities in leadership and tactics. On top of that, Kirk possessed a genius-level intellect. Pike figured this is the best way to get Kirk to stop being a loser and start doing something useful with that potential.

Besides, Kirk affirmed Pikes faith in him by warning him about the Romulan ship- this act saved the entire crew from certain death. 

The thing that bothered me the most is probably Nero's motivation. He's upset about his planet being destroyed and his wife being killed. But it's nonsensical to blame Spock for this, given that Spock was trying to save them.

It's like murdering the family of the firefighter who wasn't able to save your loved ones from a fire. Nonsense.

Well I admit That bothered me only a little but how different was it when Annorax used the Krenim temporal weapon ship to play God and erase entire species from existence just to bring his wife back ? Tragic villains are rarely rational. I guess Nero missed his family too much.

Romulans usually are fairly rational- brutal but rational. Tragic villians are not rational . Nero was so heartbroken he just went whackadoo.

That's very different, you even describe the difference! Annorax was doing what he did in order to try to restore his wife. He was willing to destroy other cultures to that end, but that destruction was not his goal, it was the collateral damage involved in reaching his goal.

Nero, by contrast, never once said that he wanted to change the future to make sure his wife lived. His sole stated goal was to destroy all the Federation planets so that the man who tried to save his planet would be really, really unhappy.

Which is actually a shame, because they could have simply had him say something like "You Federation types have held us Romulans back for two hundred years, so when the supernova came we had to crawl to you for help because we were too weak to help ourselves. Well I'm going to wipe out the Federation now, so Romulan can be strong in the future and we can beat the black hole ourselves without your help!"

And then his motivation would actually make sense. In fact that would be so easy that I'm sorely tempted to believe that it was the intent, but the scene got cut for time.

But that's the thing with Abrams. He's waaaay more into the visual and emotional aspect of a script than he's ever been into character motivations and plot logic.

But the difference is that Annorax was trying to actually achieve something. Now I freely admit that restoring one person is a trivial goal, and so you could say of both men that they were killing on a mass scale for a trivial reason. But that's a pretty thin distinction to make! Whereas the HUGE difference is that Annorax had a goal - he wasn't trying to destroy, he was trying to restore - and destroying either by accident, or just as a price he was willing to pay, depending on how you look at it.

Nero, on the other hand, just seemed to be hell bent on destroying purely for the sake of hurting Spock. That's it, that's his entire motivation in the movie. Spock failed to kill his wife, so he wants to destroy everything Spock cares about.


He has a single line where he says "My purpose, Christopher, is to not simply avoid the destruction of the home that I love, but to create a Romulus that exists free of the Federation. You see, only then will she be truly saved. That is why I will destroy all the remaining Federation planets, starting with yours."

But that's literally the only reference to it that I can find. He says nothing about wanting to save his wife.

Yeah, he says he doesn't represent the Empire and "we stand apart".

This film should be called Star Dreck, it's a space travesty with an sterile, lens-flared look. 

Kirk becoming captain is a classic piece of MarySue writing. The prototype Mary Sue in A Trekker's Tale literally took over the Enterprise too (but with a better written reason). Rey (MaRey Sue) in Force Awakens took over the Millennium Falcon with Chewbacca being her co-pilot (without any real reason).

Shows you how much this dreck is pandering to the most lowbrow common denominator.