I went last night. Since there are now 3 threads about this, I guess I'll post in here and continue my own line of thought.
Still digesting what I saw, not sure what to think and not sure I caught all of the details. Once again, after all of the clips and spoiler reveals, I felt like I had seen the whole thing already. Which doesn't bother me, or have much effect on my attitude, but it's interesting to be watching a movie and on every scene change you can guess within second "oh, I bet this must be the part where _____" and be correct. Plot spoilers aside, we had seen on-set photos, previews, trailers, tv spots, etc, with so much material from the beginning, middle, and end that you could pretty much write your own film in your mind and end up pretty close to what we got.
My initial reaction is to say, it seems that there was slightly more of the "Star Trek spirit" I look for in this film (or perhaps more precisely, briefly referenced in this film) -- but that's not to say that I still don't expect to see more of it. I still feel a bit let down there.
Meanwhile every complaint about it I've read so far seems valid to me. But many of the praises also seem valid, for one example I do think I liked the crew better this time.
It felt at times like STID contained a lot of "do-overs" for the writers, trying to correct or explain some of the problems people had with ST09. So in the end the whole film almost seemed like "ok, let's try this again" and I would agree with one common complaint: seems like 4 years went down the tubes on essentially a rehash of what we've seen before
...when will we get an exploration film (something more original, or if not, then at least different)? Expanding on that I also again felt like I was just watching an amalgamation of all the other high-octane films of late (superhero, etc)... like, "let's do all that cool stuff
but with Star Trek". I wish Trek could do more of what it was once good at doing -- showing us something different from all the other "schlock". And I wonder how much life is really left in the whole "hero, villain, explosions" pattern for the short term. Will the world really put up with all of this for another round of Marvel Phase 2, etc?
One thing I keep reading is reviewers describing the film as moving swiftly from one stunning action sequence to another without much in between to distract. Somehow I actually felt most of the sequences were not all that stunning, and I also felt that the in-between moments were sometimes on the long and dull side and I could easily imagine non-Trekkies losing interest fast over those periods.
I think it is now time to give some other writer/director combination a chance to run with the universe at least once before the actors all get out of their contracts. And they should get on it quick -- why it had to be a 4-year gap to make this happen is beyond me.
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Oh, and here's a spoilery review I found yesterday that I thought may resonate with a toy collecting audience due to the reviewer's analogy throughout. I held off on sharing it until I knew whether I agreed or not (I feel like he maybe goes a bit too far, the jury is still out). His closing summary:
With Into Darkness, Abrams and his co-writers have dumped out their extensive Star Trek toy collection onto the floor of their playroom and have great fun crashing and bashing the figures together. But they're not interested in sticking around to clean up the mess.
