Since this is Monday morning and all the cool kids have probably seen the movie already, I'm sharing my take on what I found wrong (and somewhat right) with the film. There are a bunch of spoilers in this post, so if you're not interested, don't look. I mean, seriously: don't read any further.
There were a lot of problems I found with this movie, problems that were never reasonably explained or just didn't think much of the science in science fiction.
First:
In the beginning sequence we see Kirk running from the natives, ala Indiana Jones, through a jungle whilst dodging spears and arrows. That's great. Why? Because he stole a holy canvas. Why? We don't know -- the only answer that was ever given was simply: "They were bowing to it." And why, during an observation mission, was Kirk and McCoy on the planet and that close to the natives, anyway? Sure, they were setting up Kirk's violation of the Prime Directive, but they never really explained why he had to have more access to the alien civilization than observing from space would have sufficed.
And why the captain of the ship with his chief medical officer and not an anthropological/sociological away team? That always bothered my about the STAR TREK movies and television shows. The captain of a ship has more pressing concerns than what goes on in a tent on a random planet.
Second:
The Enterprise was on a observation mission to watch this planet and collect data. Why did the Enterprise have to be submerged under water? Why couldn't it have been placed in orbit and a shuttle have been sent down to the planet for a closer view? Or, if the ship needed to be within the atmosphere (for some reason), why not over an ocean or a an ice-cap and (again) sent a shuttle in for a closer look?
This is never adequately explained.
Third:
There is a volcano that will erupt and wipe out this planet. Fair enough. Why did Spock have to descend into the volcano and drop off the bomb? The bomb was set on a 3 minute timer, couldn't they have timed it properly and dropped it into the volcano from a specific height? Couldn't they have "beamed" it down or even lowered the bomb from a cable without a Vulcan escort?
I know this was a premise to set up the rest of the story with Kirk violating the Prime Directive and the subsequent punishment, but it just seems to me this could have been done in a much better way.
[Side Complaint]
I won't even get into a discussion about emergency stopping out of warp speed. Is warp truly a speed or is the warp engine just creating a hole in space from one location to another? Is it isolating a piece of space and then moving space around the isolated space? Can a ship, or anything, be jerked out of warp with a engine problem?
I'll leave that one to the physicist theorists to argue about.
Fourth:
Scotty was drunk when Kirk called him. If this story happened in less than a day from when the Enterprise left Earth (as we're supposed to assume at the end when Scotty says "I've only been gone one day") then how his the engineer coherent or at least not hungover? Space-aged hangover cures?
And why did that ship, three times the size of the Enterprise, have a cargo bay door that was only a few meters wide? That cargo bay was huge, what are they loading that didn't need more than 3 or 4 meters of diameter?
Fifth:
The return trip from the Klingon's home world, Kronos, seemed to only take a few moments and the other ship caught up with the Enterprise in the warp tube (for lack of a better analogy). Like above, depending on how warp drives work, could a ship over-take another ship inside the same warp tube? Could it fire weapons inside the warp tube knocking the other ship out of warp? If so, could it then leave warp quick enough to stop in the same location without shooting well past the defunct ship?
Sixth:
The Enterprise is shot out of warp (see above) next to the Moon. ow is the Earth's gravity going to pull it hundreds of thousands of kilometers into the Earth's atmosphere within minutes when it's not pulling space debris or the Moon itself (and one has to assume the Moon's gravity would be counter-acting the Earth's gravity on the Enterprise).
Seventh:
Back to the second act of the movie, why on Earth would all the senior captains and their seconds all meet in the same room, accessible by any aircraft or rocket launched missile?
Eighth:
When they needed Kahn's blood to save Kirk's life, why on Earth did they need to go after Kahn? The Enterprise was filled with 72 other genetically advanced people just like Kahn whose blood, presumably, would have had the same properties as Kahn's. I mean, he was awakened at random, right? Or are we to believe the admiral wakened the leader of the people on the first try?
Now, don't get me wrong, the movie did somethings right as well. For example, Kirk and Spock's relationship with Spock providing the caution of reason and logic over Kirk's passion and Kirk's earnest need to appeal to Spock's human nature.
I really wish there'd been more screen time from McCoy and Uhura and while I'm more interested in the character story-based drama, STAR TREK is, and always has been, about science and unlike the first of the reboots, this movie just didn't seem to hold science as a major player in the plot.
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| Image borrowed from the internet [Paramount Pictures owns the rights] |
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