Cracked recently put up a post about how silly it was to gloss over the reaction of the cadets on Enterprise to seeing all of their classmates casually killed by Nero. Of course, they’re about the get blown out of the sky next, but there ought to have been some reaction worked in there. Sloppy. But more egregiously, STAR TREK missed a chance to rip off a much better movie, INDEPENDENCE DAY (yes, it pains me to call that bit of fluffy cheese a better movie than a Trek movie, but it’s true) by showing the people of Earth menaced by Nero. Sure, we don’t care about Vulcan except through Spock, but we all live on Earth–come on! Do you think the audience sees Earth in STAR TREK as “sci-fi Earth” and hence foreign and non-relateable? No, of course not. It comes off as lazy and cheap. As in “We were too cheap to show reaction shots of people around the Earth, so we give you all the B-list Academy cadets who weren’t given berths on the defense fleet. You’re welcome.” I don’t know about you, but even as a big Trek nerd I couldn’t care less about Star Fleet Academy or the cadets, other than the principles. Why would non-fans connect to that? Please.

Also, the Golden Gate bridge should have buckled and fallen into the Bay when Nero plunked that drill down next to it. Now THAT would have been a fun visual. Again, INDEPENDENCE DAY did it and did it better. Why is the GGB off-limits but we can blow up all of Vulcan? And why should I care?

At one point Spock claims there are only 10K Vulcans left… okay, so they have no colonies. Yaright. At another point, they refer to 6 billion Vulcans. IOW, Vulcan has the population of Earth today. Aside from the implausibility of that, as Vulcan, unlike Earth, is not exactly resource-rich, it’s a dumb attempt to connect with the audience. YET AGAIN, when you could bring it right home to the audience when Nero attacks Earth… they fail. Oopsie.

Eh… I mean, people lined up to see those Wars prequels and boy was that some disappointing cinema. UNtertainment. Star Trek was fun. It just worries me that while Abrams did have good instincts about SOME things, he missed such obvious, easy, logical, sell-outy-goodness moments to pander to the audience. Earth to Abrams, we love to be pandered to! But not in a way that makes us think we’re racists. (Like that vomit-inducing “caring American tourists” scene from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. We like to be talked down until we catch on that we’re being talked down to… TOO OBVS, SILLY FILMMAKER.)

Btw, speaking of racists, notice how most of the Vulcans just drip condescension to Spock but nobody but McCoy among the humans ever says anything abusive to him (and only to needlessly reference TOS, not because it makes any sense within the logic of the movie)? (Kirk’s tirade doesn’t count–unlike, say, the TOS Kirk’s racist rant in “This Side of Paradise”, NuKirk is just engaging in bog-standard reverse psychology.) Having the humans be meanies too would make the audience feel bad about themselves, definitely a no-no. I like this, though, because it was about time that Spock left that tragic mulatto trope behind. That shit was soooo last century.