OK just saw it last night, so I'm a bit late to the game. Perhaps no new ground here, but here's my $.02 (in no particular order):
1) I almost wonder whether or not this storyline was in response to a lot of fan criticism that Kirk "wasn't ready" for the Enterprise, or if it's how they had planned a story arc from the beginning. Either way, I enjoyed that they dealt with this issue and didn't just shove them out there on an adventure. It always did strike me as a bit of an unfair expectation that after the first movie, folks seem to expect Kirk to be the exact same as Shatner. Well of course they're not the same character because they haven't had the same amount of life experience.
2) Cumberbatch was great as the antagonist. I don't know that it
needed to be Khan for this story to work though. Remember when Benicio Del Toro was rumored for the villain? How great would he have been as Khan? The plot, for me anyways, didn't come off as so "earth in peril" as everyone was thinking during the pre-release thread. And in retrospect, the teaser trailers with what ends up being the Vengeance crashing through San Francisco was a decent way to throw people off from 'real' plot of the movie. And as great as Cumberbatch was, he was still mis-cast as Khan.
3) I don't really want to get too far into any verboten political discussion, but I do think this plot
does honor Star Trek's legacy of dealing with issues of humanity, and is relevant to the world we live in today and the discussions we have about terrorism and war.
4) I can understand how fans of Prime Trek might feel that the references to Wrath of Khan and to TOS were a bit hammy, especially given that JJ has said that he wasn't really a fan of the franchise. So I can see how one might feel a bit pandered to when Christine Chapel comes up in dialogue; a random tribble appears; or when Kirk romances some alien ladies. They probably could have left a few of these moments out (Spock doing the "KHAAAAN!" yell was perhaps a bit gratuitous), but on balance, for me they made the movie really fun.
5) The Vengeance....well, aside from the kind of general "WTF" about Starfleet having a giant warship (the Section 31 thing was a cleaver way to make it not be Starfleet proper actually), why was it so big? It would have been nice to have seen the Klingons just a bit more in this movie so that the potential threat of the Klingons could be better realized on screen. Because what we saw of them was really not much. Some funky looking mini Birds of Prey (why did all the other ships in the universe get bigger except for the Klingon ships?!?), and a few that got taken out by Khan. That battle scene was kind of hectic, did those red shirts even die?
6) And oh yeah, the Klingons....I'm pretty "meh" about the redesign. I don't think the more angular head ridges work for me. It doesn't really look organic as if it evolved from an exoskeleton. And as I mentioned above, I could have used just bit more Klingon presence in the story, I realize it's kind of ancillary to the plot, but there's not much in the JJ-verse which actually discusses the Klingons, so the audience doesn't really know to take them as a threat that would warrant Admiral Marcus' concerns. And, I'm pretty sure those piercings in the ridges were left over from the Romulan concepts from the 09 movie....
7) I'm really over the Spock/Uhura romance. It feels totally superfluous to Spock's character evolution and actually feels regressive for Uhura's character. The thing that was so great about Uhura in TOS was that she was a strong female character, and now she's still a strong female character, but not so independent.
8) I think everyone did a good job of "growing into" their characters, although I especially like Simon Pegg's performance.
9) So Chekov can beam Sulu and Kirk up as they're free falling through the air, but can't snatch Khan off of a flying car? Actually that whole last act with the Vengeance crashing and Spock pursuing him felt like it could have been cut by simply just writing around the problem of Khan's blood (McCoy doesn't inject
all of it into the Tribble perhaps...). I just don't know that the sequence was really necessary to advance the plot of the movie, other than sneaking in some effects shots.
All that having been said, I really enjoyed the film, despite the quibbles I had with it.
I also went out and saw this in a
Dolby Atmos theater, which is a 64 channel sound system with 200 speakers and 13 subwoofers. It's a way more dynamic way to move sound around the theater and it creates some really awesome opportunities to have what are essentially different audio environments. With the opening "forest" sequence, you are really immersed in leaves and wind, and everything flying by; while in say, the engine room or in the Vengeance, there's a much more realistic auditory sense of the space. You can hear smaller noises off in the background. There's also much better tracking of off-screen voices as they move in and out of the frame.
