The Abrams reboot of the fabled franchise, on the one hand it's a great picture in and of itself, but on the other hand it will have die-hard Trelk fans screaming.

As a movie, it works great. Plenty of action, excitement, things in peril, all the good stuff. The casting is mostly good, with the guy playing Dr. McCoy hitting it right on; I swear he's channeling DeForest Kelly, with his face even being the right shape, not to mention the mannerisms and all whatnot. Young Spock is acceptable, and young Kirk fierce enough and a very good Kirk with all the right body language, though missing that occasional twinkle in the eye, though I should note that the Koberashi Maru bit is priceless. Scotty is dead on, Uhuru is good, though Sulu bland and Chekov just geeky and annoying (though good is his speach recognition problem with the computer). There's the expected classic lines uttered by the appropriate characters,, the humor, and Kirk being as unruly as ever.

So the movie is good, but what about the Trek history stuff? What about the plot? Well, the plot has spome holes I could pilot a shuttle through. Yes, I understand that Abrams knows nearly nothing about Star Trek and that the metmethod of this reboot allows him to get around that fact, but even in that framework there are some problems. First, lets look at the relative ages of the characters. Spock is a commander by the time Kirk joins the Academy, so that's right, and Bones in the right age (acting curmudgony already), but Chekov should have been about 10 years old at the time, Pike should be a young fit captain without greay around the sideburns and in command of an Enterprise that had been flying around for a couple years already and not just fresh off the line. Of course anything starting at the point in which the future-ship comes back to mess things up is forgiveable in the context that, well, time has officially been messed up at that point (so thus Kirk has no brother, a dead father, assumes command of the Enterprise WAAY early, etc.).

Oh yeah, and "Red Matter"; what exactly IS that? Deos Ex Machina? The magic gold ball? It's never explained at all.

Of course the "but they can't do that" moment is something that hard-core Trekkers will scream at. Yes, someone comes back in time to mess up history, and never mind that in Voyager we learn that 500 years up timestream there's some Time Cops lurking around just to make sure that no one does such a thing, but there are somethings you just don't mess with. Though before there are cries of the irrevocable nature of what happened, I DID think of how it could be undone and history reset, and it would be dramatic enough with Spock Prime being of prime inportance, and maybe even a spot for you Kirk to save the universe (as Spock Prime would put it, no doubt with a line like "Don't worry, Jim, you end up doing this sort of thing all the time"). They just have to hunt up the singularity that Spock Prime came through, use that Red Matter of his and some calculations to use that black hole to go back to the future and finish his job with the threatening supernova but this time BEFORE it hits Romulus and starts the whole chain of events.

So all in all, it's great from one perspective, but what's been done to Trek Cannon may come back to bite Abrams in the rear.