Brent Phillips

Flashy, noisy imagery (think any Michael Bay Transformers films) with thin writing and character development. There's a couple good but rushed character moments between Spock and Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and Scotty and a character unique to this film. Uhura is unfortunately reduced to the 2D role of "Spock's Girlfriend", with a lazy subplot about her breaking up with Spock only to uneventfully get back together. Most of the dialogue feels like the director was bored with character development and just wanted to get back to more visually unintelligible Transformers-esque large scale action scenes. The villain is an interesting concept, but is a "twist villain" - so they're very two ​dimensional for most of the film, only to be expositioned rapidly at the last minute. The visuals for the big space scenes were probably neat in 3D on a big theater screen, but just look like a mess on a TV screen at home. The in-universe tribute to the memory of "Ambassador Spock" (Leonard Nimoy, who passed away before this film was released) was done tastefully. In short, definitely the weakest of the three Star Trek "Kelvin Timeline" reboot movies (the strongest being Star Trek 2009). Go watch "Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country" instead.