I've never watched a single minute of anything Star Trek related. I know nothing about it other than a guy has pointy ears and they live in a spaceship.

If I watched this with my wife would I be 100 percent lost from the very beginning?

Couldve dropped the whole car off the cliff Nokia commercial for one.

I thought Chekov being able to transport the falling Kirk AND Sulu but minutes later Wynona falls to her death, was a bit stupid.

I dont think so, its a fairly well done starting off point. Im not a Trekkie. Saw some Next Gen and Voyager and thats about it.

this movie was made with you in mind. you won't be lost.

however, there are quite a few in-jokes (mostly in one-liners that call back to previous star treks) that you won't notice, but that won't affect anything in terms of understanding what is going on.

that's the part that's ridiculous. i'm ok with the explanation as to why they're all in close proximity on the planet but it would have been better if Spock had seen him being chased and come out to help him, rather than the one in a million chance of kirk running into that one cave.

it's such a great movie that i didn't even care until afterward.

not any more lost than if you'd never picked up a comic book before you went to see X-Men or Ironman.

^

I love the movie top to bottom, oddly I view it as a sequel because everything in Star Trek "happened" and then led to this point and re-started.

As for Kirk and Spock and Scotty all at the same place, it's the timestream trying to "fix" itself. Kirk's destiny is to always be Captain of the Enterprise, so things twist to make it that way. I think it adds another layer to the flick - Kirk knows that something is wrong about all of it, he becomes an aimless twat, but he STILL manages to become Captain, because he's that awesome.

It works on both levels as Trek fans or non-Trek fans. If you know your Trek, it's really in-depth. If you don't know it, it's a straight-up origin story that accessible and fun to other fans (saw it twice with two non-fans and they liked it). Pretty ingenious. (reading Countdown beforehand was very neat the way it tied up the TNG'ers and led to this.)

Best line "I suffer from aviophobia. It means fear of dying in something that flies!" (I'm shocked how good Karl Urban is. I've hated him in, like, everything.)

Do we really have to use inviso-text by now? Movie's been out a solid week. Reader beware by this point.

They're in mourning for Romulus with the tats and black, that's their funeral garb. (Countdown.)

I justified that as the car was obviously an antique, so while the "tape deck" wasn't from the 60s, but it could have been added. Same with Beasties playing, it's obviously someone with an antique fetish, and it had antique music loaded on it. Kirk didn't want to blare the Beasites, he just hit the media button to shut the guy up and it played. (I loved the way that scene was edited to the music, with the future-cop slamming his foot down right on the "Wooaaaahhhh" part) And I becha Bud will still exist hundreds of years from now.

Another part I loved was just Bana's scenery chewing. "SPPOOOCCCCCKKKKKK!!!" And the way lightning flashed when he said "Welcome back, Spock." In outer space. That's so cool.

For anyone wondering how Nero blowing up the Kelvin created a different look to the tech in the alternate universe (it was obviously different looking from the original TOS), one of the movie's writers was posting on AICN when it came out and I managed to pester him for answer why it was different:

"Certainly one would expect that the fleeing shuttles carrying survivors would also carry whatever telemetry was recorded by the Kelvin in its final moments ( like an airplanes BLACK BOX). Imagine the wealth of information that Starfleet was exposed to from scans of the Narada."

That's super-indepth (Countdown establishes that the Narada is part Borg tech so that would advance 23rd Century science greatly) although I wish that had been explained in the flick, but I have no idea how'd they do that. No one in this timeline would notice anything different (except for Spock, but he didn't do much sight-seeing)

That whole opening sequence is just amazing, surprisingly emotionally effective. Overall, I'd rank this with my top 2 Trek movies - Kahn and First Contact. Great stuff that works if you don't know any Star Trek whatsoever.

Also the Kobyoishi Maru scene was great, even if you're a Trek fan or not. (But even totally more if you are)

This is easily the best paced Star Trek flick - once they get the distress call from Vulcan the movie fucking flies. And it has the best metatexual Star Trek gag ever:

"I am Spock."
"Bullshit."



Get it?

Yah, that one too. That's the one I actually own, not the "Am Not" book. I think I got it for 3 bucks, hardcover, at a clearance sale over a decade ago.