OK, first off: spoilers on. If you don't want to be spoiled, (waiting for the video? *shrug*...) don't read on.
I finally got around to seeing this. I thought I was going to have to wait till video, or resort to some low quality cam, but now that I'm back in civilization, I found that it was still showing on a couple of screens.
Man, this movie rocked. I had zero interest in this movie until I started noticing some of the great casting decisions. "Harold" as Sulu? "Sylar" as Spock? "Shaun" as Scotty? OK, I'm sold. This new Kirk, though... In the posters and press pictures he just looked sort of blank. I was pretty iffy about him, I wasn't sure if he'd be right for the part.
He managed to completely change my mind. Within a few minutes on-screen he was Kirk, plain and simple. I just now realized that he never did any hammy pauses in tribute to Shatner, and I never noticed or cared.
And the casting I had been looking forward to was every bit as good as I had hoped and then some. And then there was the kid playing Chekov who I'd never seen before that I know of. He was fun as hell, too.
In some ways, the alternate-dimension reboot thing worked too well. I would find myself thinking things like "Kirk's absent-father issues are a perfect set-up for the edge and never-say-die thing that he always had," and then do a double-take and realize, no, his father's heroic self-sacrifice never happened in Star Trek universe V1.
The opening scene, with the abovementioned self-sacrifice was incredibly emotionally manipulative, and I can't in the least decide if I mean that in a good way or a bad way. All I can say is that it felt like the film-makers were doing their darnedest to yank out my still-beating heart. But a lot of that might be me and my current life-situation.
I didn't have any problem with Bana--the acting or the character. Romulan out to simultaneously avenge and prevent the future destruction of Romulus? Works for me.
The "Sabotage" scene had been slightly spoiled for me by foolishly reading about the movie before I'd seen it, but a couple of details that were left out left me with surprises that made the scene much cooler than I had anticipated. A young adult joyriding while rocking out to the Beastie's? (As I had imagined the scene went from what I had read.) It gets across the character point of Kirk's rebelliousness, but it would also paint him as pretty stupid and juvenile. But a little kid stealing his stepfather's beloved car expressly to jump it off a giant chasm and leaping out at the last instant? Still stupid and juvenile, sure, but a) more age-appropriately stupid and juvenile, and b) too damn bad-ass not to respect a little.
If anything it seemed like the stakes were a little too high. Vulcan being completely destroyed is just a little too big to even mentally and emotionally process. Are the actor's showing the appropriate level of horror at such a thing? Who can really say? With something that massive, maybe the horror would be too great to even express. It works for Spock's character, though. They want to show his Vulcan emotional command breaking, but at least he's not losing his temper over a game of checkers or something. It takes him watching his planet and his mother murdered before his eyes to do it.
One scene that I was kind of iffy about was the Romulans' death. Kirk offering to save them, Spock questioning that, Bana's character refusing aid, and Kirk blowing them away (even though they were probably about to be crushed by the black hole anyway) just struck me as a whole big Bin Laden revenge fantasy, and kind of broke me out of my suspension of disbelief, and into "this is an entertainment and a product of film-makers influenced by these-troubled-times." But I might be over-analyzing.
Just maybe.
One more quibble: although I don't at all begrudge them using the "threat to the whole federation-galaxy-universe" plotline this time, I really think there have been enough of those, and I really hope the next movie does the "man this place is weird, we need to figure out what the deal is around here before our own ignorance gets us killed" plot. Y'know, some real "boldly going."
Anyhow, regardless of minor reservations, I loved this movie. It was pretty much the perfect first chapter for a new Trek.