How the mighty franchise falls. I've been a Star Trek fan since catching my first partial episode of _Voyager_ with my dad, during the original run. I followed the broadcasts on UPN (remember them?) for the last couple years leading up to the series finale. Meanwhile, I got caught up on the rest of the shows, and several of the movies. I should have seen _Nemesis_ for the omen it was.

Other reviewers have already covered the flaws in impeccable detail (see https://trakt.tv/comments/90923 by @abstractals and https://trakt.tv/comments/91751 by @andrewbloom for starters), and I don't feel the need to rehash the details, but…

The defining adjective for this film is "muddy". The cinematography is muddy; the writing is muddy; the acting is muddy; the message is muddy. Makes me wonder just how much it rained when they were out shooting on location.

Only a few minutes in, the film's tone goes off the rails and ceases to feel like Star Trek. It coasts along at breakneck speed through firefight after firefight, in space and on land, barely ever stopping to let boring details like character motivation get in a word. As a result, I honestly don't care about anyone. Not a single character. There was a moment on [spoiler]the _Franklin_[/spoiler] late in the film when I thought (for some reason) that [spoiler]Krall had killed Scotty[/spoiler]… I was wrong, but it would have been completely unsurprising. Maybe I'd been primed not to care by the [spoiler]dozens (at leasT) of crew members that were shown getting sucked into space as Krall's "bees" tore the _Enterprise_ apart[/spoiler].

Really, it's hard to find a scene in which nobody dies—or at least gets shot, with ambiguous outcome at best—for much of the film. The _Star Trek_ I know really makes you feel the weight of deaths, even if they're "just" redshirts. This…whatever it is…doesn't. It's all action movie porn.

And they can't even stick to how "Treknology" is supposed to work—what starship captain in his right mind would [spoiler]give the order to go to warp after the deflector dish has been destroyed[/spoiler]? It would be suicide.

I hope there are no more reboot films, because I'll feel obligated to see them at some point and by now I know I'll just be disappointed.