The most hair-wrenchingly annoying thing about JJ Abrams is that there are things he is legitimately fantastic at as a director. His sense of kinetic propulsion is genuinely unmatched; he's like if Michael Bay was able to maintain coherence between camera cuts, and that is a damn powerful thing. And for as much deserved flack as he gets for his moronic commitment to the "mystery box," his movies are always compulsively watchable in the moment, which is something most every blockbuster director right now struggles with. Frankly I'd take this movie over literally any superhero movie of the past several years, save for Spiderverse and Guardians 3. It's successful dumb popcorn fare; the fact that it has the name "Star Trek" stapled onto it obviously makes its dumbness a travesty, but it's still fun as hell in the moment (and I mean, c'mon: "Threshold." "Move Along Home." This franchise we adore so much is occasionally very dumb, very silly).

And that's actually what grates me about this; Star Trek should never be "cool." Star Trek is endearingly dorky, aggravatingly starry-eyed and constantly forward-thinking. This is also the main charge against later TV shows like STD and Picard, with their constant edgelord posturing and sucking up to Elon Musk; they're chasing cultural relevancy that has literally never been Trek's strong suit. Even in this movie, where it technically "works," it's an odd fit. And I don't think it's unrelated that this bviously only works in the moment; JJ's second film reveals how much of this was empty-headed gestures and allusions to a story, rather than actually being a story, like the rest of his filmography.

But even as a standalone, under the surface of its shiny hood there's just not much going on there. It's a constant stream of distracting surface-level gestures, which is something Abrams is VERY good at; it's arguably the only storytelling maneuver he can actually accomplish, which obviously makes him a terrible fit for what Star Trek should be. But again - sometimes Trek can be that. First Contact remains the only good TNG-era movie, and that's just a straight up zombie movie, except the zombies have robot augmentation. But a movie like this, where Kirk is a fratbro and Spock ends the movie by shrugging and agreeing they should totally blow up the bad guy, absolutely should NOT be the default state of Trek.