An unqualified success.
I can understand your view, Taranis, and I can even understand why people like Promus take the stand they do. But I wholeheartedly disagree with that.
Ever since the original
Star Trek premiered, time travel and temporal interference has been a part of the mythos. From the first accidental trip into the past taken by the Enterprise under Kirk to the "Temporal Police" of
Enterprise (which was awful, BTW, until the final season),
Star Trek dealt repeatedly with the idea that one event can change a timeline significantly.
All JJ Abrams & Company did was take that very
Star Trek element and applied it.
Now - spoilers follow, for anyone who hasn't seen the movie but intends to, so continue with care.
Chasing the future Spock through a singularity, a vengeful Nero emerged into Federation space. The USS Kelvin was diverted to investigate. This did not happen in the other timeline, the one we are most familiar with.
The Kelvin carried George Kirk and his very pregnant wife. It isn't clear in the movie, but perhaps the Kelvin was originally on its way to Earth where, in the other timeline, James Tiberius Kirk was to be born somewhere in Iowa. In this timeline, though, the Kelvin was diverted to investigate the anomoly, is attacked, Mrs. Kirk goes into labor, and we see the events of the early part of the movie.
Nothing here is the same as in the other timeline, the story we are familiar with. Jim Kirk grows up without the stabilizing influence of his father, as he did in the other timeline, so his attitudes and behavior are not the same. He's more openly rebellious, more often into trouble. If you recall, we do see streaks of rebellion in the original timeline's Kirk, a risk-taker. With different formative influences, the end result will be different. Thanks to Nero, Jim Kirk's beginnings were not as they were in the other timeline, so this Jim Kirk is different.
You can take that and apply it to everything else in the movie. As
Star Trek taught us, any one event has a ripple effect (Guardian of Forever, where saving Edith in the 1930's meant there was no USS Enterprise 400 years later), so when Nero destroyed the Kelvin - killing how many people? - it changed things fundamentally across a much wider scope than the formative years of one boy.
Were there misses? Of course, there always are. But they managed to capture the essence of the characters, their broader personalities, as well as the basic
look - I was amazed at the resemblance of Quinto to a young Nimoy, and Urban looked enough like Kelley it was easy to see him as McCoy.
We should also consider that we're being introduced to the characters several years earlier than we were before. They are less mature, less seasoned if you will, than when we were introduced to them back in 1966, on top of the timeline issues.
So this movie is, without a doubt, quintessential
Star Trek.
If it helps, you might consider thinking of it in the same context as the Mirror Universe, which could well have been just another timeline of the same
Star Trek universe.....
I am
Dawg
