I see they dragged out the silly warp drive throttle control from Star Trek - The Motion Picture. That got a good laugh then, and now. And they chopped a pasted a lot of glittery show at the beginning of the movie, instead of wasting time on building characters. Oh, and as for characters, you walk away thinking that the universe has only 50 people in it. A over accented Chekov, an over emotional Vulcan and... well I could go on.
McCoy was very well acted and comes across as a walking cliche'. But, he sounds like that McCoy from the original SNL skit, all those years ago. Kirk, in the future, will undergo a 23rd century cure of zit-face, will give him that pretty-boy look and will also give enough sense to not try and fight 5 men in a bar by himself.
By the way, I don't recall Kirk ever meeting Capt. Pike, except when he took over command of the Enterprise after Pike's tour of duty and then later after Pike's unfortunate accident that left him crippled. This must of been some kind of alternate universe thing, in the movie, that got by me.
Spok's "te'-da-te'" with Uhura, was not logical because Vulcans only do that once every 7 years! The original engineering set, at Desilu engineering set, with it's coffee cans, looked better than this movie with it's glits.
Oh, and a super-nova will not destroy a galaxy! It just wipes out a solar system. And how do you deposit a black whole inside a planet? Watch as they do in this movie and use cheap morphing graphics to show you!
Oh, and when Scotty makes like Augustus Gloop of "Willie Wanka And The Chocolate Factory" and goes up the pipe!... Great laugh. Oh, and they even supplied the bridge crew with a funny Hollywood variation of the original bridge chairs.
One final observation about Kirk. In the original series we learned that the brash Lt. Kirk was very serious which delighted another joker named Finnigan to no-end. And we learned in the episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" that in Kirk's class "you either think or sink." But the movie did not reflect this. In the movie, Kirk is a silly, wet-behind-the-ears, idiot. The kind that steels cars for a joy ride... Oh, he does that, too. In all, though, Uhura does look sexy when undressed! Barbara Eden never would of gotten away with that 40+ years ago.
Go see it but don't pay for the Imax version. Too expensive for what you get.