Just got back from watching the new Star Trek movie. When someone gives you a budget of $200,000,000.00, it had better look like you spent the money, and so visually the movie is absolutely state-of-the-art for special effects (although I take issue with the lame ship phaser sound effects--toy-like comes to mind...).

Unfortunately, I got the impression that the writers were handed a "treatment" that said

1. Planet blows up
2. Spock meets Kirk, they don't get along at first, then become friends
3. Find a way to introduce other iconic characters
4. Find a role for Leonard Nimoy.
5. Three major space battles--work around them.
6. Make all the main characters misfits who triumph.

I suspect a lot of big budget movies get made this way.

Perhaps more interesting though was the Heinleinian political dynamic, where very bright, attractive people find they have no need for useless nonsense like experience, interpersonal skills and the indispensable taskmaster of failure. Success is destiny!

Caffeine for the mind--up now, crash later.

Still; its completely consistent with the risible socialist outlook of all the Star Trek series, where people are highly motivated to employ their intellectual and other gifts on behalf of "humanity" without credit or compensation. Bureacrat teat-suckers, power-obsessed politicians and apathetic entitlement slaves seemed to have gone extinct between the 21st and 23rd centuries.

This is what sex with prostitutes must feel like...