Although there were other things I disliked when I thought about it more, when leaving the theater, my immediate reaction was that I felt like this movie lacked the emotional depth that the 2009 film had. In that movie, we had some great action, crazy science, and developed characters whose personal journey we were watching sort of inside this larger plot. We connected with them. When Spock's planet implodes, we feel for him (twice, even, when we see it through Spock Prime's eyes). When Kirk can't get anyone to listen to him on the bridge, we feel frustrated, too.

And this time I felt like there was almost no emotional depth- there were surface emotions of sadness or anger, but the plot had so much too much action and even crazier science (maybe a little too crazy) that they had to whip through everything quickly and we didn't have time to get connected to these people again, or even get a feel for how they connect to each other. Spock gets all emotional over Kirk, but really, there were almost no scenes to convey that they have grown as close as TOS Spock and Kirk had after however many years of TOS being on. So it made no sense and we didn't feel it (or I didn't).

In that way, this film does feel like a fic, because in fic you don't always have to do as much set-up- we already know the characters and personalities and to some extent, relationships. You can rely on familiarity with canon to get you to a certain point. And that's what I feel like the filmmakers did here. They relied on people's emotions for TOS Spock and Kirk in the original movie to move them in this film as well. (This is interesting because JJ claims he made these movies for people who weren't necessarily fans of TOS.) Whereas before, they did that only with Spock Prime's feelings for Kirk and made everything else evolve naturally.