Pine is symptomatic of the essence of J.J. Abrams: He has a TV soul. He casts TV-ish actors. The staging of his thrill sequences is fine for the small screen but light years shy of real masters like Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, or Paul Greengrass. And he loves TV writers, workaday scribes like this script’s authors — Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Lost). They are not, to put it politely, overly-burdened with talent. They got started on stuff like Xena: Warrior Princess and to a degree they’re still there. So when they attempt wit, all that comes out is camp. Meeting Uhura, a linguist, Kirk says, “You’ve got a talented tongue.” The writers’ idea of a snappy comeback is “Tell me something I don’t know.” Their notion of characterization is to throw the word “logical” into every line Spock delivers and they actually include the lines “I’d like to kick some Romulan ass!” and “Are you out of your Vulcan mind?”

Trekkies emerging from the theater were heard murmuring things like, “It’s great that it was kinda campy, just like the show.” That’s making a virtue out of necessity.