As a supposed master of Television, JJA has instead become a serial killer of American myths, minting millions in ad revenue while he chews up our origins as manifest thinkers of space travel (and air travel, Lost rambles away with the incorporeality of an after school special gone haywire). He kills our drive to explore space with cheap thrills and even cheaper pick-up lines. The instantly forgettable and falsely titled Star Trek (a better title might have been Star Trek: Recession or Start Wreck)  is primed to shift its small-town thinker mayhem onto plasma screens no later than 2010 (all those spaceships are built in IOWA??). Check your fall schedules, avoid that hour at all costs. By reusing Next Generation's Star Trek Generations time ribbon gimmick that allowed Kirk and Picard to team up in that franchise's first flick, Abrams and committee ante-up a working class Romulan bent on revenge against both a future and past Spock.  Time travel and alternate outcomes are the Joker card of any hard working neo-con posing as a west coast liberal,Abrams hints at waterboarding while reusing a torturing bug from the vastly more entertaining Wrath of Khan. Minuses: He loses his stomach for violence thereby saving a father figure, an alternate-U Captain Pike. He defangs the film by showing no leaders that are female, it's mothers and sex objects for the devolving audience and crew members (although I am no huge fan of any of the Star Treks, Kirk's 1966 libido was Roddenberry's rationale for his era, he bedded aliens but was discrete onboard; sex was a weapon as vast as any photon torpedo, in this 2009 atmosphere his sex-crazed antics are signs of a depraved love-addicted sociopath, he's simply a comedic phase-in posing as a hero: there is no logic unless everything is plot-based not character).  Determined to pack the film with false-memories, his mislabeled alternate reality even unaudaciously throws away the Kobiyashi Maru test, a kind of Zen-Buddhist encounter with impossibility, which of course comes true as the entire starfleet is sent on a preposterous mission to rescue planet Vulcan that has sent word it is undergoing some form of tectonic nightmare (while the Romulan's vast ship hovers above it dragging a biblically scaled umbilicus that beams a hole deep into its core: the Vulcans have every technology except telescopes?). While the logic of time-travel is an anything goes device of plotting, Abrams gets to raise logic-busting to new levels, impossibly move a trainee force into helmsmen: Kirk into first officer then Captain, a space-hating doctor McCoy into Chief medical officer, trainee Uhuru onto the bridge and a still wooden Sulu and still one-note accent joke Chekhov into the pawns they always were.  Littered with deus ex machinas like stranding a rebellious Kirk by expulsion, endless and convenient Starfleet Regulations, something called trans-warp transport, a sub-Spielberg water-tube gag,  and a planet (Delta-Vega) in sighting distance of Vulcan that manages to contain both the old Spock and the new McCoy, Abrams heaps frosting on a non-existent cake, rips off the least intelligent nuances from George Lucas and then sends us home humming the old theme, saved for last, as if he knows it just might save his film. The reboot is a forgettable mess. As if running out of physical gags Kirk has to hang from three precipices for Abrams (you can almost see the writers looking in their thesaurii for more words that mean hanging). Even the bland sidekick that resembles a dried-green Mickey Mouse comes up way short. For all the oedipal links he hints at, Abrams actually manages to kill his spiritual father Gene Roddenberry in a 2 hour running time. Not to be seen.