"Star Trek": Even better the second viewing

Seeing the "Star Trek" movie gives you time to appreciate the more subtle touches in the film.

WARNING: Spoiler alert.

Good Things:

• The use of silence (or near-silence) during apocalyptic scenes in space, like the destruction of the USS Kelvin
• Camera angles switching back and forth between wide-angle close-ups and telephoto zoom shots of ships in motion in space, which really gives you a "you are there" feeling
• The contrast of framing the shot of a ship close by, while looking past it at a more distant ship, which gives a good sense of spatial relationships in space (because space is flat and uninteresting, and it's very hard to judge distance)
• The use of "lens flare" in many of the space scenes where sunlight is falling across the "camera lens," producing flares and bars of light. It makes it very realistic.
• The use of "beauty shots," such as the Enterprise heaving itself up out of Titan's atmosphere, and the billowing clouds spilling off of the saucer section
• The use of female choruses in the soundtrack, opera-style, for many of the action scenes, which lends those scenes a very bombastic, impressive air
• The re-use of dialogue from past movies and TV episodes, such as McCoy's exclamations ("My God, man, are you out of your Vulcan mind?" and Spock's "I have been and always shall be your friend.") It really ties it together and captures the high points of what made those prior movies and episodes great.
• The re-use of bridge sounds and various other ship sounds, which hark back to earlier movies and TV episodes

Bad Things:

• Filming at a brewery and a power plant to simulate the lower deck spaces of the Enterprise and the Kelvin. Those giant tanks and support beams are just too big, I think, for a ship in space. And what ship would have wet concrete floors? Sure, the ship is big, but there's a LOT of wasted space in those industrial scenes, space that would not be wasted on a ship in reality.
• The Romulan ship is supposed to be a mining ship. It seems to be made of mostly empty space plus lots of little multi-level platforms. Where are the holds to contain the ore that they mine?
• Why does a mining ship have such an inexhaustible supply of homing torpedoes? It seems odd to arm a mining ship.
• The Romulans hang around for 25 years after coming through the black hole (a white hole, in our space), waiting for Spock to arrive. Why don't they age at all during that time?
• The mining ship has a big drill, but no way to pull the ore into the ship. Of course, they must have tractor beams, because they capture Spock's ship. But it seems odd that they wouldn't simply have a big scoop or something, which would be useful if they are mining asteroids.
• By the end of the movie, there are at least two new black holes running around (one where Vulcan used to be, and another where the Romulan ship used to be). I would think those would be a navigational hazard.
• If a person can see the planet Vulcan from the surface of Delta Vega, and Vulcan looks as big as Earth's moon, then Vulcan must be within a million miles of Delta Vega. Now that there's a black hole where Vulcan was, Delta Vega is going to be eaten soon too. Which won't be a bad thing, because that tongue creature was horrible.
• There's a white hole where the Romulan ship came out into our space at the beginning of the movie. What else from the future is going to fall through the black hole there, and emerge here?

I'm sure I'll think of other things. I'm sure going to buy the DVD when it comes out.