I was introduced to Trek as a kid starting with Wrath of Khan and the rest of the films, then TNG which I couldn’t get enough of as a teen. Trek to me was always about philosophical exploration of ideas and moral quandaries, with some action added in for spice. I will admit I probably was skewed in my perception of the original characters because I was introduced to them in feature films where they were already heavily developed and where the characters were midlife and getting older.

I felt like the Kelvin movies went all in on the action and completely abandoned the philosophical core that made Trek special compared to any other space shoot-em-up.

I also felt like the dialogue and script writing was just impossibly bad. The worst example of this was when the commanding officers die and there is this scene where McCoy says something like “We’ve got no captain and no first officer.” And then Kirk just says “Yeah we do” and sits in the chair. I was screaming at my tv in that moment. It was like the writers had no clue what a chain of command was in any sort of military organization or even a civilian vessel. It’s not like the Johnny come lately just says oh man Captain’s dead I guess I’m captain now. Uhh didn’t Spock train him, and therefore probably outranked him at this point? Anyway it just seemed so poorly written and contrived that it completely broke immersion for me when I was already struggling with the plot.

Now that I’ve gotten all of that off my chest, I am glad that as an OG Trekkie you enjoyed it. I’ve noticed in clips I’ve seen from TOS that the show often had a much lighter, whimsical feel compared to the later films and I didn’t really absorb that because I didn’t watch the show, just the films. Maybe the writing and characters matched TOS better than I realized but I was coming at it with a skewed perspective because of what I had / had not watched.

I do agree the casting was pretty good though.

Edit to add: I think what bothered me most was I really like to see character growth and development and the trailer really billed the first movie as Kirk’s growth arc from irresponsible youth to captain. In the actual movie it was like here’s a random circumstance where you can sit in the chair with no substantial growth and now do action-y stuff. I was really hoping it would be more about the character change. I’ll stop now as this has become War and Peace.