I just finished watching the re-boot of Star Trek: The Movie, so I figured I'd write a review on it. Like all remakes I was very skeptical of how good the movie would be. Too often in remakes, they lose the meaning of the original work. I think the Star Trek movie kept much of the original meaning, but also presented it in a much different way than any of the previous Star Trek TV shows or movies have before.
I'll first start our by reviewing the casting choices for the movie since characters are very important to the success of a remake. I think probably the character that was most like the original series was Dr. McCoy. It was almost a dead-on impersonation of DeForest Kelley from TOS except for his appearance. The next most similar character was Scotty. I would say that Spock also bore an extremely close resemblance to Lenard Nemoy that it was scary. The only difference with Spock was his voice was a bit different and that was hard to get over. Finally Captain Kirk, probably bore the least resemblance to the original. The characters appearance seemed a bit off, and his actions did as well. Overall, I think they did an excellent job with the casting, which had to of been a difficult task.
Next I'll review the special effects. This movies had by far the most complicated and advanced special effects I've ever seen in a movie. This is something not typical of any of the other Star Trek movies or shows and will probably annoy a few Star Wars fans who have always had the monopoly in this arena. J.J Abrams did a wonderful job creating some of the stunning scenery in the movie.
The plot of the movie was a bit confusing at first, and in a sneaky way, the movie does away with the timeline of events of the series by the use of time travel (in a Back to the Future sort of way). Because of this, Abrams won't have to worry about canon from the franchise by using an alternate timeline. This is both good and bad. It's good because we'll get fresh stories and won't have to strictly adhere to the past rules, but it could be bad because Abrams could start creating a really bad alternate storyline.
Here's a few other random thoughts about the movie. Spock quasi-dating Uhura was stupid and very unlikely for his character. The Romulans also did not look 'enough' like the Romulans we've seen in prior work. The interaction between Spock+Kirk+McCoy did a very, very good job in bearing resemblance to the original series, and in essence WAS the original series. It was extremely funny to see a 'Red Shirt' die in the movie (like the old shows).
Overall it was a really great movie, and I hope they decide to make sequels. I give it a 10/10.