YMMV / Star Trek (2009)

• Accidental Innuendo: Uhura is quick to remind Spock about her "oral sensitivities"^note actually "aural" sensitivities.
• Actor Shipping: A lot of fans love to ship Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, with tons of fanfics and fan edits that pair them together, which is unsurprising considering the two are playing the characters who basically invented shipping, Kirk/Spock. The two are actually good friends in real life and love to play up their closeness in interviews. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Quinto is actually gay in real life. They even have their own Portmanteau Couple Name, "Pinto". Some fans also ship Pine with Karl Urban (Urbine) and Quinto with Zoe Saldaña.
• Adorkable:
  • A number of fans find Chekov adorable, with he being the youngest member and his thick accent.
  • Nero. He was a major fanboy of Spock in the prime timeline and bits and pieces of his former nature still show through the madness occasionally.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Nero an angry and vengeful man blinded by rage at the people who could have saved his home planet, or is he simply insane and driven off the deep end by grief and rage? A lot depends on whether you see his mission (killing Spock and destroying the Federation in the past to take revenge on them for failing to save Romulus in the future) as an act of righteous anger or just the irrational death throes of a broken man with nothing left to live for. A common observation about the story is that Nero could've warned his people about their planet's destruction if he really wanted to save it; depending on how you interpret his actions, either he didn't do that because he didn't think anyone would believe him, because he cared more about punishing the people he held responsible, or because his traumatic experiences drove him crazy. Star Trek: Picard leans towards the latter interpretation when it revealed The Federation was trying to help evacuate Romulus, but a terrorist attack destroyed the shipyards building the evacuation fleet and led them to call it off.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Safely parachuting from a planet's orbit wearing a space suit. It sounds like pure science fiction, but it's actually been done twice on our own planet. At the time of this film's release, the world record for highest parachute jump had been set in 1960 by American Air Force officer Joseph Kittinger, who parachuted from Earth's stratosphere in a manner almost exactly like that depicted in the movie. Then, three years after the movie came out, that record was broken by Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner, who parachuted from the stratosphere about 24 miles from the ground (again, almost exactly like Kirk and Sulu did it).
• Angst? What Angst?: Nobody but Spock seems particularly bothered by the destruction of Vulcan, one of the core worlds of the Federation, and the death of its six billion inhabitants. Scotty doesn't even seem to be aware that it happened, which is bizarre considering he's stationed on a planet in the same solar system.
• Awesome Music:
  • The main theme, known as "Enterprising Young Men", especially in the opening credits. Something about that crystalline, somber yet uplifting horn solo sends chills down your spine every time. Especially the brief variation that plays on the drill platform when Sulu whips out his folding katana, throws off his helmet, and looks ready to rumble. And, of course, its bold usage accompanying The Reveal of the alt-universe USS Enterprise.
  • Naturally, the inclusion of "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys in Kirk's scene as a delinquent youth.
• Base-Breaking Character: James T. Kirk.
  • There's many of a debate whether Kelvin Timeline Kirk actually deserves to be the Captain of the Enterprise, given that he is shown to be arrogant, risk-taking, and willing to disregard Starfleet protocols when it suits him; defenders point out that Kirk always had those traits, they just seem more pronounced here because Kirk is a younger man, and he also demonstrates heroism, bravery, and intelligence.
  • There's also the matter of Chris Pine's performance as Kirk. William Shatner has made a nice career out of Adam Westing his most famous role, and the film's creators and Pine himself were aware it would be a bit of a challenge to portray Kirk as true-to-character without devolving into a parody of impression of Shatner. It's debated if Pine pulled it off or not (consequently, Saturday Night Live showed he could pull off Shatner's Kirk a few years later).
• Common Knowledge: Everyone knows the film features all the characters meeting as teenage cadets. Except it doesn't. Only Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and Chekov are expressly cadets; Spock is an Academy instructor, Scotty is a long-serving officer who was Reassigned to Antarctica due to an unfortunate transporter accident, and Sulu is either a cadet or a recent Academy graduate (it's never stated). Also: Chekhov (who's portrayed as a teenage prodigy) is the only character who's a teenager in the movie; most of the others are young adults in their twenties, while McCoy is a middle-aged man who enlisted in Starfleet late in life and Scotty, who as mentioned above was already an officer, is of similar age.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Captain Robau, who has about five minutes of screen time, has gone down in Trek lore as one of the most badass captains ever.
  • Gaila is proving very popular. She stars in one scene, is a face in a crowd scene, and that's it. This may have something to do with her being an Orion who presumably has lots of sex or just the fact that she's another female face.
  • Sarek of all people takes this from some parts of the fandom who find his open admission of love for Amanda and the fact that he is finally portrayed as a good but flawed father had won him many fans, especially after Discovery, which many claims assassinated his character.
  • Kind of a meta example: Simon Pegg reportedly loved Scotty's companion Keenser so much that he pushed for him to get a bigger role in the franchise than was originally planned. (In the first draft, he was a one-shot character who wasn't seen again after Scotty leaves with Kirk and wasn't even shown to rejoin Starfleet, let alone become part of the Enterprise crew.) He was popular enough with the fans and crew to appear in both Into Darkness and Beyond.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When the Enterprise fails to go to warp, Pike sarcastically asks helmsman Sulu, "Is the parking brake on?" Seven years later, Anton Yelchin would die in an accident caused by the failure of his car's parking brake.
  • There's an in-universe case of this in that scene too. It's Played for Laughs in the moment, but if they had gone to warp with the rest of the fleet, the Enterprise would likely have met the same fate as the other ships. Sulu's beginner's mistake, and the consequent delay, probably saved a lot of lives.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Leonard Nimoy reprising the role of Spock to pass the torch to the new cast is incredibly heartwarming since he was the next TOS cast member to pass on in 2015.
  • On a 2022 episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, Zachary Quinto learned that his great-grandfather, P.J. McArdle, who was a union leader in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had used the phrase "May it live long and prosper." in a letter to the editor of The Amalgamated Journal in 1899. As Quinto put it:
    Quinto: The fact that a hundred and fifteen years later, or something, I would get cast a character who is known for that very phrase... There was something about it that felt bigger than me... There was something about it that felt kind of cosmic.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Uhura's roommate is a Green-Skinned Space Babe who'd been getting on her nerves for bringing guys (including Kirk) into their room. Fast forward to Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)...
  • On the commentary, the "cliffs" in Iowa (actually part of a quarry) were caused by the "2011 earthquake". There actually was an earthquake in an unusual part of the United States (the East Coast) in 2011.
  • A "lightning storm in space" occurs on the day of Kirk's birth. His father, Chris Hemsworth, would later play Thor.
  • McCoy is Skurge in Thor: Ragnarok, Uhura is Gamora, one of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and after Star Trek Into Darkness, Khan is Doctor Strange.
  • Kirk's mother, played by Jennifer Morrison, names him after her father. Her father's name is James, but he's better known as Prince Charming. Made even more hilarious as Chris Pine plays the Prince—a deconstruction of the Prince Charming archetype—in Into the Woods.
  • So that's where Kirk gets his penchant for getting into trouble and kicking ass from; his parents are Emma Swan and Thor.
  • Spock quotes Sherlock Holmes during the film. Quite apt, considering who ended up bring cast as the Big Bad in the sequel.
  • Near the end of the film, Nero yells Spock's name as a reference to Wrath of Khan. In Into Darkness, Spock gets to yells the iconic KHHHAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNN! himself near the end of that film.
  • Towards the end of the DVD Commentary, J. J. Abrams mentions he talked to George Lucas during filming, asking what would make this film better, and Lucas answered more lightsabers. In 2013, Abrams became director of the Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens. In general, the film draws many comparisons to Star Wars, making it even funnier.
  • Zachary Quinto would learn on Who Do You Think You Are? that his great-grandfather once used the phrase "Live long and prosper" while writing in a worker's union newsletter. As the newsletter was dated 1899, his great-grandfather likely learned it from a then-recent stage play about Rip Van Winkle.
• Ho Yay:
  • Kirk/Spock is the granddaddy of all slash pairings, and the subtext is definitely there in this adaptation.
  • Kirk/Bones too, what with their Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Parodied by The Onion in the video "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'", which "showed" how the hardcore Trekkies were upset when the movie was critically acclaimed, on the basis that it was "theirs". "They" were particularly annoyed about its inclusion of demographic-pandering things like a sensible plot, actors who care about what they're saying, and aliens who speak English.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many of the original fans only turned up to see Leonard Nimoy as Spock for one last time. Not really the last time until Star Trek Into Darkness.
• Les Yay: Uhura and her roommate seem very comfortable being in their underwear around each other.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • Kirk getting chased by a gigantic toothy monster. Kudos to them for giving the monster a face made of Nightmare Fuel, but there couldn't have been a single person in the audience who was the remotest bit worried for Kirk. And lo and behold, he doesn't get a scratch that isn't gone by the end of the movie. Quelle surprise.
  • And, of course, an impressive subversion with the destruction of Vulcan.
• Memetic Badass: Captain Robau, now being adopted by some segments of the Trek fandom as their own personal Chuck Norris. And he's only in the movie for about five minutes.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Fire everything!", "I like this ship! It's exciting!", "Wictor-wictor...", "SPOOOOOOOOOOOOCK!"
  • "Chekov can do zat. HE CAN DO ZAT, HE CAN DO ZAT! MOVE, MOVE!"
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Narm:
  • The absurd overuse of Lens Flares, even when there's no apparent source for them.
  • Nero's line "Hi, Christopher, I'm Nero" for how awkward it sounds, making it sound like he's a customer service representative.
  • When Nero finds out that Spock foiled his plans and shouts his name. It wasn't so much the shout that was narmy, but the fact that when he shouts it the second time, Nero looks like he's had too much Romulan ale. Plus, Eric Bana's delivery can make you wonder if you just heard a Precision F-Strike.
  • A lot of Nero's line reads sound like an angry toddler, especially the infamous "I want Spock dead NOW!"
• Narm Charm:
  • Normally Nero's delightful hamminess would count as Narm, but Eric Bana accomplishes the impressive task of making it work.
  • Chekov’s “Russian” accent is still obviously fake-sounding, despite his actor actually being Russian-born this time. But let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be Chekov without his signature “nuclear wessels” accent, now, would it?
• Never Live It Down: As far as the internet is concerned, this movie and everything J. J. Abrams will ever make from this movie on will be nothing but one giant Lens Flare, even after Star Trek Into Darkness and all his other works since then have significantly toned them down.
• Older Than They Think:
  • In one article in preparation for the film's release, Entertainment Weekly addressed hardcore fan outcry about the redesign of the Enterprise's bridge with a "Through the Years" photo comparison of previous bridge sets, pointing out that it's actually been redesigned significantly for previous movies too—it just got more attention in this one, considering the movie's already controversial Continuity Reboot status.
  • Likewise, the controversial Everyone Went to School Together premise of the 2009 film? Per a Starlog magazine from 1988, the idea was being kicked around by both Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek II director Nicholas Meyer as an Alternate Universe television series. Star Trek II producer Harve Bennett also wanted to use it for Star Trek VI, but his proposal was rejected in favor of a story featuring the entire TOS cast (his story would've featured only William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as Kirk and Spock in the present day).
  • The fact that Spock and Uhura are a couple drew fan outrage, as there was only some mild flirting in TOS. However, Nichelle Nichols and Leonard Nimoy have stated that the Uhura/Kirk kiss was intended for Spock, and Roddenberry had intended for them to be a couple but couldn't because of the blatant racism towards Nichols at the time, so when they were told that Spock and Uhura would be a couple in the reboot, they wholeheartedly approved of it.
  • This isn't the first Trek movie that has fun with Lens Flares. EC Henry noted that Star Trek: The Motion Picture has plenty of gratuitous lens flares.
  • In Harve Bennett's first draft for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the villains were supposed to be Romulans. Spock's role remained relatively the same, except he goes feral and kills several Romulan miners when they were drilling for dilithium on the Genesis Planet.
  • The supernova threatening the entire Romulan Empire draws ire because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, but this is hardly the first Star Trek film having such issues, with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country also having a shockwave traveling interstellar distances when the Klingon moon of Praxis explodes with enough force for Excelsior to feel it on the far side of the Neutral Zone.
  • The idea of stardates being based directly on Earth calendar dates was originally considered for Star Trek: The Next Generation well before its first usage here.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Captain Robau, despite appearing for a few minutes before dying, is a total badass.
  • Lieutenant George Kirk, thanks in no small part to Chris Hemsworth's eventual superstardom, to the point that producers actually considered bringing him back in the shelved Star Trek XIV.
• Questionable Casting: Many people's first reaction when the cast was first announced.
  • Winona Ryder, in particular, became this in the editing room. They cast her as Spock's mother because there was originally supposed to be a brief prologue scene where we would have seen Spock's birth, with a much younger Amanda Grayson celebrating the birth of her son alongside her husband. When that scene was cut, many people in the audience were left wondering why a well-known actress who could easily pass for 30 had been put in unconvincing age-effect makeup in order to play such a small role.
  • As a Korean-American, John Cho as Sulu attracted controversy with fans until George Takei, the original Sulu, explained that Sulu is a pan-Asian character, meant to represent all Asian nationalities. Also, the original Sulu was canonically born in San Francisco (which has a sizable and diverse Asian population), and thus there was no basis for assuming that he would be of a single nationality any more than this would be true of a European, Latino, or African character. There is a bit of socieital bias in play here, as people only marrying members of their own national/ethnic group is in decline even in the present-day real world, and there is no reason to imagine that 300 years from now such a push for ethnic purity would reassert itself, especially when you have Interspecies Romance going on!
  • Tyler Perry as the head of Starfleet?^note He's there because he happens to be a big Star Trek fan himself and requested a role in the movie
• Retroactive Recognition: Chris Hemsworth in his single scene as George Kirk, considering he became an Avenger two years later.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Many pairings qualify, but Sulu/Chekov and Scotty/Gaila are notable for their HUGE popularity in proportion to the amount of canon interaction.
• Tainted by the Preview: The initial two trailers (the first featuring some shots of the Enterprise under construction, and the second being a somewhat random collection of clips from the film capped off by a shot of Spock Prime) were treated with indifference at best, and outright derision at worst by most film-goers. Averted in the end, however, as the third trailer was much improved and credited with creating much of the buzz that made the movie a success.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Everything from the Enterprise's design to Spock's sideburns has been used as "proof".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Nero in the novelization/comic version^note A working stiff who risks charges of treason to help save his world, working with Spock toward the solution only to have the Vulcans slam the door in his face, dooming his race... and then having nothing to live for but revenge is more complex than what he was, even sympathetic, and could've actually outdone Khan.
  • Considering how much screen time Christopher Pike gets in this film, it would have been pretty easy to fit in (at the very least) a cameo from his old second-in-command "Number One", if only as a nod to Pike's first appearance in the TV show. Sadly, she's nowhere to be seen.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Spock becoming the Captain of the Enterprise. This film seems to go out of its way to treat Kirk's promotion to Captain as a Foregone Conclusion, despite the fact that Spock outranks him for most of the movie, Kirk never graduated from the Academy, and the movie takes place in an Alternate Timeline where nothing is guaranteed to happen exactly like it did in The Original Series. Though it might have earned the ire of some fans, it arguably would have made for a much more interesting story if Spock had stayed Captain after Pike's departure, and Kirk had become his First Officer instead. Not only would it have shaken up the classic dynamic from the TV show, it would have provided an interesting opportunity to see how the stoic Spock would handle being a leader and to see how the hotheaded Kirk would handle taking orders from someone else.
  • Some people felt that it was a missed opportunity to have the Narada be an early version of the titular planet-killer from "The Doomsday Machine", to which it already shares a great number of similarities.
• Win Back the Crowd: Love it or hate it, this movie got everyone interested in Star Trek again after years of decline, also considering what would happen with the Star Trek Movie Curse.

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