It's funny.. I do not broadcast my Trek knowledge/fandom to chicks.. I've only known my wife for 2.5 years, we just had our first wedding anniversary. It wasn't until literally the day after our vacation ended (like two days after LBJ came home) that I fired up Hulu and said "fuck it... you should know, I like Star Trek."
There aren't all that many good things about getting old, but one of them is that the nostalgia factor makes liking some things more acceptable. Though I still don't like The Police. Anyway, my wife actually likes the original Star Trek, and we both liked the movies. My brother is a bit older than I am, and I know he also watched TNG, but he's a huge fan of the original series and really liked the reboots.
But I think liking the reboots is more likely if you are more of a fan of the original series as opposed to a fan of the entire franchise, simply because of the lore and other reasons you mentioned. For me, the thrill of seeing those same original series characters at a younger, more "raw" state was...
fascinating, and a real joy. It really kind of trumped everything else. Scholar's post really encapsulated this for me, because even though the movie Kirk wasn't the series Kirk, I thought the essence of the character was close enough that you could see him maturing into that Kirk. He was Kirk without being William Shatner, and I really think that was extraordinarily difficult to pull off.
The one moment when he did seem to do a Shatner impression was at the end of the movie when he sat in the Captain's chair and said "Bones....", with the
exact same intonation Shatner had used. Perfectly timed and placed in the movie, and gave me a pretty big grin. That's really it for me. Seeing those characters again as younger people, with the slight differences you'd see in any reboot, was really such a joy that I could quite easily overlook other flaws and still get a big kick out of the movie. Karl Urban in particular was great as McCoy (he looked like he had a lot of fun doing that), and as much as I didn't like the Spock/Uhura romance, I thought they still nailed the core relationship of Kirk/Spock/McCoy.
By the way, on the Spock thing, I remember the movie began with Spock turning down an appointment to the Vulcan science academy. But wasn't there also some kind of "complete emotion stripping" process that he was supposed to undergo as well? I don't recall that ever happening. I
suppose -- and this would be a bit of stretch but doable -- they could say that in the real history, Spock subsequently returned and did undergo that, so the only Spock we ever saw in the original show had very few emotions. However, because of the destruction of Vulcan,
this Spock never will undergo that complete emotional wiping thingy.
Don't really like that, because I think a too-emotional Spock -- especially one in an ongoing romantic relationship -- detracts too much from his core character.
