After a super-human destroys a Starfleet databank, Kirk and Spock hunt him down on the Klingon homeworld, only to find a conspiracy back home.

Star Trek does good characters, even when the movie is bad. This is a prime example: When Pike dresses Kirk down, saying he can't justify luck as his excuse for succeeding in this missions. He takes risks, breaks the rules, and so on. The story they set out to tell was one where Kirk faces a no-win situation. He says he's never lost a single crew member before this; in this movie, he loses almost all of them. Unfortunately, he barely bats an eye, at least on screen, despite his speech at the end. However, while the characters are strong, the plots get worse and worse. The creators continue to show their lack of understanding of science at every turn. Every Trek fan knows that it takes more than five minutes of warp to get from the neutral zone to Earth, even in this separate timeline. They should also know that losing power near the Moon will not get a ship caught in Earth's gravity. At the end of the movie, not only is Kirk's ego still intact, but his body now posesses the regenerative properties of Khan. Does that classify him as an augment, or do we have to assume the effects were temporary. Section 31 must now be taking blood samples of all the augments to give their agents such power!

I enjoyed the action again, but there were so many plot holes. Still, Kirk as a character, and Spock as well, have developed a lot since the first movie. I don't think it explored the state of Starfleet, though, quite enough. It was only one admiral who actually went Into Darkness; even Kirk relented by the end.

Good action, with a lot of character development. There were several large plot holes, like why nobody noticed people inside the torpedoes back at the secret base, how they got to the klingon homeworld so quickly, and why there were no security patrols near Earth so soon after a terrorist attack. But I liked the way Kirk had to go through his own kobyoshi maru test here, the reversed roles for Kirk and Spock compared to The Wrath of Kahn, though Spock's "Kahn!!!!" cry can't match that of Shatner and feels just weird. Overall enjoyable, but I'd like less fighting and more real action in the next movie.