Between these groups there is no room for rational discussion from the rest of us. Those who critique any aspect of the film are immediately seized upon by group 2 as a “hater”. They are likewise denounced by group 1 for pointing out anything positive about the film.

Such extreme views do not justify a response. It seems to me most who possess them are actually looking for a fight, or a public soapbox from which to spout their ideas. The best thing to do is ignore them, lest you encourage them. Note if you will some of the most prolific extremists here rarely receive direct responses, yet they continue to write post after post, seemingly for their own enjoyment.

My advice … ignore them. Post your own ideas about the film and just assume that those of us with rational perspectives on this film will see the extreme posts exactly the way you do, and those that don’t probably deserve to be influenced by them. Since there is no moderator in the truest sense on this site, those presenting extremest views are not being called to task, therefore, such unsupervised discussions are impossible to debate reasonably and only serve to inflame others. True it is a pain to wade through them to get to something useful or worthwhile, but then so is anything in life.

But I love the Muppet Show analogy. It’s quite apt. Like the old curmudgeons, It strikes me that the most extreme voices on this site have little better to do as evidenced by many such posts appearing on Friday and Saturday nights – so they go online and praise or condemn their favorite past-time, looking for fights. Well, better here than on the streets!

And 66 – amen.

I went to the theatre to see it. I was entertainted. but this AINT Star Trek.
Its got a lot of trek like nouns and thats it.

No, they explained it already. They wanted to open up the future for these characters, not to have it so that you know exactly where they are going what they will be doing or how they will be dying, AND to give themselves some storytelling freedom without being SO constrained in imagination by canon.

Notice the word “so.” They obviously respect canon a lot or they wouldn’t have meticulously crafted a many worlds theory plot to give themselves the latitude they needed to rejuvenate the franchise while respecting what came before.

What i find most intriguing about the Abrams-team approach to their version of STAR TREK, is how strongly and on how many different levels they rely on the various concepts of Transmedia Storytelling Theory.
I feel tempted to read the whole endeavor as a textbook example of those principles and as a field study on their validity and viability.

For example, one of the most basic formulas of Transmedia Storytelling revolves around a narrational strategy that transports substantial, often closely related, but not directly inter-dependent portions of one story over a variety of different media formats.

Therefore, the approach to create a separate, but closely linked, narrative space of existence for the Prime versions of the TOS characters, for example in the form of a “companion” movie co-released on DVD/Blu-ray or over some “HULU”-like Internet-delivery platform, does seem feasible, at least theoretically.

Such a project would certainly represent an interesting continuation of what is currently being done for the new film, in the form of the various comic books (Countdown, Nero, Spock), that carry supplemental story-lines for the movie´s main narrative.

Of course, the realization of this idea would require the allocation of a substantial amount of manpower and financial resources and might therefore not be considered viable. But on a purely narrational level, i do see some very interesting possibilities.

One intriguing aspect of storytelling in such a space could be the chance to preserve a crucial element of character building that sets apart STAR TREK from many other US TV- and movie narratives.
Due probably more to circumstance, rather than to deliberate planning, the TOS characters, over time, have been allowed not only to grow and mature, but to truly age as well.

Placing these long established, old(er) protagonists continuously at the center of the narrative, rather than reducing them to supporting mentor figures, or replacing them altogether by other, younger characters, has introduced a rather unique temporal dimension into the fictional world of STAR TREK.

This story trait represents a distinct feature of the TOS-portion of the franchise and remains missing from most of the other prominent American pop-cultural narratives, whose hero characters often do exist, and quite deliberately so, in an almost perpetual state of a nondescript here and now.

The narrational space created by an adjunct movie could also be used by this new team of writers, to explore how their personal version of a more traditional form of STAR TREK story-telling might look like, i.ex. with regard to a slower paced narrative, a less streamlined plot, or the usage of metaphorical story motives and trademark Tropes, such as the non-villainous adversary.

Of course, I cannot simply infer any interest on the part of the writers, to truly revisit those elements of the Prime-verse, but if I interpret Orci´s and Kurtzman´s audio commentary analysis of the STAR TREK IV narrative correctly, they are indeed completely aware of the inner workings of the previously practiced methods of STAR TREK storytelling, and they also seem to show a certain amount of appreciation for them.