Slowly Going Bald

• This is the best Star Trek film to date. Hands down. The various series and movies were too susceptible to getting caught up in hard science, but really, no one cares that you can defeat the evil space cloud by blasting it with a tachyon pulse. The best stories are the ones about characters, and that's what this movie had. Kirk and Spock were simply but effectively drawn, on opposite sides of the fence when it came to following procedure but united in their desire to get revenge against the man who killed their parents. For the first time since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film was actually about someone.

• The screenplay's alternate timeline device was ingenious. The film takes place before the original series and films, but it opens with the enemy ship traveling back in time and changing the past, killing Kirk's father before he could get to know him. The idea was efficiently introduced on the bridge of the Enterprise years later, and driven home by the elderly Spock's confusion that Kirk was the ship's first officer, not captain. It was a perfect way to admit that the characters originated in a separate series of stories but are now free to create new ones without ruining what some consider an unimpeachable canon. J.J. Abrams' film exists in a new universe, one with unwritten stories.

• The humor was perfectly done, a mix of one-liners and slapstick that was still always rooted firmly in character. One of the many things that made the scene where Bones kept injecting Kirk with various ailments so funny was that it wouldn't have played the same with any other characters. It had to be these two guys, and that's what made it click.

• The effects were dazzling and slick, and the production design was gorgeously crowded. The bridge of "The Next Generation" looked like a Chevy Suburban, but the glistening, white deck of Abrams' redesigned ship was a way of literally starting over with a blank slate as well as honoring the overall aesthetic of retro-futurism. A lot of the film is meant to look like what people in the 1960s thought the future might look like, and it's fantastically executed.