I was skeptical at the concept of remaking Star Trek. It's not that I don't see the cheese of the original Star Trek, it's just that there has been so much that rebooting it seems difficult without simply ignoring it all.

This movie did a really good job of making Star Trek feel new while keeping the characters and feel close to the original.

Beyond the actors who played the parts the most notable difference in this story was the technology. The first thing I noticed was that the transporters didn't work all that well in comparison to the transporters in the show. it takes considerably longer, you can't move, and they are blocked most of the time.  I understand this, transporters are great for getting the characters into places that are interesting but it drops the tension once they are there if you know they can be beamed out any time.

The ships themselves felt much more real in that you felt you knew where things were. The engines actually looked and felt like engines, the shuttle bay felt like part of the ship and it all simply felt real.

Third was the weapons. The changes in the phasers were great. They really felt like they were better than a handgun you could get now rather than worse.

All of the characters felt pretty much right on and they really gave them all a chance to do something useful, in fact in many ways Kirk was the least useful of the characters in large parts of the movie. I would have to watch again but I don't think he actually won a fight in the entire movie.

I love the style they tell the story in. You don't know what is going on early in the movie though you can guess at it and that truely helps especially through the early part of the movie that could have been slow as they went through Starfleet Academy.

The only major weakness I saw was that I wasn't all that impressed by the villain. He did his job and did it well but the reason he was doing it was a little bit of a stretch for me.

I truly enjoyed this movie and as someone who likes Star Trek and was worried that this wasn't going to be Star Trek but some other show crammed into a Star Trek uniform I can say that it really is Star Trek. Yet at the same time there is no reason that someone who has never really cared for Star Trek can't go to this movie and see a perfectly reasonable movie with a good story and plenty of action without needing to know or care about Star Trek.