J.J. Abrams knows how to write a thriller. He knows how to direct a thriller. With shows like Lost and Alias on his resume, it’s safe to say he knows how to keep an audience on edge, tuned in, turned on.

With Alias, Abrams shuffled the structure of the show and used time-based plot lines to keep viewers interested. With Lost, you can practically see a physical question mark hovering over the collective American population, offering plot answers only when crafting two or three more questions in the process. Thriller? Check. Done.

So the script, which was written by Alex Kurtzman, auteur of Mission Impossible 3 and a number of episodes of Alias, chose to take the rich but convoluted history of Star Trek, add a time-travel scenario and, in effect, change everything without changing a thing. So we’re left with familiar characters made unfamiliar through youth and inexperience, living an alternate timeline unique to itself and completely separate from anything we’ve experienced in the past.

Time travel scenarios quickly become a mess. They have to. Look at Back to the Future. A progressive mess. The Terminator. Mess. Each effort to polish content makes the content that much more inaccessible.

Abrams and Kurtzman, however, took inaccessible, dissected it, threw away the sludgy bits and built on the crucial piece remaining - the characters. Kirk, headstrong, daring, a ladies’ man (and makes it with the infamous hot, green babe)? Check. Bones contrary, frustrated, disgusted? Check. Spock conflicted half-breed, logical, reflective? Check. Red shirt gets smoked? Check. Done.

Scuttling between the debris of the Star Trek universe is Nero, the villain - lost in self-pity, consumed in loathing, Nero, like his namesake, plays the swan’s song of the Romulan empire, plays the violin while Rome burned. He’s a miner, but as a villain, he’s a bit of a dud. He succumbs to the classic writer’s oops: I am, therefore I must.

Let me explain.

Nero uses this rather cryptic crimson goop to create singularities (re: black holes) in space to gobble up his enemies home worlds. His own home world was incinerated by an exploding sun so he wants revenge on the one man who promised to save it - Spock.

So Nero shoots off to Vulcan and begins to bore into the planet’s core. He’s a miner after all, why shouldn’t he? At this point, he injects a globule of the aforementioned cryptic crimson goop and boom - singularity inside Vulcan. Vulcan is quickly chewed up. Done.

But wait, Spock’s half-human and that means Earth must be on Nero’s agenda as well. So a quick warp over to Earth, and he starts mining towards the planet’s core. He’s a miner after all, why shouldn’t he?

Here’s the question: why should he?

Why take the extra effort to mine into the planet when he could simply ignite the cryptic crimson goop in space NEXT to the poor, doomed planet and be done with it? The singularity would still chew up the planet nicely. So why mine? It puts you behind schedule on the whole “earth as a red shirt” scenario. Both writer and director are excellent architects of the cliffhanger, but this seems…well, as villains come and go, it makes Nero seem like a bit of a prat.

The production design of the film is gorgeous. Instead of the the sterile, arching corridors of the Enterprise we’re accustomed to, the film communicates an Enterprise that is “a work in progress.” Crude and looking a bit like a combination between a time share in Las Vegas and a water processing plant, there’s just no telling if this one is up to snuff after looking at the interior. And the design of the Romulan mining vessel was beautiful.

All in all, plot holes aside, this is a film worth seeing on the big screen. But I still haven’t decided if I’m going to purchase it on Blu-ray yet when the time comes…