8. The Mining Drill
It is perfectly feasible that in the future you will still have to drill the ground to extract minerals and ore that you need. I can even go with the idea of the drill being lowered through the atmosphere rather than have it constructed at the mining site. And I understand that the drill is simply in the film for cinematic purposes because in pre-Abrams' Star Trek, the Federation and the Romulans would fire a controlled phaser beam from their ship, rather than go to the trouble of lowering a drill that does essentially the same thing. But I can't understand how a drill is disrupting communications and transporters. It's described as a ''high energy pulse device'' but it's just a mining drill so how and why would it be causing disruption to transporters and communications on board the Enterprise? They could have said that Nero was disrupting communications and it would have made much more sense, but the writers focus was on making the pointless mining drill a bigger threat than it was. The drill also had and obvious flaw in that a single phaser blast to the chain area would send the thing crashing to the planet surface, but that was saved for Spock to do during his ACTION sequence in the climax. If only he had thought to do that around Vulcan and billions of lives would have been saved. Before I'm attacked for not getting it, I know this is the brand new ACTION Trek and that the writers and the majority of the casual audience are not bothered with small details like how can a drill cause so much disruption to the Enterprise systems because as long as the next ACTION scene is not disrupted, the drill can disrupt as much logic in the script as it wants. It's primary purpose was for it to enable the skydive and fight scene on the drill. But if you ignore the small details, it just highlights how ill-thought out some of these scenes are and act as a block to you being absorbed into the film, a problem that ruined Prometheus.