10 Great Things
10. Mass Extinction, Screw The "Prime Directive"
The movie got started off on a high note when our heros shove the "Prime Directive" where the sun don't shine in order to save a species from a planet killing volcanic explosion. The "Prime Directive" had been used perviously in other Star Trek shows to justify no interference, even in the face of complete annihilation of a species. Now listen the PD was incepted for a reason, to make sure pre-warp species would not be interfered or conquered by technologically superior ones. However, especially with some of the 24th century crews they seem to take this to mean that there should be no interference of any kind for any event what-so-ever. Even if they had the power to say, stop an asteroid from causing an extinction level event on a planet, no go that would "interfere with the course of natural events". I'm sorry but what's more "natural"? The continuation of life as it was on a planet or the end of all life caused by preventable means, in most cases without the primitive populace even knowing about it?
9. The Look Of The Warp Core
Hey, we finally have a warp core reactor in Star Trek that looks somewhat like actual real-world reactors! Funny stuff aside it is good to see machinery in an engineering section of a spaceship. Just for some prospective, the picture above is of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, today we use it to accelerate atomic particles UP to the speed of light. The warp core on board the Enterprise is used accelerate the entire ship 1000's of times FASTER than the speed of light, so credit where credit is due in making the machinery look "plausible." Additionally, it is good to see some SHIELDING on these reactors, again for prospective take a look at this video of what happens to an
F4 Phantom Jet versus a concrete wall slab. We line that completely around our Nuclear reactors today, shielding anti-matter reactors would be a whole other story (and probably more so then what they present here but take what you can...). Another nod to practical technology, they finally put in Picard's seat-belts, retroactive a hundred years or so...