Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

That was a wrong turn, I thought -- it was interesting to see a Spock/Uhura dynamic (though I'd think Spock to be a little more aware of the possible ramifications of a relationship with a student), but given the effort they went to make her interesting and useful (having xenolinguistics be useful for a change), she becomes foil to Spock in much the same way Bones becomes foil to Kirk (they contribute but contribute too much in the context of the main characters).

And roseneko had a great observation a while back -- in the more recent generation of movie re-imaginings, the first movie is solid if incomplete, but the second film really leaps into the meat of the matter. We saw it Nolan's Batman, I'm going to put Singer's X-Men in there, and if Singer'd had a shot at a second Superman I think he could've breathed a bit more life into it than what we saw in the first installment of that particular series. If there is a sequel to this flick and they keep the creative side mostly intact, I think we'll see a genuine improvement.