In the many TV series, each episode normally involves an encounter with some strange planet, alien race or space phenomenon. The crew’s lives are frequently endangered, but few of the alien species turn out to be entirely bad. Indeed the story is often moralistic, with Star Trek covering issues as diverse as war and peace; racism and religion; authoritarianism and anarchy; and many, many more.

The film has a dramatic beginning as we follow the USS Kelvin in an encounter with a Romulan mining vessel captained by the deranged Nero (Eric Bana). First Officer of the Kelvin, George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth), realises that the ship’s crew can only be saved at the expense of his own life. Meanwhile, in her evacuation pod, his wife Winona (Jennifer Morrison) gives birth to an infant, named James Tiberius Kirk.

We also follow the development of the youthful Kirk, who is a distastefully clichéd, selfish, wild child who impresses a Starfleet Captain, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) with his brawling skills in a bar fight and is unconvincingly persuaded to join Starfleet. This arrogant, rebellious, brilliant Kirk (played by Chris Pine) offers no surprises as a character, with utterly predictable and frankly boring successes and sexual conquests at the Starfleet Academy. This whole part of the film had me wondering if it was a deliberate spoof; the Academy and space cadet training reminding me of nothing so much as the film Starship Troopers (which I really did think was a deliberate spoof – but apparently wasn’t).

To take you further than this would risk spoiling the plot, but this development adequately demonstrates the sort of preposterous events and coincidences that run throughout the film. Why is the entire fleet except for cadets deployed elsewhere? Why can’t they be contacted, seeing as it only takes three minutes to travel across the apparently vast distance between Earth and the Vulcan homeland? And given that it only takes three minutes, why did the crazy Romulans not think to stop by and destroy the Academy before its cadets could manage to deploy themselves?

Younger versions of familiar Star Trek characters are introduced along the way, so we meet Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), Pavel Andreievich Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and Hikaru Sulu (John Cho), who are hackneyed and uninspiring versions of their future selves. Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (Simon Pegg) is introduced in the most bizarre and absurd of fashions that includes a brief diversion to almost slapstick humour when a transportation onto the Enterprise doesn’t go entirely to plan.

It is difficult, for example, to assess the acting of such shallow characters. Chris Pine’s Kirk was one-dimensional, but that was as much the fault of the scriptwriter and director as that of the actor. The same can be said of the characters played by Greenwood, Urban, Yelchin, Cho and Saldana. There were a couple of performances that managed to rise above this fray; Simon Pegg was lively as the upbeat and slightly crazy Scotty, and Zachary Quinto put in by far the best performance as the uptight and troubled Spock, convincingly depicting his character’s change from rigid coolness to emotional distress and finally somewhere in-between.

I find it difficult to pinpoint the cause of this film’s success. The truth, probably, is that most cinema goers have very different tastes to what I do. If you like your characters to be simple, your plot developments to be essentially predictable, and your bangs to be big and colourful, then you will enjoy this film.