With the greatest respect, you're all wrong:)
There's a reason why the even number Trek movies have a reputation for being the good ones and this is a big part of it. The story is sufficiently huge and such a subversive take on the core universe that this still stands up, for me, very well.
Think about it; Trek's big weakness has always been the reset button. At the end of an episode everything's fine, we get the pithy little three way between Kirk, Spock and Mcoy (Or Picard, Riker and Data, Janeway and Chakotay etc) and we warp off into the sunset.
Here we get the consequences of that very mentality, of Kirk's morality and refusal to kill for that matter, coming back. We get to see them look at what they've accidentally created BY leaving and not coming back and we get to see what happens when, for the first time, Kirk and the Federation itself find their reach massively exeeds their grasp.
This, for me, is the movie where everything comes home to roost. Captain Sexy Pants discovering that having a girl in every port means sometimes there WILL be consequences (And in this case those consequences are called David) is only the start of a movie which in essence deconstructs Trek, stomps on the pieces and then puts them back together.
This let's not forget, is the movie where the Federation stop trying to discover new things and start trying to create them. It's the movie where Kirk is faced with the incredible cruelty of an old enemy and his own faults in abandoning his son. It's the movie where for the first time, we get a sense of Starfleet as a millitary organisation (Chekov on the Reliant, the cut scene involving Sulu accepting captaincy of the Excelsior) and the price people pay for it, most notably the deaths of Spock and, in the novel at least, Scotty's nephew.
Most of all though, this is the first time the series feels both personal and intimate and big. More than one Starfleet vessel, entire worlds given over to research projects and a maniac crouched on a nightmarish planet, refusing to die until his chance for vengeance arrives.
It's also very easy to forget exactly how revolutionary the approach to ship to ship combat was at this point. The idea of the Enterprise and Reliant as, in essence, two old submarines blasting away at one another in three dimensions not only felt new at the time but also emphasised once again, the scale of the conflict (The Enterprise's entire crew reconfiguring the ship for war still sends shivers down my spine) and the fragility of the people locked up in it. Plus, whilst it looks a little clunky now, it should be pointed out that this was a lesson the franchise as a whole promptly forgot for almost a full decade of screen time. You have to look at mid-run Deep Space Nine to get something even approximating a fight scene this complex.
Oh, and Spock dies.
He dies. One of the three main characters dies in an incredibly horrible and heroic manner and as a direct result of choices made in the original series. For the first time, the very first time, we see Kirk forced to not only look at his actions but realise what he's lost as a direct result of them. This isn't just the fallible hero, this is a victory that tastes of cold ashes and nothing else and, much like the battle scenes, it's a moment that the series has, arguably, never got close to matching.
Yes, the reset button's implicit but it's also overt. We know about the Genesis project from the get go and the script trusts the viewer enough to figure it out. It also doesn't dilute the emotional impact of those final scenes at all and there's even a case for saying that Trek III, which is also pretty damn good, is not so much a stand alone movie as the second half of this one.
So yeah, I like this one.
