It wasn't a good Star Trek story, but it was a good spectacle. The whole thing was basically nostalgia with little else, between the brain worms, Spock, Romulans, Kirk being made Captain with the crew, etc.

The only thing it was really missing was the Borg and Dominion.

But I'd argue that spectacle was what Star Trek needed at the time, to make a casual audience want to watch more of the actual Star Trek, and bring it back to the cultural fore.

At that point in the 2000s, Star Trek basically had the reputation that it was a boring TV show for nerds, where you'd be watching people sit around and talk politics for an hour, over panning shots of planets and the Enterprise.

Star Trek of all things to have such boneheaded threads of anti-science magical thinking, noxious xenophobia and childish cruelty is unforgivable.

I don't know if that's necessarily true, since even the TV shows have had the Federation express those viewpoints before, with little to object against them.

If Data or the EMH MK. I were human, their treatment at the hands of Starfleet would be plainly unconscionable. Admiral Satie shows that anti-Romulan sentiment is still alive and well within the Federation, enough that she could tap it for her crusade without much pushback. Former Borg drones, like Picard, or current ones, like Hugh, are also treated with considerable hostility, even if they aren't being actively hostile.

The bigger issue that is that neither show nor film really tap into those problems within the Federation in any significant way. Data, the EMH, and the crewman Satie accused got by because they had friends amongst the crew of the Enterprise/Voyager who stood up for them, and supported them. But the wider problems in Starfleet aren't touched upon. As "Author, Author" touches on, they're treated as one-off incidents, rather than highlighting underlying problems in the Federation that need addressing.

I cannot see the Federation, after a devastating strike during the Klingon war, capturing a Klingon, then promptly ordering the creation and release of a bioweapon that deliberately targets Klingon genetics; to be released to spread amongst the population to wipe them out.

And yet after Wolf 359, that was exactly what was ordered to be done with Hugh. We know that it likely wouldn't have worked, given that they accidentally infected Hugh with individuality, and the Collective eventually cut his cube off after the episode, but the intent was for Geordi to create a memetic virus that would target the visual processing of Borg drones and kill them all that way.

But literally every last thing about the story is stream of consciousness, fever dream nonsense, which in any other franchise might be forgiven, but for Star Trek of all things to have such boneheaded threads of anti-science magical thinking, noxious xenophobia and childish cruelty is unforgivable.

Yeah no I totally agree, Final Frontier really is just the worst.

Edit: Yeah I totally get it, I reflexively downvote any reminder that ST:V is canon too.

(lmao why is that image so huge)

But it's also really going to be hard to argue that ST:V isn't as-bad-or-worse on pretty much every item (except scope, god beats black hole gun every time) compared to ST:09. 09 wasn't a great star trek movie, but it was generally mindless fun and it revived interest in the series so we could get good stuff from STD and NSW (and great stuff from LD).

Oh for sure. The contrast between how the respective plots treat the Narn vs. the Bajorans alone sets B5 ahead. But it's understandable for there to be a much more focused (and thus deeper) narrative when you don't have to integrate the work of 98 different writers while trying to develop your characters/plot (and also Harlan Ellison just -hanging out- in your writers room probably doesn't hurt...)