I went to the premier last night. It was great! Lots of great scenes, nothing I found particularly bad. There are many people talking about this movie, so I’ll focus on two things that I’m not seeing anyone else talk about. Don’t worry, these spoilers are about as mild as you can get.

1. In the movie, there are frequent references and uses of what’s called “Red Matter.” It appears to be a liquid substance that is kept in magnetic suspension in a special container. The liquid is, of course, red. To use it, a user will insert a magnetically shielded needle into the sphere of matter and a single drop is extracted, itself kept in magnetic suspension. This canister is then allowed to be broken in a given location. Once the Red Matter has contact with any other kind of matter, it forms an instant singularity (a black hole). They gave no explanation as to how it worked or how it was discovered, but I can only guess that it’s made up of extremely exotic anti-matter. Anyway, J.J. Abrams, the director of Star Trek also created that great Action/Drama TV show Alias. For those of you who watched the show, you might have noticed that Alias also featured a magnetically suspended red liquid. Regular water could be made to levitate in a sphere that quickly turned red, and in many cases turned poisonous or caused madness. It was all because of one of Rambaldi’s Mueller devices. I thought it was interesting that he used the same visual effect for two very different, but similarly important inanimate objects.
2. Secondly, I didn’t get a chance to, but someone really should count how many times Kirk gets punched in the face. It’s seemed like far more than 30 times! He really was a glutton for punishment in this. Another physical recurrence was characters holding onto cliffs, platforms, and everything else for dear life, about to fall off. The amount of times a character was found holding on to something by their arms for dear life was something like 10 times. J.J. Abrams must really like that kind of physical suspense.