Is it just me or were there a lot of little things with respect to the new 2009 Star Trek movie that just didn't make any logical sense?
Here's a link to someone's list of mistakes that they noticed in the new Star Trek movie. Some of the things that I personally noticed are not there but I did notice at least half of the ones in this list.
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2009/05/exclusive-most-illogical-11-mistakes-new-star-trek-movie
Other potential errors that I noticed:
1/ The miniature black hole created at the center of the planet would not have sucked in the planet like the grains of sand in an hourglass. The gravity field would have been isotropic (spherical) and the entire planet would have collapsed/shrank uniformly down into a point.
2/ The disintegrating planet did not show any sort of glowing magma-based mantle. It just looked like it was all loose dirt.
3/ The nearby moon (with an atmosphere) where old Spock observed the demise of the planet Vulcan would not have simply hung there in space without being adversely effected. The dramatic gravitational flux would have ripped it to pieces. At the very least, it would've been very windy!
4/ Our modern science has proved already that a black hole is not a space-time wormhole or gateway. It's a super dense collection of matter that exhibits gravity so strong that even light is contained within it (or curved around it so we don't see it). That fact was used to suck in the planet and destroy it. That fact was then immediately forgotten conveniently to allow the two ships to pass through the black hole and end up in the relatively recent past, undamaged I might add. Why didn't the planet just pass through the black hole exactly the same way? Or conversely, why weren't the two ships simply crushed and destroyed? And don't say "the ships had their shields up".
5/ The movie dialog stated that the planet Romulus was destroyed when the sun of its solar system went supernova prematurely and unexpectedly, before Spock could "absorb the explosion" using "red matter" to create a miniature black hole. First of all, a star just doesn't spontaneously explode. It gradually runs out of fuel (hydrogen that atomically fuses into heavier elements by nuclear fusion) over millions of years and then becomes a "red giant" for a few million years. After that, when most of the fuel is gone and nuclear reactions dramatically reduce, the star collapses into a white dwarf for a while. Only after that phase does the supernova result. In the movie, the star was not a red giant. If the star had ever expanded into a red giant, Romulus would have been consumed by it at that time.
6/ The engineering section of the Enterprise was a beer brewery. They didn't even bother to build a set for it, not even a lousy Jeffrey's Tube.
7/ Delivering the "red matter" to the center of Vulcan required phasering out a hole to the center of the planet. First of all, that could've been done from orbit using a ship-mounted phaser system. If the beam can hog out a hole 4000 miles through a planet, it can certainly pass through a few miles of air.
8/ If the "red matter" had to be delivered to the center of the planet through a hole, then why did another scene show the glass vile containing the red matter just being "tossed" into the star from a distance?
9/ Why did the black hole have to start up at the center of the planet to destroy it? I would think that sucking the planet into a black hole that forms at the surface or in near-orbit would have done the same job, even if only half of the planet was consumed. Then again, why not just use a bigger gob of red matter?
10/ The "red matter" is so sensitive that it has to float within a container where it never touches the sides of the container. Floating within a magnetic field within a vacuum would make more sense than floating within a liquid of some kind. Somehow, seeing a sample being taken by poking the gob with a metal needle didn't make any sense to me. Neither did seeing the big gob dispersed all over the place at the end of the movie where it did nothing at all until "ignited".
11/ Couldn't the "red matter" have been delivered in its vile using a transporter beam? How about a photon torpedo tube? These methods have always worked in the past.
12/ Why didn't the movie describe what "red matter" is or how Spock came to possess it?
13/ Why did Spock have a 1 meter diameter gob of "red matter" aboard his ship when only a single drop of it was required to do the job?
14/ Shouldn't the black hole generated by the "huge gob" of "red matter" at the end of the movie have been a lot bigger? After all, just one drop of the goo ate an entire planet right?
15/ Why was Enterprise so worried about falling into the black hole at the end of the movie? Wouldn't it have simply transported them back further in time and given them the opportunity to prevent the Romulan Nero from executing his plan and destroying the planet Vulcan? That is assuming that passing through a black hole effects Enterprise similarly to the other two ships that did the same thing earlier. Why wouldn't it?
16/ Why wouldn't Nero have used a common matter/anti-matter bomb to blow up the planet Vulcan? What the hell do you need "red matter" to do that for? After all, Romulus was destroyed by an exploding star anyway, not "red matter".
17/ Nero said that he and his people "put their trust" in Spock's plan to save them (and in the Federation as well for that matter) and that everyone on Romulus died because they screwed up. I don't know about you, but on any decently run planet, wouldn't they have evacuated the planet long beforehand just to be on the safe side? Do you really think that it is feasible that Spock would have been sent to execute the "red matter" plan all alone? Wouldn't he have been commissioned a great big ship and a full crew (or a small fleet) to help him out? That seems like an awful lot of responsibility for one man and one tiny ship, don't you think?
18/ Even if the Romulan sun (and its explosion) had been "absorbed", wouldn't that have left the solar system without a star? Wouldn't the planet Romulus have died very soon after that event regardless? I would think that drifting through dark cold space (I said drifting, not orbiting because there's nothing to orbit anymore) would have a substantially negative effect on the environment.
What do you think?
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