This franchise was never dead, it was just napping. Like I've said before, I am not saying this is a bad Sci-fi movie, I am saying it isn't a great Trek movie. You could claim X3 or Spider Man 3 were great action movies, but compared to X2 or Spider-man 2 they were crap. Nothing in Trek has ever come close to being as good as ST:2 for the simple reasons of a) Montalban was a fantastic actor b) it is the only film that has a direct tie in to an episode of the show, and c) ven if you aren't a Trek fan and never watched Space Seed you can still enjoy the movie simply because it is a really good movie. The two films that followed were a direct result of things that happened in Wrath of Kahn, and ST:5 would have been better if Shatner hadn't gone over budget. Other then the first film I don't think there has been a Trek flick that didn't make money, and I am not surprised that this one did. In the end, Abrams came up with a great story for a film, but didn't have enough faith in himself to think he could make it work with out using characters somebody else made up. So like Roman Polanski and somebody's 13 year old daughter, he was given permission to rape Star Trek in the ass.