[horatio]

I disagree. Nero being devoured by his desire for revenge is indeed not the focus of the movie but it is not something tangential either. Like in the previous copy of TWOK the motivation of the villain was fairly unintelligible.
Either you write your villain decently or you truly make him a minor character. You cannot have it both ways, deeply weave (Nero isn't a mystic entity like the whale probe who just enters the story at one point) him into the story and then excuse abysmal writing via turning around 180° and pretending that he is totally irrelevant.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

His world was destroyed because of what he saw as a broken promise.

[horatio]

He wasn't just mad, like Khan he was devoured by his desire for revenge. A broken promise about preventing a natural catastrophe by an alien can hardly trigger such raving madness.
If you wanna copy TWOK you gotta focus a bit on the villain. If you don't wanna focus on the villain don't copy TWOK, simple as that. I thought that this was one very obvious lesson of NEM and Orci being a fanboy should have learned it.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Nero is in some ways a mystic character who just dropped into the story, that's the whole point of the man out of time thing.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Originally Posted by horatio

He wasn't just mad, like Khan he was devoured by his desire for revenge. A broken promise about preventing a natural catastrophe by an alien can hardly trigger such raving madness.
If you wanna copy TWOK you gotta focus a bit on the villain. If you don't wanna focus on the villain don't copy TWOK, simple as that. I thought that this was one very obvious lesson of NEM and Orci being a fanboy should have learned it.

They aren't claiming to want to copy Khan, that's your claim

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

The movie isn't really about Nero at all, it's about Kirk and his crew finding their place in the world.

[horatio]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

Nero is in some ways a mystic character who just dropped into the story, that's the whole point of the man out of time thing.

Ehm, no. Nero is motivated by revenge and like Khan it is his undoing. I have no idea why you deny the obvious, that the guy is a Khan copy (Spoooock! Spoooock!).

Nero being a mystic character out of nowhere and connected to nobody would have been fine. Nero being a well-developed Khanesque villain would have been fine. But the worst of both worlds certainly isn't.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

But in the narrative of this movie, both he and Spock literally "fall out of the sky". Everything they were and everything they are comes from literally another world. All the great answers you want, they are in that world. The movie doesn't take place there. They are just dropped into this one and start screwing it up.

What you really want would have disrupted that narrative, because they aren't telling us the story of that world. They are telling us the story of this one.

[horatio]

Yes. And this very mixture of the worst of both worlds is the problem. Do a decent Khan copy (like, guessing that the next villain is Khan and a fairly good one, in the upcoming movie) or do a decent mystic character.
But as you pointed out the focus of the movie is thankfully not on this abysmal villain so it is just a minor issue. Nero aka Khan 3.0 aka Shinzon 2.0 is as horrible as Shinzon aka Khan 2.0 but does less damage to the movie as his role is smaller.

[kevin]

Nero is a story element but their isn't anything substantial enough in his backstory to make anything else from since enough of what was in Countdown (minus the uninteresting Praetor malarky anyway which would have just stodged up the film with irrelevances in terms of the alternate Universe anyway. Is he or isn't he more in the Prime? Doesn't matter he isn't playing in that sandbox now anyway and nobody in the Alternate would rightly care) appears in the mindmeld sequence that we know a combination of broken trust and grief drives Nero on his endeavour in the film itself.

However, the writers were perhaps capable enough to realise a lot of what was in Countdown would have clogged up the film had it been introduced and since elaborate backstory to Star Trek movie villains has never been a prerequisite before it need not be with Nero either. We're given enough to understand why he is doing what he is doing but he is not the point of the film (although I tend to think the mindmeld itself could have been slightly redone to get just a little more info in it still works) and any similarities to TWOK are clearly the B side of the film compared to the A side of Kirk, Spock and the formation of the crew.

While it's a bit regrettable Khan looms over every subsequent villain like a cloud Nero ultimately falls as neither better than nor worse than any of the others. And as such, with the end of the film his story also ends and there isn't anything much else to cover.

As with other problematic villains in Trek - what's done is done. Let's see what comes along next.