It’s funny, I ended up watching this last night as well, after having watched it 20 years ago in the theaters and thinking it was one of the better ones. And like you, I walked away noticing only the hundred and one plot holes and the just plain sloppy writing. Besides the ones you mentioned …

- Everything happens so fast. In the short time it takes the Enterprise to rendezvous with Gorkon’s ship, an admiral, a Vulcan, a Romulan, and some Klingons manage to identify each other as allies and orchestrate this entire plot. Then after the plot is carried out, Kirk and McCoy are arrested, tried, and sentenced faster than you can say Rura Penthe. I feel like the whole movie happened in three days, which is ridiculous, considering everything that happens.

- Why, when the prospect of peace with the Klingons is mentioned in that big meeting in the beginning, does one of the admirals(?) suggest mothballing Star Fleet? Really, there are NO other threats in the entire galaxy besides the Klingons? Because the entire series seems to speak otherwise, even if you just look at TOS and the first six movies.

- Were the Excelsior’s long range scanners not working? Because it seems to me that any long range scanner worth its salt would pick up A MOON EXPLODING across the Neutral Zone with enough advance notice that the captain would have time to put up shields BEFORE the shock wave actually hit the ship.

- While we’re on the topic of shields, exactly what good are the Enterprise’s? Because at one point, during the final battle, Scotty says the shields are down to blah blah percent, and by that point, every single torpedo the Klingons have fired at them has already done major hull damage and rocked the ship. Isn’t the whole point of a shield to KEEP THINGS FROM HITTING THE SHIP in the first place? Seems to me those particular shields couldn’t have done much more than slow the torpedoes down a little, in which case, good riddance to them.

- I’m no expert on Vulcan ethics, but I’m pretty sure that as a culture, they frown upon MIND RAPE, even in cases of pending assassination. Yet when Kirk asks Spock to mind meld Valeria against her will, he does, without even putting up a single principled argument against it. And he does it with gusto, ripping right in there to the point where even Uhura is wincing. Yet nobody speaks up against it. Talk about completely writing away Spock’s soul.

- Generally speaking, I just didn’t buy any of the conspirators’ motivations. Particularly Valeria, on whom so much hinges. There were so many other less risky ways to “sabotage” (actually nice foreshadowing, having her use that line) the fragile peace effort that didn’t require turning Valeria into a completely unreasonable, un-Vulcan-like character. Hell, they could have just made her a Romulan agent in disguise, and that would have made a lot more sense overall. But having her shoot her co-conspirators point blank in the head in a turbolift just seems brutal and senseless.

- The usage of Shakespeare quotes just got out of hand. Literally, Chang was talking ONLY in Shakespeare quotes during that final battle scene. It was ridiculous, and made the Klingons seem ridiculous in turn. Previous movies had done a better job of making the Klingons seem intimidating and interesting — this just made them seem like cartoon characters, the acting skills of Christopher Plummer notwithstanding.

- Speaking of Klingons, who knew that in order to completely decimate them, all you have to do is turn off the gravity in their ships? The fiercest warriors in the galaxy, in SPACE SHIPS that are at least as advanced as Starfleet’s, presumably with some kind of space training, but if you turn off their gravity, they’re like baby turtles on their backs, just ripe for the killing by two dopes with phasers moving at a snail’s pace in mag boots. Really?

- Also speaking of Klingons, are we to believe that Uhura, a comm officer for decades, presumably a master of languages (like Ensign Sato on Enterprise) speaks NO Klingon whatsoever? Likewise, are we to believe that McCoy knows NOTHING at all about Klingon physiology? It’s not like this is the first time the crew has ever encountered Klingons before — they’ve been around for quite a while by this point in Starfleet history. The ship’s cook even knew enough about them to serve them worms or whatever. It seems unreasonable that Uhura and McCoy could claim complete ignorance about the basics of their biggest enemy.

That’s all I have for now. At the end of the day, I still think the movie has merit, but primarily as a vehicle for the characters that everybody had grown to love by the this point. And the pretense of a murder mystery was interesting, even if sloppily executed. I’m just not sure why they had to throw all continuity, logic, and basic science fiction technique out the window to tell the story. The Next Generation series was already doing a better job of things in the weekly series by this point.