What you described of DS9 is not something "new", it the same old thing, but with a different sugar coating. TNG tackled the same topic which is DS9 main topic, the darker setting.
Star Trek has lasted something like 700+ hours of Television. In that time, you're going to touch on a lot of stuff.
There's a big difference between touching on something and going in-depth.
My point is this: "Star Trek" means something. Like any adaptation of a work, you need to keep the meaning of it intact in the re-telling. The Lord of the Rings films changed many things: dialogue, character interactions, etc. But they kept to the true meaning and intent behind the original books, which is why they work very well as an adaptation.
Star Trek means something. So any film, TV series, etc. that bears that name needs to keep to the essential meaning of it. You can change the look of ships, technology, and the crew, as was done between TOS and TNG; that's all well and good. But you need to keep the sense of what Star Trek means alive. Otherwise, you're just stealing the name as a marketing gimmick.
Even Batman & Robin, horrible film though it was, kept to the essential nature of the character. Well, a version of the character; yes, the comic Batman was at one time very much like that presented in B&R. All I ask is that this movie that bears the Star Trek name keep to the essential nature of the series that came before it.
And, BattleStar Galactica? It doesn't keep to the nature of its originating series. But it's better for it, since the original BSG wasn't that great of a series. It had its moments, but it wasn't all that. The new BSG takes the setting and a few elements from the series and charts its own course.
The die hards are afraid of change. They want to keep the original series in the 1960's with the lightbulb and twist knob cardboard control panels. They want to keep the matt painting backgrounds with the styrofoam bolders. They want to keep the The bad SFX, the cheese, and the camp, and Shat's overacting.
I can't speak of anyone else, but as far as I'm concerned, TOS can be bruied in a shallow grave. I liked it when I was, like, 10. But my greatest emotional connection with Star Trek is TNG and DS9.
I never wanted them to revisit the TOS era. As far as I'm concerned, what is interesting is the future of Star Trek, not its past.
Too many people put TOS on some kind of pedestal, as though it were the pinnacle of all greatness or something. It was a good show, but it was inconsistent: truly great works of TeleVision art would air alongside utter drek like "Spock's Brain" and so forth. Not that TNG and DS9 were innocent of putting out horrors ("Profit and Lace"...), but the average was clearly better.
So from the beginning, this film gets a strike from me. They should have gone with an all-original cast in a new time setting, not redoing old stuff that should be left in the past. This just makes Star Trek look old (not to mention the fact that ST was at its most popular during the heyday of Next-Gen, not TOS, so they're stealing from the wrong place).
Strike 2 is what the trailer shows: nobody acts like the characters they're portraying in TOS. The look of the sets and so forth is entirely irrelevant next to the fact that the characters aren't right. TOS, ultimately, is about 3 characters; everyone who is not Kirk, Spock, or McCoy is a glorified extra. If you don't get these characters right, you fail at making a version of TOS.
They failed. Spock does not sound like Spock, nor does he act like Spock. Kirk is way over-the-top (and he's supposed to be a cadet that somehow ends up in charge of the ship? Did StarFleet lose their minds?). We didn't see enough of Bones in the trailer to know.
Now, I freely admit that the trailer may not be the best way to tell these kinds of subtle character details. But this is the trailer they made! They're telling us what they want to tell us. So if there is actual good characterization going on, they're doing a poor job of letting us know that.
Strike 3 is the direction/cinematograpy. Not the construction of the sets and such, but the camera moves. They simply look terrible. Too much clippy-editing style that the thrice-cursed Michael Bay brought us. Too much "twist the camera at a 60 degree angle for no real reason" nonsense that needs to be buried a the shallow grave right beside "bullet time." In short, it is not directed in a way that I want to see any movie directed in.
Three strikes and you're out.
It is ironic that fans demand new Star Trek, and when it happens they nit pick and bash the hell out of it when one smidge of canon is stretched and/or ignored.
No, what's ironic is that nobody (or, at least, nobody here) is doing any of that, yet people keep saying that they are.
