Sure, you watched the new Star Trek trailer today — a couple of times, in fact.  But did you see Winona Ryder?  How ’bout that quick shot of Leonard Nimoy Ben Cross?  And what can all those really quick cuts tell us about the plot?  Not a ton, but more than you might think.

Below the cut are my favorite screen shots from the trailer.  Some are spoilers or contain plot information, others are just particularly cool eye candy, and I give my explanations for each one.  First, if you haven’t seen it yet, watch the trailer.  Then when you’re ready, click through to read on and get some context…

Let’s start at the beginning.  I did a double-take when I first watched the trailer, but those shapes on the horizon, as you probably already noticed, are indeed massive buildings.  It’s a clever special effect: pretty cheap to pull off, and it hints (but doesn’t fully reveal) another world of possibility.

Young Kirk on his joyride.  Or is it?  Take just this image, and that looks a heck of a lot like a stunt driver and not a little kid…

I actually read a minor flame war online earlier today about how there are no cliffs in Iowa.  Well guess what, it looks here like a very man-made quarry.

Starfleet Academy?  In a hanger that looks like it was borrowed from Synecdoche, New York?  (See, in that movie, there’s a really big warehouse…never mind.)  Check out the tall guy on the right — total alien.  He belongs in a catina on Tatooine.  Whoops, this is Star Trek.

Kirk and…a girl.  Rumors surfaced a few months ago that this movie would tell the story about how Kirk cheated on the legendary Kobayashi Maru test, and the word was he did it by…seducing a girl.  That’s probably what we’re seeing.  Without that context, the trailer kind of sneakily suggests the girl is Uhura — a previous shot shows Uhura taking her shirt off — but look closely and the girl lying there is definitely not Zoe Saldana.

Switching gears, here’s the Vulcan home world…

…And there’s Zachary Quinto as Spock with an old woman — wait!  That’s Winona Ryder! Pretending to be an old woman!  She plays Spock’s mom in the film.

I confess I’m not totally up with Spock’s backstory, but that’s Ben Cross as Sarek, Spock’s father (and not Leonard Nimoy as I at first immediately assumed.).  Reminds me of Aragorn’s dream of Arwen in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  Probably not what J.J. Abrams was going for.

Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), the doomed captain of the Enterprise before Kirk came.  Spock was his first mate.  You’ll notice Kirk in the background; his black clothing is a school uniform.

So here’s what happens, I think: Pike is killed or becomes incapacitated in some way, and the completely inexperienced Kirk starts taking over leadership of the Enterprise — you’ll notice he still has his school shirt on in the picture above.  Spock doesn’t like this even a little bit, which might be why the trailer shows him attacking Kirk on the bridge.

So the Enterprise is going through warp/lightspeed…

…When suddenly it lands right in the middle of a battle.  Neat.

It’s anyone’s guess if this is even the same space battle as we were seeing in the previous picture, but it’s a nice money shot — as in, this shot alone cost millions of dollars.  That’s the Enterprise you see, by the way, doing a little sidewinding.

A good shot of the red space monster…

And here it’s opening its mouth.  Or mouth-equivalent.  It seems to be roaring more than trying to eat the guy, though, because in the trailer it just hangs there for a bit with its mouth open without trying to take a bite.  Oh, and the guy’s probably Kirk, because one of the first stills released showed Kirk marooned on a snowy planet.

I didn’t include close-ups of some of the other characters because you already know what the actors look like.  But this shot of angry, slightly insane Bones McCoy (Karl Urban) was too priceless to pass up.

A previous shot shows Kirk fighting this angry black dude, but it came out so blurry it wasn’t worth showing.  So here’s Sulu’s turn.  He’s giving off a distinct “swordfighting ninja” vibe.

Now here’s some real eye candy.  However, it does reveal a little bit about Uhura’s character, if you’ll indulge me for a moment.  Her bra is lovely, but also white and functional.  The bra of the girl Kirk was sleeping with was darker, had a pattern, “sexier.”  There’s a great contrast there.  Uhura will be more proper, more focused, and more capable.  (And hot, too.)

Look who got himself an official outfit and got out of his school clothes?  That’s why he’s so happy in this scene.

From his baldness and the tattoo on the back of his head, the guy on the left is most likely Nero (Eric Bana), the main villain.  And he’s standing over Kirk, who’s dangling off a ledge above something that looks pretty important down below.  What we’re looking at almost has to be a very late-in-the-game climactic moment.

That’s all I got.  Anybody notice anything else?