A series with teleporters, time travel, warp drive, artificial gravity, deflector shields, all manner of ESP-type woo... and submerging a spacecraft is what ruins it for you?
Yes. It breaks the established rules of the world.
I also have problems with the Enterprise being built in a canyon in… checks notes Iowa?!? Also, I hate the transgalactic teleporter JJ has Kahn use to to escape, and pretty much the entire plot of JJ’s Star Trek 2. I already saw that movie, done better. It was called Star Trek II.
At risk of defending JJ Abrams, hadn't Leonard Nimoy already submerged the Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) back in 1986 when he directed Star Trek IV?
That said, I've long agreed with others here who take issue with the idea of landing star ships that are supposedly so large and structurally precarious they more or less must be built in space. On reentry the dynamic stresses on the hulls of those ships would be insane to the point of absurdity.
>At risk of defending JJ Abrams, hadn't Leonard Nimoy already submerged the Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) back in 1986 when he directed Star Trek IV?
Huh? No, where did you get that crazy idea?
There was no Enterprise in the movie, because it was destroyed in the previous movie. The crew used a Klingon bird of prey to go back in time, and they didn't go underwater, they built a tank inside the ship and beamed some whales (and water) into it.
>On reentry the dynamic stresses on the hulls of those ships would be insane to the point of absurdity.
And how does that compare to the stresses on ships that can (in most sci-fi) accelerate to a significant fraction of lightspeed very quickly, or perform extreme maneuvers during space battles?
Even in Star Trek, they recognized that inertia and structural forces would be a big problem with the plot, so they "invented" the "inertial dampers" and the "SIF": structural integrity field, which somehow manages to make the ship strong enough to handle crazy forces well beyond the strengths of the materials it's made from.
Voyager I’ll allow since it’s small and pointy, and came with landing gears. The Enterprise is too big. You only get to “hot drop” that saucer section once. (Galaxy class only. Any other saucer sep is apocryphal.)
I hate that Rogue One had Star Destroyers hovering in atmosphere. That’s just dumb, and destroyed the lore about Victory versus Imperial class Star Destroyers.
I loved Rogue One for all the EU hardware they used. And the new TIEs they introduced were cool, too, the TIE Striker is the new canon version of the Scimitar in my head. If they had parked a VSD over the city so, that would have been the crown!