The internet has your back on this one...

Yeah, in the LAH commentary when I said comedy isn't really McT's thing... that's exactly the moment I was thinking of.

However, there's just that and one or two other blatant fan service moments in the whole movie - the rest is solid.

The latest on McT and his prison sentence.  It's a pretty messed up situation all around.

So...

SPOILER Show

Khan designed the torpedoes that were secretly hiding his people to also blow up if anyone actually used them as torpedoes?    

That's yet another result of the way the story is sorta based on the original series and sorta not.   

In the original series...

The movie apparently assumes we know that story already, but also doesn't stick to it.  Hence, a mess.

Nice helmet...

I actually met a guy just last weekend who lives in Tasmania.   It was sort of surreal - like meeting someone from Narnia.  Or the moon.

Speaking of whom:

Damon Lindelof admits the Star Trek underwear scene was "gratuitous"

Now if we can just get him to admit the same about the rest of the movie...

The part of the equation you're skipping is that the water on Earth doesn't stay in one place - it's in a constant cycle of evaporation and precipitation.   Water evaporates everywhere, and air currents carry the water vapor to other parts of the planet.   Some of the vapor ends up at the poles, where it gets cold and falls as snow.

If global temps are above a certain level, that snow - plus a little extra - melts every summer.   So over time the ice caps shrink, and more liquid water is added to the global system.   That's the state we're in right now.   To be fair, this has been the state of the planet since the end of the last Ice Age - technically we're still IN the last stages of the last Ice Age.  The concept of "global warming" is really about the great acceleration of the warming process that we're seeing now.

Conversely, in a cooling trend the snow at the poles doesn't all melt in the summer.   So every year the poles trap a bit more of the planet's water and prevent it from returning to the sea.   Also, the colder the planet gets, the farther from the poles the "no-melt" zone gets too, and so the ice sheets grow outward as well as upward.   At the height of the last Ice Age, much of North America and Europe were covered in glaciers.   That adds up to a lot of water that isn't in the ocean anymore.

This is the natural process of the planet, it's ongoing every day.  When the overall temperature trends one direction or other, the world's ice/water ratio gradually shifts as well, over thousands of years.   The polar ice sheets have disappeared and re-formed at least five times in Earth's history.   

But nothing in AI suggests an explanation for the completely unnatural scenario of a frozen Earth with a high sea level.

I suspect it's ignorance on the part of the filmmakers, rather than some grand plan, in the case of both AI and Waterworld.   You're right that semi-flooded Manhattan is sorta plausible if the ice caps melted completely.    But "Waterworld" isn't - even with a total thaw there'd still be a lot of land left.

Welp, looks like ST:ID will fall well short of matching the opening weekend of the first one.  Not a bomb, but not exactly blockbuster-y either.  But it's making more than the first one in the rest of the world, so ultimately it shouldn't cause anyone to lose their job.

Data here (but don't click if you're still staying spoiler-free)  http://www.deadline.com/2013/05/star-tr … -and-imax/

Next weekend's results will really tell the tale, but even so, the "what went wrong?" post-mortems are already underway.  Overall this one's looking like a bit of a damp squib - it'll do okay in the end but it's not breaking any records or garnering a lot of raves.  If you actually look at the text of those "Fresh" Rotten Tomatoes reviews, they're mostly pretty lukewarm.

Still haven't seen it myself, btw.  Might later today.

Why does this keep coming back to the weapons?   That's not what the complaints were about.