I thought it was good - but as a whole I feel the new movies kind of leave behind the "old" Star Trek themes in favor of vivid action scenes (not opposed to that, they just feel very different). I suppose that's part of the "broaden the audience" thing. It works, but as a fan of both the old and new stuff I can say you have to take them both as what they were supposed to be, and to not compare them to each other.
In particular I kind of thought it odd that the one death scene in particular was almost verbatim to its cousin from a previous film... Whether it was supposed to pay homage to the earlier film or demonstrate the characters' similarities to their "alternate reality" selves, I have no idea.