Star Trek

Delete.

Don't other board members also feel that the Kirk character has to be right? As he is SO central to Star Trek if he deviates from accepted type the whole thing collapses. The original (Shatner) Kirk as envisaged by Roddenberry was more urbane and stolid following GR's desire to model him upon Horatio Hornblower. This version of Kirk is barely recognisable. The James Dean analogy holds true. It seems a standard approach by Hollywood these days that your heroes have to start mean and with a huge chip on their shoulders, alienating everybody, before finally proving themselves. That in itself is a totally hackneyed and stereotyped device ...

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And, the fact of the matter is, BECAUSE it's entertaining is why it is used so much.

I never understand Star Trek fans who value "realism" over entertainment. Star Trek is fiction, my friends. It is designed to entertain. Too many Trek fans get caught up in the "yeah, but could you actually LIVE there?" game when they are analyzing the realism and consistency of things.

Consider that before you just dismiss what you see on the surface.

BOO HISS!!! i cant believe they made that! at least make on different and new characters or on a cast young enough to do a movie! dont try to remake tos!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes, I wonder if the makers of the new Star Trek movie were thinking about the fictionality of the Star Trek universe. There is a way to "read" the movie as about its own production. The creators (and the readers/viewers) of a prequel automatically recreate or reimagine the fictional universe of that prequel's successors, just by engaging with the concept (a sequel actually works similarly). Now, the prequel can try to hide the fact that it is re-writing fictional history, as Enterprise does, or as the Star Wars prequels do. This kind of prequel (fictionally) represents a real world, elsewhere, the history of which is being reported out of order, not recreated. Star Trek 2009, by contrast, lays bare the device, by having Nero and Spock-prime re-write history within the story as Abrams and his collaborators re-write history through the story. The fictional time alterations mimic and metaphorize the real-world writing process.

If Star Trek 2009 is a movie about itself (and I admit, I might be stretching, to make the movie what I want it to be, as a viewer), then the quick, serendipitous assemblage of the Enterprise crew can be interpreted in a new way, not through the lenses of realism or improbability, but as a gesture to Trek continuity within the reimagination of Trek, an acknowledgement by the creators of this movie that the piece is a "reboot," but a "reboot" indebted to its roots.

There are so many gestures to continuity in Star Trek 2009 (despite the perception that the movie was made exclusively for non-Trekkies). The characters fall into their old roles. Quotes and situations from the old movies are repeated. All these continuity gestures are corny, as well as insufficient compensation for the changed time line, if we think of the Star Trek universe as a real place, or as a movie striving for realist representation. But viewed through another lens, these gestures reflect the movie's deliberate faithfulness to Trek, its commitment to the survival of the old within the new.