Saw Star Trek

[fabrisse]

I never thought of myself as a hardcore Trekker. No, seriously, I got into it when I was about twelve, and, along with Sammy Davis, Jr., Kirk was one of the first people that made me understand sex. Not the mechanics, that embarrassed me until I was in my late teens, what those two men taught me was that adults got up to something that was hardcore fun and very physical and melty and might not have anything to do with romance.

(My romantic crushes were Donny Osmond and Gene Kelly, for the record, and they started around the same time -- well, a little later than Sammy Davis, Jr. Him, I got confused about when I was seven.)

I mostly liked the movie. Hated the texturizing of the velour in the costumes. It made it look cheap and nasty compared to the originals. Admittedly, the originals probably were cheap and nasty, but they filmed as if they were lush and tactile.

My love for the film would be unbounded if not for two things:
Chekhov was way too young, though I loved his geeky confidence.
Kirk's Kobayashi Maru cheat.

Now, I read the Kobayashi Maru tie-in book many years ago. Kirk cheated because he needed to beat the exam. I have no issue with that: well, other than my issues about cheating in general. What bothered me was the way this Kirk cheated.

In the book Kobayashi Maru, Kirk programs the computer to have the first Klingon commander recognize his name. When he's called up for the incident, Kirk points out that the size of the ship the cadets are supposed to be commanding would mean the enemy would know its commander. Just as we knew the major naval commanders on the Soviet side during the Cold War, they would know our senior staff. By recognizing the name, the Klingon commander agreed to allow Kirk's ship to rescue the survivors. Upon departing, Kirk fired on Kobayashi Maru to make certain the Klingons didn't get the tech, but no other shots were fired. It was truly a win. If I remember correctly, the other three Klingons decloaking were added to the simulation afterward, so that the Kirk work around could never be effective again.

Here, Kirk initiates a subroutine that changes all the parameters including the Klingon shields. And he fires on an enemy that can't, as best we can tell from the information given, fire back. It's a little piece of nastiness that truly bothers me.

It's not that I don't think Kirk is capable of being vindictive, but one of the things I liked about the original series was Kirk's line in one episode about choices "I choose not to kill today." Shatner's histrionics always made me aware of the fact that Kirk was constantly making choices and that his decisions changed on the fly. He constantly assessed situations and listened to his intuition. His inner Spock and McCoy synthesized well, but he needed the external versions to remind him of his reasons for being in space.

I loved all the little call backs and shout outs in the movie, not just to the original series, but to the movies (Scotty being given his future equation mirroring Scotty giving a contemporary company the formula for high strength clear aluminum in The Voyage Home), the later series (Archer's Beagle being referenced. I had to go to the bathroom so I didn't stay through the end of the credits as I usually do, did that pay off?), fanon and tie-in books (Uhura's first name had been fanon for awhile when Kagan made canon in Uhura's Song).

I loved it.