SilverWook said:
Mavimao said:
I don't get all of the love for JJ Abrams - I think he's a decent TV director and producer, but I feel like I'm living in some weird parallel world when people praise his Star Trek reboot. I didn't mind the concept, but the execution was atrotious and totally went against the whole mythos of star trek. The smug kirk eating the apple during the kobiashi maru, him driving a car over a cliff, Spock and Uhura... WTF? It was pretty and exciting but dumb - a play told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
It was about seeing Kirk and company on the start of the path that makes them who they are when we saw them in the series. Maturity comes with life experience. That "smugness" and the willingness to take risk have always been part of Kirk, tempered by the responsibility of command.
Uhura flirted with Spock (to no avail) in "The Man Trap". Those scenes were cut out of syndication prints for decades.
OK, I understand what you are saying about Kirk having some smugness about him and the willingness to take risks. I just feel like JJ Abrams just took it a little too far. The way they describe Kirk in Wrath of Kahn beating the Kobayashi Maru, it sounds like his "cheating" was creative and was acknowledged by his superiors as being clever. In ST09, he's just eating his apple, not even taking the situation seriously, and even making shooting gun gestures with his hand. Plus the modifications seemed so blown out of proportion and in your face, ie: this has obviously been tampered with. The lights go out, the klingons' shields magically go down, etc.
I feel like this scene doesn't so much show Kirk's rejection of the "no-win" scenario, but rather, feels like a 14 year old gamer, moding his copy of Unreal Tournament so he can make one shot kills and pissing off everyone instead of people thinking he's discovered something creative.
Does it show a young Kirk beating the Kobayashi Maru and feeling smug about it? Yes. Does it do it well? Not in my opinion.
Now onto Spock: as far as I've always understood, Vulcans were asexual except for Pon Farr every seven years. I know Spock is half-human, but he was still always depicted as a cold, logical person. This is a long cry from original trek where Bones was Kirk's heart and Spock was Kirk's brain and Kirk mediating between the both of them.