Star Trek
[[um. Hi! I'm not dead. Not even a little bit! I'm mostly on Tumblr these days, and AO3]]
Aside from some odd bouts of "dude, gravity does not work like that," "...this is a spaceship, build to withstand pressure from the INSIDE, not OUTSIDE," "guys, in space if you can see the nearest flying object you are, oh, 5,000 klicks too close" and last but not least "levelling large inhabited areas gets old pretty fast" I really liked this movie. I thought it made more sense than the first one, and was altogether awesome. :D Benedict Cumberbatch was fantastic, I could listen to him for hours. Especially with the evil plots and such.
That being said, can we talk about how Jim Kirk shouldn't be in charge of a vessel bigger than a dinghy, and even then only when a more competent person is indisposed?
I cannot stress how much I loved that he got called out on his bullshit and hard in the first fifteen minutes. In the previous movie we had him deliberately antagonise the ship's acting captain, who just went through a serious trauma, but was a) visibly holding it together, b) making all the right, sensible, protocol-mandated calls, in order to take over and deliver an ass-kicking. He succeeded, by an extraordinary bout of luck, winning everybody over, parade, captaincy for him!
Except no, not really. Starfleet might not be military strictly speaking, but it is a regulated organisation and they have the regulations for a very good reason. They get into combat situations often enough, to treat them as a paramilitary organisation, and even if they weren't, the position of captain demands rigid adherence to certain rules. Such as: the captain stays on board at all times. Failing that, his first officer must be fit for duty and present. Whereas the new movie gives us Kirk not only sending his first officer into an active volcano - and let me point out that Kirk endangered the lives of however many crew-members to get him out - but sending his chief of communications and head pilot alongside with him, while the captain and the chief medical officer go and engage armed natives, then he lies about it in his report.
All in all, I thought it was an extremely poor idea on the starfleet's part to reinstate him when they did. Kirk is too young, too hot-headed to be a captain yet, possibly ever. He may not have caused the crisis himself, but in both movies his actions exacerbate it, and he gets lauded for fixing it, which is something I really don't like. I mean kudos, if you can clean up the mess you caused, good for you, but it doesn't change the fact that it was your fault in the first place.
Aside from some odd bouts of "dude, gravity does not work like that," "...this is a spaceship, build to withstand pressure from the INSIDE, not OUTSIDE," "guys, in space if you can see the nearest flying object you are, oh, 5,000 klicks too close" and last but not least "levelling large inhabited areas gets old pretty fast" I really liked this movie. I thought it made more sense than the first one, and was altogether awesome. :D Benedict Cumberbatch was fantastic, I could listen to him for hours. Especially with the evil plots and such.
That being said, can we talk about how Jim Kirk shouldn't be in charge of a vessel bigger than a dinghy, and even then only when a more competent person is indisposed?
I cannot stress how much I loved that he got called out on his bullshit and hard in the first fifteen minutes. In the previous movie we had him deliberately antagonise the ship's acting captain, who just went through a serious trauma, but was a) visibly holding it together, b) making all the right, sensible, protocol-mandated calls, in order to take over and deliver an ass-kicking. He succeeded, by an extraordinary bout of luck, winning everybody over, parade, captaincy for him!
Except no, not really. Starfleet might not be military strictly speaking, but it is a regulated organisation and they have the regulations for a very good reason. They get into combat situations often enough, to treat them as a paramilitary organisation, and even if they weren't, the position of captain demands rigid adherence to certain rules. Such as: the captain stays on board at all times. Failing that, his first officer must be fit for duty and present. Whereas the new movie gives us Kirk not only sending his first officer into an active volcano - and let me point out that Kirk endangered the lives of however many crew-members to get him out - but sending his chief of communications and head pilot alongside with him, while the captain and the chief medical officer go and engage armed natives, then he lies about it in his report.
All in all, I thought it was an extremely poor idea on the starfleet's part to reinstate him when they did. Kirk is too young, too hot-headed to be a captain yet, possibly ever. He may not have caused the crisis himself, but in both movies his actions exacerbate it, and he gets lauded for fixing it, which is something I really don't like. I mean kudos, if you can clean up the mess you caused, good for you, but it doesn't change the fact that it was your fault in the first place.