Adventures of a Canonista; also known as "I watched ST Nemesis so you don't have to."
I'm about a third of the way into my post about Spock, and there is just so much information to compile. Hopefully I'll have it up tomorrow, but in the meantime, my "people are wrong on the INTERNETS" rage is sufficiently peaked to address something I'd planned to talk about after the backstory resources were done. Namely: authorial intent with regards to Star Trek XI, and the problematic necessity of a Director's Cut.
[Administrivia note: these posts are available crossposted at templemarker and
templemarker; you are welcome to add these journals if you want. It's solely for public fandom things. Nothing will be locked.]
Thar be spoilers under this cut.
Adam Roberts over at Punkadiddle did a critical review of XI that lead me down this road.
The problem is that Star Fleet is so toolish: so completely, dysfunctionally unbelievable as an organisation. Kirk is a cadet and an arsehole, who is under suspension. Nevertheless, Pike promotes him to First Officer on the strength of (a) I admired your father and (b) I liked the way you burst into the bridge and yelled at me that we needed to raise shields and ready phasers. When Spock takes charge and Kirk argues with him Spock ejects him from the ship (because the Enterprise lacks a brig? Because the brig isn't fitted out with a huge scarlet hairless icebeast? Who knows). When Kirk gets back on board, he goads Spock into attacking him and then seizes the captain’s chair. This is presented as a necessary and saving action, but it all speaks to an organization in its death throes. Hiring Some Guy You Met Along the Way as chief engineer (in effect: ‘you’re real smart about engines and shit … you do the job’) is part and parcel of this dysfunction. The Enterprise, as a group of individuals functioning together to crew a space ship, is-in this film, and for the first time in the Trek franchise-Not Fit For Purpose. It's a wholly unprofessional bunch of people squabbling and vying. It's dysfunctional.
I'm not really sure where to start my disagreement with this point of view, but perhaps we'll go with the shallowest of counter-arguments: what we see on-screen. First of all, of the many things Starfleet appears to be, dysfunctional as an organization can hardly be counted as one of them. The cadets, unquestioningly, mobilize as activated officers even though it's CLEAR that nearly all of them are far shy of being commissioned as officers. They take their assignments in regimented uniformity, board shuttles that leave in a clear pattern, fly to their (unknown) deaths in clear arrangement. While they could not know the situation they would come into, there was no bucking of authority or questioning of their mission from any member of Starfleet, top to bottom. Even Kirk is resigned to his suspension; it's McCoy who resets the game.
Further to the on-screen drama, Pike makes a decision to confront Nero--exactly like Robau before him--without a second's hesitation, and Kirk's promotion is acceptable when you take into account, as Pike must have, that five-sixths of the cadets who had been mobilized shortly before are now dead, or at least limping out of 40 Eridani A in emergency shuttlecraft and escape pods. In the context of that ship, there literally is no one else, and since Pike subsequently sends Kirk out on a mission pretty fucking likely to get his yellow-suited ass killed, you can't tell me that Pike was expressing favoritism in doling out that role. Pike, showing exactly why he was a fucking awesome captain in TOS, assessed the situation, made battlefield decisions, and reinforced the integrity of the crew and the ship by maintaining as much red-alert business as usual in an attempt to get the USS Enterprise out of a situation where they are clearly outmatched.
Spock's response to Kirk's attempt to reinforce the gravity of the situation--"Hey look, they can blow up Earth too!"--is a reiteration of the very emotions he is trying desperately to control. Your mom died and your planet just ate itself--can you really expect Spock to maintain his clearly already tenuous cool with someone as disliked and provocative as Kirk is to him? And Kirk's attempt to elicit an emotional response is a charge from Spock Prime himself; who, in a situation categorized by the successes of its past (TOS), points these youthful mirrors of his own life down a path that has clearly worked in the past. Whether that is right or wrong, who the fuck knows? But it worked: Kirk takes command, Spock regains that control he obviously needs, they blow up the Narada and save Pike and manage to get out relatively unscathed.
(I have no explanation for the Scotty bit, though. Too much deus ex machina there, but whatever, it's Simon Pegg.)
Claims that Starfleet is "dysfunctional" and an organization "in its death throes" fails to take into account the liabilities and decision-making that happens from the ONLY COMMAND ON THE SCENE (PIKE) in a battlefield scenario against a far greater enemy. We have an extremely narrow focus on what is occurring--narrower even than many episodes of TOS, where they at least had direct contact with Starfleet Command frequently enough--in a relatively short period of time.
From a meta perspective, turning a group of cadets into a cohesive command unit implies both a deep adherence to the rules and regs of Starfleet while also recognizing that it takes some time--or a traumatic situation--to truly bind these people together successfully. When we visit the Enterprise in TOS, her crew is already well into the five-year mission. They have had time to get to know each other, work together, and over the next three years we see them come together to reach great heights. Trek XI has no such benefits, and indeed has stripped that development time away in order to provide a different scenario, with similar results. The cadets, too, are significantly younger than their TOS counterparts, thrust into a situation that has killed so many of their peers, fighting an enemy they don't truly understand and could never take out in a straight fight.
Roberts' further point is that Trek XI does not deal effectively with the grander consequences of its plot, i.e. the loss of Vulcan in the AOS timeline and the loss of Romulus (and Remus!) in the original timeline; this is true, but I would argue that he is missing the point if he expected it to. Star Trek's universal dramatic points have always been dealt with personally: V'ger's destructive search for the Creator is resolved through the osmosis of Ilia and Decker; the force and fury of the Genesis planet is not expressed in the damage such a weapon could have on the Milky Way Galaxy, but in the loss of David Marcus and the rebirth of Spock; the final showdown of Starfleet and the Borg is not expressed in the pitched battle of the defensive line surrounding Earth versus the Borg Cube, but in Picard's insistence, even to his own death, that the line be drawn at that moment and no further, reiterated by Data's "betrayal" of the Borg Queen. To claim that Trek XI does no justice to the massive scale of damage it causes is to merely articulate an issue present in every single Star Trek film, making XI more consonant with its precedent, not less.
That review at Punkadiddle lead me to this equally thinky (ragefully so) critical response to Star Trek XI over at Asking the Wrong Questions. There is a lot I could respond to there, and mostly I won't because it's clear that we were watching the film from two entirely different (and likely irreconcilable) points of view; but this in particular sticks out because it's a thought I've seen in many places:
My Kirk was first and foremost the one from the movies. The one who got old and fat, who paid the wages of his youthful womanizing with a son who wanted nothing to do with him, and of his meteoric career with an admiralty he loathed. This Kirk was shocked, simply flabbergasted, at no longer being that brash young man who could do no wrong, but in a way he never stopped being that person. Even dying he was full of wonder and a sense of adventure...Abrams's Kirk is the kind of guy who won't stop trying to chat up a girl even after she's made it clear she's not interested, and who doesn't even have the decency to pretend that he's not interested in his officer's girlfriend. He's the guy who doesn't just tweak the parameters of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but who sits through it, smirking like a kid who's figured out how to enable God mode on Halo 2, until it hands him his victory (and who, in keeping with the film's recurring theme of dumbness, expects to get away with this blatant cheat). Most of all, he's the guy who publicly humiliates a man by goading him with the memory of his recently murdered mother, so that he can strip him of his command. Kirk's character doesn't have a journey in the film. It's the rest of the world that has to journey from thinking him a screw-up to accepting his right go command, and the film validates his dickish behavior through the reaction of the crew and later Spock, who accept Kirk's superior claim to the captain's chair, through his promotion at the end of the film, and most of all through old Spock, who urges Kirk to bully his younger self so that they can take the roles God intended for them as alpha and beta males. Because heaven forbid the brainy, level-headed guy should be captain and the gutsy thrill-seeker should be the XO, even though that arrangement actually makes a lot more sense, and worked pretty well in seven seasons of The Next Generation, the first couple of years of Deep Space Nine, and the first half of this very movie.
There is only one response to this, and I'm afraid it is in allcaps: YOU ARE OFFICIALLY MISSING THE POINT. The Kirk from the movies, whom I unabashedly love for all the reasons Nussbaum articulates, was a COMPLETE TOOL AS WELL. Especially as a child, from all accounts. She says at some point in the comments to the post that TOS was not the Star Trek she enjoyed, and the love of the Kirk from the movies really reinforces the disconnect and clear lack of knowledge of the character Shatner portrayed in the series. Kirk in TOS was a terrible captain compared to Picard, Sisko, or Janeway; he was reckless, curious to the point of danger, oversexualized and lazy with the power of his captaincy. That is a given. It's also why he was such an attractive character in the sixties, and indeed for all those faults I love him as much for the clear love written in every aspect of his life in TOS.
We never see Kirk in the given media at the age we see Kirk in this film. The Kirk in XI goes into the Academy years after the Kirk in TOS does. It's clear that his father had an enormous impact on Kirk Prime's choices, which can be established even without reaching to wonderful quasi-canon resources like "Best Destiny." There is no reason to think that Kirk Prime wasn't the enormous douche AOS Kirk is for so much of the early parts of this film. He's a decade younger than his Prime counterpart, and it's clear from the context of the XI movie that no one has taken him seriously his entire life. Just drawing on the existing media, one doesn't even have to speculate that the absence of Kirk's father had a profound affect on his life compared to the presence of George Kirk in Kirk Prime's life. It's articulated in the film itself. Events occurred in Kirk Prime's life that changed the course of his life, steering him into Starfleet, refining him into the not so clearly broken Kirk we see in TOS. Those same events did not occur in the alternate timeline, and so why is it so galling to see the Kirk character be a tool? It's not like that isn't the basic characterization of Kirk in any other universe, from the original timeline to the Mirror universe.
Aside from that, TNG is set nearly a century after the Kirk-led crew, and the shotgun diplomacy that characterized the pioneer nature of exploratory vessels is clearly not applicable for the highly-established Federation that Starfleet is involved in during Picard's captaincy, so the comparison fails contextually.
Before I get into the actual point of this post, which I promise is not just angervated flail with excessive capslock, I want to mention that John Rogers aptly responds (unintentionally, perhaps) to one of Nussbaum's points at his blog Kung Fu Monkey. Namely that there is no journey for Kirk's character in Trek XI, to which Rogers and I both say (again): you're missing the point!
Captain James T. Kirk, the protagonist of the movie, does not have the development executive's beloved "character arc." He has no arc at all. He starts as an arrogant sonovabitch, and becomes a slightly more motivated arrogant sonovabitch. He does not learn to sacrifice, he does not learn to work well with others -- he takes over the goddam ship. He's right all the time, he never doubts he's right, and the only obstacle he occasionally faces is when other people aren't sharp enough to see how frikkin' awesome -- and right -- he is as quickly as they should...A revelatory arc is one in which the story of the movie is revealing how the hero (and the virtues he represents, which you the writer wish to highlight) is exactly the right person to solve the movie's problem. It's more an echo of the old school morality play. "Behold how misfortune comes unto the world. Now see what kind of man may set it right!" The protagonist of this sort of movie triumphs by holding on to whatever virtues he has, and often by becoming even more confident in them.
INDEED, MR ROGERS. (Oh, how I've been waiting to use that line.) Kirk is promoted to first officer by Pike, because he is the best man for the job, no questions. Kirk goads Spock into relieving his command on the authority of Spock Prime, because he is the best (and only) man to get them out of the situation, save Earth, and destroy the Narada. Ballsy? Absofuckinglutely. Spock Prime has an UNQUESTIONING faith that Kirk, as young and untried as he is in this altered reality, is capable of accomplishing these tasks, and lo, Kirk does.
Kirk becomes the youngest captain in the 'Fleet? Fucking right he does--the bastard not only earned it, but Starfleet is suddenly short a few thousand promotable officers.
Now, I'm all about writing a nuanced and emotionally resonant story about Kirk stepping into his role, being uncertain about his command now that he finally has it, blah blah dramacakes; but that is so far from being the point of this film. Star Trek XI is telling you a story about how, after the intervention of these somewhat generic Bad Guys, Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise even when circumstances prohibit it. He is always the best man for the job: we know it, Spock Prime knows it, Chris Pike has an inkling of it.
Go read the rest of that post and the comments; I promise it's worth it. But now, my actual point, if you can believe it.
Here's a couple points of reference for you that I'll probably link to again in my eventual meta about the differences in TOS versus AOS.
TrekMovie.com's Q&A with Orci and Kurtzman
Cinematic Screenwriting's Q&A with Orci and Kurtzman (It is so worth downloading this podcast; I've listened to it a couple times now, and it's fantastic.)
Press Conference with JJ Abrams, Orci, Kurtzman, and Bryan Burk (right-click save target as)
Star Trek Writers Reveal Never Filmed Shatner Scene (Orci and Kurtzman describe the scene where they considered bringing Shanter back in. Damn shame this wasn't filmed.)
There's also blairprovence's straightforward ST XI novelization recap, which helps to give some background information as well.
So my real point here is this: the above two reviews that I have such a problem with are actually somewhat fair, from the point of view of a watcher who is either a casual Trek fan, a brand spanking new Trek fan, or a person who's only caught the film once and thought it was okay.
The reviews are completely untenable for, well, me. Canonista Star Trek nerd 100%. The fan that saw Nemesis in the theater even though I knew it was going to be bad. The fan that will effortlessly debate those three Romulan dialects and their relationship to the caste system of Romulan culture while drinking raktajino at the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas. And that is, I suppose, a problem, because I've been scouring podcasts and interviews and Memory Alpha and Memory Beta for the last couple weeks, compiling this worldview of Star Trek XI in comparison with the timeline that came before; and it will have exactly *no* meaning for the majority of the watchers of this film; the watchers I mentioned above.
To wit: if an understanding of canon is of significant important to truly grasp the concepts and worldview of Star Trek XI, and a fair amount of that canon is established in non-canon realms, such as interviews the like, how relevant is it to the final product of the work, namely Star Trek XI?
A good example is the character of Stepfather Frank, and Runaway Johnny. I think it's been fairly propagated through online fandom and Those Other Places on the internet I tend to avoid out of general discomfort that the reason Jim was stealing the car in that early scene was because it belonged to George Sr, and while Winona was off-planet Frank decided to sell it; so Jim, in pre-pubescent rage, steals the car and destroys it and nearly himself in an act of defiance against this poor substitute for his hero father and in self-immolating grief over the life he can't have because George Sr is dead. And the boy Jim passes was initially written as George Jr, pictured as running away while his mother is off-planet and Frank is presumably unlikely to chase him down.
But--that was contextually removed from the film, to arguably make it more accessible to the casual viewer; and the emotional impact of the scene is still present, even enhanced for the canon-hunters who are watching it in full knowledge of the writers' intent. Yet without that knowledge, I can see where the above reviewers can come to their conclusion; and still I think they are wrong, because that piece of canon knowledge is crucial to understanding Jim Kirk's motivations, especially if you intend to analyze them.
This is all well and good meta, and if I had any intention of creating a blog at Blogger, posting this, and leaving pissy comments in those folks' blogs, it would be enough. But at the end of the day I don't really care what Random Blogger Person says (especially when they're wrong!); I care about this fandom that has dominated the last decade and a half of my life.
To reframe the argument: is knowledge of that aspect of AOS Kirk's childhood necessary to write about Kirk's childhood, given the information we see on the screen? Is knowledge of what Jim Kirk experienced in "Best Destiny" important? Of what happened to the Kirk family on Tarsus IV in "The Conscience of the King" (TOS episode)?
God, everything in me wants to say YES.
But I'm not convinced its true.
I think you better understand the source material with Orci and Kurtzman's motivations articulated in non-canon sources. I think the differences in the novelization versus the film should be incorporated into the fandom understanding of AOS Kirk. And trying desperately not to be all "get offa my lawn!" at the influx of newly-come Trek fans, who are responsible for the revitalization of this fandom I love so dearly, I do think that if you want to tell a story about Kirk's life, you need to watch a couple episodes of TOS.
The struggle between the film made for a mainstream audience and the Director's Cut is something even more relevant to me right now because I'm listening to the audio commentary from the producers of the remastered version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which is fascinating on approximately eighty billion levels; but what stands out is that Robert Wise, the original director, had never been happy with the cut of the theatrical release in 1979, and felt that the film only realized his actual vision in the Director's Cut made for the 20th anniversary of the film. I can't help but think that may be true for Trek XI when it's released on DVD, hopefully with the missing scenes cut back in.
My point, I suppose, is that I want this fandom to be accessible for people who have found the Trek love in the new cast. And that's fine! There's four and a half decades of canon to sift through, some of it apocryphal, some of it fanon, some of it filmed in a Desilu soundstage. But I do think there is more to understanding Star Trek and its characters than just Trek XI and what happened in those 126 minutes. There's a lot more going on, and it's so damn interesting.
If you skipped (or made it to the end!) of my pontificating, here's your reward: Wired Magazine's fantastic TOS retrospective pictures, compared side by side with screenshots from the new film. Ace.
Also of interest: Bad Astronomy's science review of Trek XI, which is particularly interesting if you take into account the science Orci & Kurtzman describe as being the basis for Star Trek XI.
As well as the Shuttle Atlantis wake up call last month (right click save target as). NASA at Houston woke up the crew with the original TOS theme song, and the whole exchange just made me laugh in delight.
Oh god, now that I got all that out of my brain, I have to get some sleep.
[Administrivia note: these posts are available crossposted at templemarker and
templemarker; you are welcome to add these journals if you want. It's solely for public fandom things. Nothing will be locked.]
Thar be spoilers under this cut.
Adam Roberts over at Punkadiddle did a critical review of XI that lead me down this road.
The problem is that Star Fleet is so toolish: so completely, dysfunctionally unbelievable as an organisation. Kirk is a cadet and an arsehole, who is under suspension. Nevertheless, Pike promotes him to First Officer on the strength of (a) I admired your father and (b) I liked the way you burst into the bridge and yelled at me that we needed to raise shields and ready phasers. When Spock takes charge and Kirk argues with him Spock ejects him from the ship (because the Enterprise lacks a brig? Because the brig isn't fitted out with a huge scarlet hairless icebeast? Who knows). When Kirk gets back on board, he goads Spock into attacking him and then seizes the captain’s chair. This is presented as a necessary and saving action, but it all speaks to an organization in its death throes. Hiring Some Guy You Met Along the Way as chief engineer (in effect: ‘you’re real smart about engines and shit … you do the job’) is part and parcel of this dysfunction. The Enterprise, as a group of individuals functioning together to crew a space ship, is-in this film, and for the first time in the Trek franchise-Not Fit For Purpose. It's a wholly unprofessional bunch of people squabbling and vying. It's dysfunctional.
I'm not really sure where to start my disagreement with this point of view, but perhaps we'll go with the shallowest of counter-arguments: what we see on-screen. First of all, of the many things Starfleet appears to be, dysfunctional as an organization can hardly be counted as one of them. The cadets, unquestioningly, mobilize as activated officers even though it's CLEAR that nearly all of them are far shy of being commissioned as officers. They take their assignments in regimented uniformity, board shuttles that leave in a clear pattern, fly to their (unknown) deaths in clear arrangement. While they could not know the situation they would come into, there was no bucking of authority or questioning of their mission from any member of Starfleet, top to bottom. Even Kirk is resigned to his suspension; it's McCoy who resets the game.
Further to the on-screen drama, Pike makes a decision to confront Nero--exactly like Robau before him--without a second's hesitation, and Kirk's promotion is acceptable when you take into account, as Pike must have, that five-sixths of the cadets who had been mobilized shortly before are now dead, or at least limping out of 40 Eridani A in emergency shuttlecraft and escape pods. In the context of that ship, there literally is no one else, and since Pike subsequently sends Kirk out on a mission pretty fucking likely to get his yellow-suited ass killed, you can't tell me that Pike was expressing favoritism in doling out that role. Pike, showing exactly why he was a fucking awesome captain in TOS, assessed the situation, made battlefield decisions, and reinforced the integrity of the crew and the ship by maintaining as much red-alert business as usual in an attempt to get the USS Enterprise out of a situation where they are clearly outmatched.
Spock's response to Kirk's attempt to reinforce the gravity of the situation--"Hey look, they can blow up Earth too!"--is a reiteration of the very emotions he is trying desperately to control. Your mom died and your planet just ate itself--can you really expect Spock to maintain his clearly already tenuous cool with someone as disliked and provocative as Kirk is to him? And Kirk's attempt to elicit an emotional response is a charge from Spock Prime himself; who, in a situation categorized by the successes of its past (TOS), points these youthful mirrors of his own life down a path that has clearly worked in the past. Whether that is right or wrong, who the fuck knows? But it worked: Kirk takes command, Spock regains that control he obviously needs, they blow up the Narada and save Pike and manage to get out relatively unscathed.
(I have no explanation for the Scotty bit, though. Too much deus ex machina there, but whatever, it's Simon Pegg.)
Claims that Starfleet is "dysfunctional" and an organization "in its death throes" fails to take into account the liabilities and decision-making that happens from the ONLY COMMAND ON THE SCENE (PIKE) in a battlefield scenario against a far greater enemy. We have an extremely narrow focus on what is occurring--narrower even than many episodes of TOS, where they at least had direct contact with Starfleet Command frequently enough--in a relatively short period of time.
From a meta perspective, turning a group of cadets into a cohesive command unit implies both a deep adherence to the rules and regs of Starfleet while also recognizing that it takes some time--or a traumatic situation--to truly bind these people together successfully. When we visit the Enterprise in TOS, her crew is already well into the five-year mission. They have had time to get to know each other, work together, and over the next three years we see them come together to reach great heights. Trek XI has no such benefits, and indeed has stripped that development time away in order to provide a different scenario, with similar results. The cadets, too, are significantly younger than their TOS counterparts, thrust into a situation that has killed so many of their peers, fighting an enemy they don't truly understand and could never take out in a straight fight.
Roberts' further point is that Trek XI does not deal effectively with the grander consequences of its plot, i.e. the loss of Vulcan in the AOS timeline and the loss of Romulus (and Remus!) in the original timeline; this is true, but I would argue that he is missing the point if he expected it to. Star Trek's universal dramatic points have always been dealt with personally: V'ger's destructive search for the Creator is resolved through the osmosis of Ilia and Decker; the force and fury of the Genesis planet is not expressed in the damage such a weapon could have on the Milky Way Galaxy, but in the loss of David Marcus and the rebirth of Spock; the final showdown of Starfleet and the Borg is not expressed in the pitched battle of the defensive line surrounding Earth versus the Borg Cube, but in Picard's insistence, even to his own death, that the line be drawn at that moment and no further, reiterated by Data's "betrayal" of the Borg Queen. To claim that Trek XI does no justice to the massive scale of damage it causes is to merely articulate an issue present in every single Star Trek film, making XI more consonant with its precedent, not less.
That review at Punkadiddle lead me to this equally thinky (ragefully so) critical response to Star Trek XI over at Asking the Wrong Questions. There is a lot I could respond to there, and mostly I won't because it's clear that we were watching the film from two entirely different (and likely irreconcilable) points of view; but this in particular sticks out because it's a thought I've seen in many places:
My Kirk was first and foremost the one from the movies. The one who got old and fat, who paid the wages of his youthful womanizing with a son who wanted nothing to do with him, and of his meteoric career with an admiralty he loathed. This Kirk was shocked, simply flabbergasted, at no longer being that brash young man who could do no wrong, but in a way he never stopped being that person. Even dying he was full of wonder and a sense of adventure...Abrams's Kirk is the kind of guy who won't stop trying to chat up a girl even after she's made it clear she's not interested, and who doesn't even have the decency to pretend that he's not interested in his officer's girlfriend. He's the guy who doesn't just tweak the parameters of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but who sits through it, smirking like a kid who's figured out how to enable God mode on Halo 2, until it hands him his victory (and who, in keeping with the film's recurring theme of dumbness, expects to get away with this blatant cheat). Most of all, he's the guy who publicly humiliates a man by goading him with the memory of his recently murdered mother, so that he can strip him of his command. Kirk's character doesn't have a journey in the film. It's the rest of the world that has to journey from thinking him a screw-up to accepting his right go command, and the film validates his dickish behavior through the reaction of the crew and later Spock, who accept Kirk's superior claim to the captain's chair, through his promotion at the end of the film, and most of all through old Spock, who urges Kirk to bully his younger self so that they can take the roles God intended for them as alpha and beta males. Because heaven forbid the brainy, level-headed guy should be captain and the gutsy thrill-seeker should be the XO, even though that arrangement actually makes a lot more sense, and worked pretty well in seven seasons of The Next Generation, the first couple of years of Deep Space Nine, and the first half of this very movie.
There is only one response to this, and I'm afraid it is in allcaps: YOU ARE OFFICIALLY MISSING THE POINT. The Kirk from the movies, whom I unabashedly love for all the reasons Nussbaum articulates, was a COMPLETE TOOL AS WELL. Especially as a child, from all accounts. She says at some point in the comments to the post that TOS was not the Star Trek she enjoyed, and the love of the Kirk from the movies really reinforces the disconnect and clear lack of knowledge of the character Shatner portrayed in the series. Kirk in TOS was a terrible captain compared to Picard, Sisko, or Janeway; he was reckless, curious to the point of danger, oversexualized and lazy with the power of his captaincy. That is a given. It's also why he was such an attractive character in the sixties, and indeed for all those faults I love him as much for the clear love written in every aspect of his life in TOS.
We never see Kirk in the given media at the age we see Kirk in this film. The Kirk in XI goes into the Academy years after the Kirk in TOS does. It's clear that his father had an enormous impact on Kirk Prime's choices, which can be established even without reaching to wonderful quasi-canon resources like "Best Destiny." There is no reason to think that Kirk Prime wasn't the enormous douche AOS Kirk is for so much of the early parts of this film. He's a decade younger than his Prime counterpart, and it's clear from the context of the XI movie that no one has taken him seriously his entire life. Just drawing on the existing media, one doesn't even have to speculate that the absence of Kirk's father had a profound affect on his life compared to the presence of George Kirk in Kirk Prime's life. It's articulated in the film itself. Events occurred in Kirk Prime's life that changed the course of his life, steering him into Starfleet, refining him into the not so clearly broken Kirk we see in TOS. Those same events did not occur in the alternate timeline, and so why is it so galling to see the Kirk character be a tool? It's not like that isn't the basic characterization of Kirk in any other universe, from the original timeline to the Mirror universe.
Aside from that, TNG is set nearly a century after the Kirk-led crew, and the shotgun diplomacy that characterized the pioneer nature of exploratory vessels is clearly not applicable for the highly-established Federation that Starfleet is involved in during Picard's captaincy, so the comparison fails contextually.
Before I get into the actual point of this post, which I promise is not just angervated flail with excessive capslock, I want to mention that John Rogers aptly responds (unintentionally, perhaps) to one of Nussbaum's points at his blog Kung Fu Monkey. Namely that there is no journey for Kirk's character in Trek XI, to which Rogers and I both say (again): you're missing the point!
Captain James T. Kirk, the protagonist of the movie, does not have the development executive's beloved "character arc." He has no arc at all. He starts as an arrogant sonovabitch, and becomes a slightly more motivated arrogant sonovabitch. He does not learn to sacrifice, he does not learn to work well with others -- he takes over the goddam ship. He's right all the time, he never doubts he's right, and the only obstacle he occasionally faces is when other people aren't sharp enough to see how frikkin' awesome -- and right -- he is as quickly as they should...A revelatory arc is one in which the story of the movie is revealing how the hero (and the virtues he represents, which you the writer wish to highlight) is exactly the right person to solve the movie's problem. It's more an echo of the old school morality play. "Behold how misfortune comes unto the world. Now see what kind of man may set it right!" The protagonist of this sort of movie triumphs by holding on to whatever virtues he has, and often by becoming even more confident in them.
INDEED, MR ROGERS. (Oh, how I've been waiting to use that line.) Kirk is promoted to first officer by Pike, because he is the best man for the job, no questions. Kirk goads Spock into relieving his command on the authority of Spock Prime, because he is the best (and only) man to get them out of the situation, save Earth, and destroy the Narada. Ballsy? Absofuckinglutely. Spock Prime has an UNQUESTIONING faith that Kirk, as young and untried as he is in this altered reality, is capable of accomplishing these tasks, and lo, Kirk does.
Kirk becomes the youngest captain in the 'Fleet? Fucking right he does--the bastard not only earned it, but Starfleet is suddenly short a few thousand promotable officers.
Now, I'm all about writing a nuanced and emotionally resonant story about Kirk stepping into his role, being uncertain about his command now that he finally has it, blah blah dramacakes; but that is so far from being the point of this film. Star Trek XI is telling you a story about how, after the intervention of these somewhat generic Bad Guys, Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise even when circumstances prohibit it. He is always the best man for the job: we know it, Spock Prime knows it, Chris Pike has an inkling of it.
Go read the rest of that post and the comments; I promise it's worth it. But now, my actual point, if you can believe it.
Here's a couple points of reference for you that I'll probably link to again in my eventual meta about the differences in TOS versus AOS.
TrekMovie.com's Q&A with Orci and Kurtzman
Cinematic Screenwriting's Q&A with Orci and Kurtzman (It is so worth downloading this podcast; I've listened to it a couple times now, and it's fantastic.)
Press Conference with JJ Abrams, Orci, Kurtzman, and Bryan Burk (right-click save target as)
Star Trek Writers Reveal Never Filmed Shatner Scene (Orci and Kurtzman describe the scene where they considered bringing Shanter back in. Damn shame this wasn't filmed.)
There's also blairprovence's straightforward ST XI novelization recap, which helps to give some background information as well.
So my real point here is this: the above two reviews that I have such a problem with are actually somewhat fair, from the point of view of a watcher who is either a casual Trek fan, a brand spanking new Trek fan, or a person who's only caught the film once and thought it was okay.
The reviews are completely untenable for, well, me. Canonista Star Trek nerd 100%. The fan that saw Nemesis in the theater even though I knew it was going to be bad. The fan that will effortlessly debate those three Romulan dialects and their relationship to the caste system of Romulan culture while drinking raktajino at the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas. And that is, I suppose, a problem, because I've been scouring podcasts and interviews and Memory Alpha and Memory Beta for the last couple weeks, compiling this worldview of Star Trek XI in comparison with the timeline that came before; and it will have exactly *no* meaning for the majority of the watchers of this film; the watchers I mentioned above.
To wit: if an understanding of canon is of significant important to truly grasp the concepts and worldview of Star Trek XI, and a fair amount of that canon is established in non-canon realms, such as interviews the like, how relevant is it to the final product of the work, namely Star Trek XI?
A good example is the character of Stepfather Frank, and Runaway Johnny. I think it's been fairly propagated through online fandom and Those Other Places on the internet I tend to avoid out of general discomfort that the reason Jim was stealing the car in that early scene was because it belonged to George Sr, and while Winona was off-planet Frank decided to sell it; so Jim, in pre-pubescent rage, steals the car and destroys it and nearly himself in an act of defiance against this poor substitute for his hero father and in self-immolating grief over the life he can't have because George Sr is dead. And the boy Jim passes was initially written as George Jr, pictured as running away while his mother is off-planet and Frank is presumably unlikely to chase him down.
But--that was contextually removed from the film, to arguably make it more accessible to the casual viewer; and the emotional impact of the scene is still present, even enhanced for the canon-hunters who are watching it in full knowledge of the writers' intent. Yet without that knowledge, I can see where the above reviewers can come to their conclusion; and still I think they are wrong, because that piece of canon knowledge is crucial to understanding Jim Kirk's motivations, especially if you intend to analyze them.
This is all well and good meta, and if I had any intention of creating a blog at Blogger, posting this, and leaving pissy comments in those folks' blogs, it would be enough. But at the end of the day I don't really care what Random Blogger Person says (especially when they're wrong!); I care about this fandom that has dominated the last decade and a half of my life.
To reframe the argument: is knowledge of that aspect of AOS Kirk's childhood necessary to write about Kirk's childhood, given the information we see on the screen? Is knowledge of what Jim Kirk experienced in "Best Destiny" important? Of what happened to the Kirk family on Tarsus IV in "The Conscience of the King" (TOS episode)?
God, everything in me wants to say YES.
But I'm not convinced its true.
I think you better understand the source material with Orci and Kurtzman's motivations articulated in non-canon sources. I think the differences in the novelization versus the film should be incorporated into the fandom understanding of AOS Kirk. And trying desperately not to be all "get offa my lawn!" at the influx of newly-come Trek fans, who are responsible for the revitalization of this fandom I love so dearly, I do think that if you want to tell a story about Kirk's life, you need to watch a couple episodes of TOS.
The struggle between the film made for a mainstream audience and the Director's Cut is something even more relevant to me right now because I'm listening to the audio commentary from the producers of the remastered version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which is fascinating on approximately eighty billion levels; but what stands out is that Robert Wise, the original director, had never been happy with the cut of the theatrical release in 1979, and felt that the film only realized his actual vision in the Director's Cut made for the 20th anniversary of the film. I can't help but think that may be true for Trek XI when it's released on DVD, hopefully with the missing scenes cut back in.
My point, I suppose, is that I want this fandom to be accessible for people who have found the Trek love in the new cast. And that's fine! There's four and a half decades of canon to sift through, some of it apocryphal, some of it fanon, some of it filmed in a Desilu soundstage. But I do think there is more to understanding Star Trek and its characters than just Trek XI and what happened in those 126 minutes. There's a lot more going on, and it's so damn interesting.
If you skipped (or made it to the end!) of my pontificating, here's your reward: Wired Magazine's fantastic TOS retrospective pictures, compared side by side with screenshots from the new film. Ace.
Also of interest: Bad Astronomy's science review of Trek XI, which is particularly interesting if you take into account the science Orci & Kurtzman describe as being the basis for Star Trek XI.
As well as the Shuttle Atlantis wake up call last month (right click save target as). NASA at Houston woke up the crew with the original TOS theme song, and the whole exchange just made me laugh in delight.
Oh god, now that I got all that out of my brain, I have to get some sleep.