I vaguely remember Roddenberry & company deciding that just as there were no enlisted men astronauts, there were no enlisted men in Star Fleet. That seems pretty silly to me; somebody’s got to have KP duty at least. 
Yes, but KP isn’t an essential role. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, it seemed like many unskilled/non-essential functions were carried out by civilians, not Starfleet personnel. Mr. Mott the barber, Guinan the bartender, etc. These people seemed to carry out at least some of the functions enlisted people would in a military, but they weren’t in the chain of command, and SOP was for them to be evacuated before a crisis if time permitted.
I don’t know where this comes from as there were clearly enlisted personnel in both the original series (Yeoman Rand), the films, and The Next Generation (Chief [Petty Officer] O’Brien). There was one episode of the later show in particular (“A Measure Of Man”) in which a character specifically explains himself as enlisted rather than having spent the four years to attend the Academy.
And it may be true that there are no enlisted personnel in the astronaut corps, but as NASA is not a military organization this is of no consequence. There are, in fact, astronauts with no military rank or commission, and since job titles (Mission Commander, Orbiter Pilot, Mission Specialist) are functional rather than command ranks, any military commission carried into the astronaut corps means essentially nothing.
As for the film, I found it kind of tedious in that it clearly felt obligated to both replicate the characters from the original series and films, give them a complete and needlessly explicit backstory, and simultaneously try to distance itself from the original story. In the end, it seemed just completely unnecessary, as if someone tried to merge Star Trek with Firefly. I thought it was a better movie when it was called Galaxy Quest, to the point that when the nameless crewmember shows up for the jump in a red suit, I turned to the friend next time me and said, “I bet his name is Guy.” Never mind the big tube-o-water that Scotty beams into which leads to a person-sized Salad Shooter. I wanted to yell out “What is this thing? I mean, it serves no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things …it makes no logical sense, why is it here?..This episode was badly written!”
This film deserves, nay, begs to be MST3K’d.
Stranger
Nitpick: Memory Alpha says Laurentian, not Lorengian. I had assumed it was Laurentian but saw your name for it, so I checked.
Amen. Then a re-dubbing in which it is not mentioned as a Star Trek movie, but as something both re-named AND re-imagined.
(seeing how many fans write fanfic)
Kids, there is only residually-negative points describing a movie as “rebooted.” This isn’t “The Sheik;” WAY too many, probably MOST, of us original Trekkies have outlived Rudolph Valentino. So yeah, relationships described before your parents were born should be expected to have survived, though your parents’ may not have. As for [del]trashy literature[/del] fanfic reborn, its canon is all that protects it from the shit written by your cousins and little sisters. Yeah, I’ve been there and I KNOW how crappy they were! Worse yet, tonight I found my daughter’s Harry Potter fanfic. Honest, would you prefer tripe written by JJ Abrams or utter shit written by my daughter?
First off, I liked the movie overall, but nitpicking minutia is fun.
I’d like some fanwankery of these, as I can’t see how “[del]a wizard[/del] time travelling Romulans did it” in these cases.
Why does Scotty have to work hard and push things to get the ship up to warp 4, to get from Vulcan’s system to Earth’s system? The NX01 from nearly a century earlier was capable of warp 5.
And speaking of warp, how the hell does the Kelvin manage to pull off having a single nacelle? Don’t you need at least two for warp?
I also wonder about all of Star Fleet having the Enterprise’s ensignia instead of various ensignias based on what ship/station/whatever they’re posted on, but unless it showed up on the Kelvin (and I can’t recall if they did or not) I guess that could’ve been caused by time travelling Romulans. Somehow. But it’s weird.
Likewise, shouldn’t Pike have gone from Captain to Commodore, not Admiral? I mean, I guess if time travelling Romulans can cause a guy to skip all the way from cadet to Captain in hours, it could also cause this jump, or even be the cause of the rank of Commodore going away earlier in the timeline, but it seems like an odd thing to be changed from temporal hyjinks.
Multitasking!
Anyway, there’s also a magic supernova and a magic black hole generator (evidently bought as surplus from Warner’s ACME division) so having abandoned any pretense of logic, the movie could really only be saved by excellent character drama.
Tragically, it wasn’t. There’s no dramatic tension if time itself is contriving to bring these characters together. If in addition to Vulcan, they’d killed off Chekov or Sulu… that would be gutsy and dramatic.
No. Many ships (most non-Fed, but at least one was Fed) are shown to have perfectly fine using one and three warp nacelles.
Fanwank: It’s easier and most efficient to “balance” the warp bubble with two precisely placed generators (nacelles), but it can still be done with an odd number. Doesn’t the Enterprise, in it’s various Marks, get shown operating on one nacelle when one gets damaged?
Particulary on a ship of hundreds. You need somebody to do the work on a ship and somehow I don’t see it getting done by a ship full of officers.
Let alone the logicalistical bottleneck of requiring all your people to do 4 years at the acamedy before they can staff a starship. Though maybe that explains why starfleet seems perpetually lacking in starships and the Enterprise is always “The only ship in the Quadrent”. It turns out there’s only twelve ships in the whole fleet because they don’t have the manpower to staff anymore then that with just the officer corps.
Vulcans live much longer than humans in traditional Trek lore. There is no reason that Spock isn’t in his 40s or 50s. Commode Door is ancient talk for a Rear Admiral, or President of a Yacht Club. It doesn’t exist anymore as a naval rank.
Only it exists in TOS-era Trek. Pike was a commodore; there were at least two others. I think in TOS, Commodores were officers in command of starbases to whom captains in a given sector directly reported. You’ll note that Kirk is clearly not in charge at Spock’s court-martial.
I got beat up over the term on the board some while ago. Commodore was of course a Captain in temporary command of a force of ships in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. If I understand correctly, the US Navy used it for a rank more or less equal to Rear Admiral during the Second World War.
Well, the warp system was changed dramatically between the original series and Next Generation, so it’s conceivable it changed between Enterprise and the movie. There’s a good 10 years before they have to be able to hit that warp 15 they do in TOS.
Alternatively, Enterprise’s warp engines weren’t entirely complete, since it was brand new. And Scotty really wasn’t that good yet. He’s more of a bumbling genius type. I mean, he was sure that Admiral Archer’s dog would be fine…
I don’t think it odd that Pike got that promotion to Admiral, his choice of Kirk as a first officer, and the orders he gave that Kirk followed saved Earth. Even the space jump almost saved Vulcan.
BTW, I really liked Sulu’s sword.
It was interesting what changed because this is 2009, and not 1967. Uhura was show as being more than a glorified telephone operator. They made it clear in the movie that she was the best of the best in a difficult specialty essential on a starship. She got to say more than “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.”
The whole thing with Kirk entangling himself with Sulu as they fell, I don’t think that could have worked even 20 years ago. It would have been too “gay” that it would have taken people out of the scene. I can just hear the jeers, “Oooh they’re hugging! Kissy Kissy!” It made perfect sense in the movie, and the characters were not distracted or apologetic about it.
I also don’t think it odd that Pike made Kirk first officer. He knew Kirk’s record. He said in that bar he thought that Kirk would bring back something missing in current Star Fleet officers. We have seen a tendency toward a Star Fleet square personality for officers before, it has been a recurring theme. I imagine that record that Pike saw revealed not just a history of offenses, but of creative mischief. I would be willing to bet that for at least a few of his offenses the reason that he did not end up in prison, is that they did not have laws against exactly what he did and some good came out of it anyway. This really seems to be a no win situation, who else do you put in the chain of command? Someone who wins no win situations. In much of TOS, Kirk is amused, and creative, and we saw this in this movie too. He seemed to be having a good time even though the galaxy is in peril.
Spock is not well with his planet being destroyed before his eyes and his mother dying. If he had been as in charge of himself, as he usually was, it is reasonable to have him in command, and with Kirk as First Officer to prod him out of the box, He might have lead them to overcome Nero. This Spock seems to somehow have become much better commanding people than the one who had such a hard time leading his crew in Galileo Seven, but the emotional fog he is in lead him to retreat to logic and what is expected, and to start Enterprise toward meeting with the other starships, which would have let Nero destroy Earth.
P.S. Does anyone here not think he was banging Uhura?
With the sword and the brightly colored suit, anyone else think “Power Ranger”? 