Enterprise travels back in time to screw up history – again

BBC NEWS => Star Trek film names Kirk actor

Well, they’ve finally named the actor to play Captain Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek: The Wonder Years movie.

  • Captain Kirk – Chris Pine
  • Older Mr Spock – Leonard Nimoy
  • Young Mr Spock – Zachary Quinto
  • Scotty – Simon Pegg
  • Nero – Eric Bana
  • Uhura – Zoe Saldana
  • Chekov – Anton Yelchin
  • Sulu – John Cho
  • Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy – Karl Urban

I really have strong misgivings about this concept. (That concept being “The movie will show the crew meeting at the Starfleet Academy and embarking on their first mission.”)

I have no problem with recasting the show with new actors. They’re just actors, after all, they aren’t actually the characters themselves. (Somewhere a get-a-lifer just committed suicide.) How many times has the Saint been recast? Or 007? Or Charlie Chan? Or Robin Hood? Or Hamlet for that matter? The play’s the thing, not the actors. Not that actors don’t make their own contributions, they do, but it is largely a phenomena of the “television character” that has created this perception that the actor and the role are inseparable.

What does bother me is why bother making this an “origins” story? Why not just recast and set the movie during the run of the original 5 year mission? By setting this at a specific time, they screw up continuity.

Why is Chekov here? Chekov was obviously fresh out of the academy later in the series. It’s like redoing Doctor Who to say that the Doctor and Romana both left Gallifrey together at the same time. They don’t need Chekov here. The cast of the show was unwieldily large to begin with. Why not just jettison an unnecessary character with the perfectly sound justification that he wouldn’t have been there at all. They actually have to go out of their way to bring him into the movie.

Second, do you really think that Kirk and all his junior officers were at the academy together. That’s not the way it works. Yes, some people get promoted faster than others, as presumably Kirk was, but generally, the lower ranking officers are younger officers also.

It’s doubtful that McCoy would have ever been at the academy at all. Star Fleet might be different, but military academies are rarely medical schools, and, he wasn’t even the ship’s doctor in the first episode.

Spock, of course, was already serving aboard the Enterprise before Kirk took command, and, based on the longevity of Vulcans and the length of time quoted between the events of Talos IV (Spock served under Pike for 11 years, the events of Talos IV occurred 13 years prior to the first season of Trek) and Obsession, in which Kirk’s first posting after leaving the academy was 11 years prior to the second season of Trek, would indicate that Spock was likely already aboard the Enterprise before Kirk left the academy.

No, the established history of Trek – not that the current producers really give a rat’s ass about continuity, nor ever have – precludes this premise from the start.

Simon Pegg as Mr. Scott? I’m really not sure about that casting. Couldn’t they have gotten Gary Oldman?

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