Becoming Kirk

WTF is the Sydney Morning Herald thinking? This is a terrible review of the new Star Trek movie.

The reviewer offers little actual analysis of the film. What does the film do? Instead he offers obvious opinion about what ‘they’ were trying to do. ‘They’ being the nameless people at Paramount or even ‘Hollywood’ like this:

I think the movie is titled this way because Paramount is trying to reinvent the franchise, just as the Bond series did with Casino Royale. It’s known as a reboot but it’s really a rebottling of old wine, one of Hollywood’s core businesses.

Clearly the reviewer, Paul Byrnes, has an over-appreciation for modernist aesthetics. Rebottled? Fail. The movie can stand alone as a science fiction film, it does not need the rest of the Trek universe to prop it up. Tell me I am wrong.

This young Kirk is far from the level-headed character played by William Shatner (who’s not in the movie). He’s set up to be Spock’s antonym all passion, emotion and action, while the other is all control, logic and brain. It’s mechanical but there’s not much room to change the bedrock of the Trek world.

Maybe because HE IS THE YOUNG KIRK! WTF He is the young Kirk becoming Kirk, but in the diegetic world of the film the temporal order has been disrupted, so the young Kirk has to become Kirk in a DIFFERENT WAY to produce a DIFFERENT KIRK. See what we did there? Miss the point much, movie reviewer?

WTF