New Empire magazine STID photos

[SalvorHardin]

Enjoy...or not

..With Earth under terrorist attack from Benedict Cumberbatch’s ex-Starfleet employee John Harrison, Kirk is this time forced into a rash decision that breaks a critical Starfleet command, puts his crew in danger & costs him his captain’s chair. Now out of uniform and dressed down in space civvies of black leather jackets and boots, our three heroes have separated from the Enterprise and headed off on a mission to try and rectify his mistake…

Abrams: He was within Starfleet and has now turned against the organization and is hell-bent on revenge. He’s responsible for a very violent, horrific attack in London and then one in the States. He believes he and others were wronged and is focused on destruction. He’s an incredibly brilliant strategist who is aware of various truths that Kirk is not privy to.

Pine: He is Kirk’s shadow of death, his Achilles’ heel. He is just a big mirror reflecting all of Kirk’s insecurities back at him. He is just as intelligent and logical as Spock, but is also one very bad motherf—er.

Cumberbatch: He’s sort of superhuman, pretty much unbeatable. Brainy and brawny. He manipulates situations. He’s incarcerated when Kirk is talking to him and yet he still gets Kirk to do his owrk for him. He pushes him into a corner where the only route to salvation is cooperation. There is a real Hannibal Lector quality to him.

[teacake]

Gee whiz. Who would have thought..

that James T. Kirk would break the rules, go rogue and save Earth?

[SalvorHardin]

More

[BillJ]

They're really doing this less than a year after he takes command? It's disappointing.

We know why Chekov is in red now...

[SalvorHardin]

BillJ wrote:

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They're really doing this less than a year after he takes command?

More or less a year.
Vulcan was destroyed at 2258.42, STID opens in London 2259.55

[Christopher]

BillJ wrote:

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They're really doing this less than a year after he takes command? It's disappointing.

Actually it kinda makes sense. If someone were given command of the flagship right out of the Academy, no matter how heroic the circumstances, there'd be a lot of questions about his qualifications and a lot of second-guessing. It stands to reason that Starfleet Command would be watching him closely and ready to take his command away as soon as he screwed up. So this version of Kirk at this early stage would be far more likely to have his command revoked than the more seasoned Kirk of the Prime universe.

[King Daniel]

Seems they've based the story somewhat on Prime Directive by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, one of the best Trek novels ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_D...tar_Trek_novel)

[BillJ]

Christopher wrote:

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Actually it kinda makes sense. If someone were given command of the flagship right out of the Academy, no matter how heroic the circumstances, there'd be a lot of questions about his qualifications and a lot of second-guessing. It stands to reason that Starfleet Command would be watching him closely and ready to take his command away as soon as he screwed up. So this version of Kirk at this early stage would be far more likely to have his command revoked than the more seasoned Kirk of the Prime universe.

But we just covered the bad boy angle in the last movie.

[SalvorHardin]

BillJ wrote:

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But we just covered the bad boy angle in the last movie.

Did Kirk ever stop being the "bad boy", defying orders and doing what he feels is right?
Even in his old age.

In any case, according to Pine:

Chris Pine: I’m different because I am five years older and hopefully a bit more mature and I have had many more experiences since the first film and you can only help that experiences to bear on the character you are portraying at the time. So Kirk is definitely different this time around.

[BillJ]

SalvorHardin wrote:

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Did Kirk ever stop being the "bad boy", defying orders and doing what he feels is right?
Even in his old age.

Kirk of TOS and the image of the character in pop culture are two distinct things.

[Christopher]

BillJ wrote:

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Kirk of TOS and the image of the character in pop culture are two distinct things.

True. The only time in TOS that Kirk ever overtly violated a direct order was "Amok Time." In other cases, he bent the rules from time to time, but generally obeyed orders even when he hated it -- he was ready to abandon Spock and McCoy in "The Galileo Seven" because the High Commissioner gave him a direct order, and was willing to leave McCoy behind on Yonada because an admiral ordered it. True, he was flexible in his interpretation of the Prime Directive, but that was his prerogative as the commander on the scene, in a time when it was often not feasible to get direct orders from superiors and captains were expected to use their own judgment to interpret the rules. And in most of TOS, Kirk was portrayed as a disciplined career soldier.

The popular image of Kirk as a renegade and rule-breaker comes mainly from The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. But again, as in "Amok Time," he only violated orders as an extraordinary measure for the sake of saving a friend and colleague. It wasn't his regular MO.

Let's keep in mind, though, that the Abramsverse Kirk was intentionally given a very different, far more troubled backstory. This Kirk actually is the hotheaded maverick that his counterpart is only mistakenly assumed to be. They're the same at the core, with the same intrinsic leadership skills and virtues, but this Kirk's life history has led him to be more unruly, brash, and undisciplined. So they shouldn't be treated as identical characters.

[BillJ]

I'm not saying that the movie will be bad. Just disappointed that we are following one movie where he was a bad boy with another. I was just hoping to see a movie where Kirk works within the system to solve the problem.

This wouldn't be a complaint if it was the basis of the third movie where he'd been in command for five or six years.

[Mr Silver]

SalvorHardin wrote:

---

Enjoy...or not

..With Earth under terrorist attack from Benedict Cumberbatch’s ex-Starfleet employee John Harrison, Kirk is this time forced into a rash decision that breaks a critical Starfleet command, puts his crew in danger & costs him his captain’s chair. Now out of uniform and dressed down in space civvies of black leather jackets and boots, our three heroes have separated from the Enterprise and headed off on a mission to try and rectify his mistake…

Abrams: He was within Starfleet and has now turned against the organization and is hell-bent on revenge. He’s responsible for a very violent, horrific attack in London and then one in the States. He believes he and others were wronged and is focused on destruction. He’s an incredibly brilliant strategist who is aware of various truths that Kirk is not privy to.

Pine: He is Kirk’s shadow of death, his Achilles’ heel. He is just a big mirror reflecting all of Kirk’s insecurities back at him. He is just as intelligent and logical as Spock, but is also one very bad motherf—er.

Cumberbatch: He’s sort of superhuman, pretty much unbeatable. Brainy and brawny. He manipulates situations. He’s incarcerated when Kirk is talking to him and yet he still gets Kirk to do his owrk for him. He pushes him into a corner where the only route to salvation is cooperation. There is a real Hannibal Lector quality to him.

Cheers for posting these!

Some really interesting details, although nothing "conclusive" (as is the JJ way). I'm starting to get Sector 31 vibes, given the talk about him being "within Starfleet" and being responsible for terrorist attacks.

[Christopher]

BillJ wrote:

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I'm not saying that the movie will be bad. Just disappointed that we are following one movie where he was a bad boy with another. I was just hoping to see a movie where Kirk works within the system to solve the problem.

I think it's a logical continuation of his character arc. We've heard Pike's warning in the trailer that Kirk is still too lacking in humility and likely to make a critical mistake. The first movie was about how Kirk got command; this one is about testing his worthiness for command, as he makes mistakes and has to learn responsibility and humility in order to become truly deserving of the command he just stumbled into before. I'm glad they're actually confronting the questions we've been asking for four years about whether he was really ready to command the ship yet. I wouldn't just want that to be glossed over and have Kirk spontaneously become a more disciplined, by-the-book captain without showing how he earned that.

Mr Silver wrote:

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Some really interesting details, although nothing "conclusive" (as is the JJ way). I'm starting to get Sector 31 vibes, given the talk about him being "within Starfleet" and being responsible for terrorist attacks.

But Section 31 isn't just the generic "everything bad done by members of Starfleet" group. They have their own specific set of motivations, believing their actions are justified for the good of the Federation. They might arrange terrorist strikes against groups they believed were threats to the Federation (and, if history is any guide, most likely exacerbate the threat by doing so rather than ending it), but against Earth cities? No way.

I'm increasingly starting to suspect that Harrison is secretly the descendant of Augments who went to ground after the Eugenics Wars, and maybe he's striking against the UFP's laws banning genetic engineering (what we see in the teaser trailer, the "I can help her" line to Noel Clarke, might suggest that). That could explain why a human member of Starfleet would have such enhanced physical and mental abilities. Maybe he's even looking for Khan and the Botany Bay.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

This isn't TOS and isn't meant to be. It's the result of five decades, more or less, of Trek's evolution as a narrative and in popular culture.

One can draw a line anywhere in Trek's narrative history - including right down the middle of TOS - and say "on this side lies the original presentation of Star Trek and on this side lies later accretions/transformations/elaborations."

One example is Spock's troubled relationship with his father, something invented well after the character had been fleshed out and portrayed by Nimoy for quite some time. To have that - including fairly explicit references to an animated story produced years after TOS finished - reflected in the 2009 movie is to accept changes and additions to the narrative understanding of the character.

That movie also makes great use of the Kobayashi Maru test which was introduced in 1982 as an insight into Kirk's essential character.

By the end of TOS Kirk had already become a (somewhat reflective) serial rule breaker. All of that is who Kirk is as a character now. To expect the producers and writers to discard everything about the character's evolution beyond some early line of demarcation is expecting them to hamstring themselves unnecessarily to no good effect in obeisance to a trivial sense of faux historicity.

The only place you'll ever see the TOS versions of these characters is in TOS itself.