Thank you, Jarod.
I may have gone over some of the same ground, but I tried to present new observations rather than merely repeating old ones (or, if I repeated old ones, I tried adding something extra).
It's a new day, so I'll resume. Another one that really bugs me is the Kobayashi Maru scene. Now, yes, this one has already been raked over the coals, and in this thread, also, but I want to focus on one part: the apple.
First and foremost,
why is Kirk allowed to bring an item of food into a serious test? The scene presents it as the most natural thing in the world, not least because the Starfleet extra asks, "Is he not taking the simulation seriously?"
before the apple is actually shown, in response to Kirk acting theatrically indifferent to being targeted by the Klingon war birds, and not because he brought a piece of fruit into the test -- implying one of two things: no-one noticed or no-one cares (both of which are slightly disturbing, not to mention absurd).
Then there is the fact that Abrams is clearly quoting a scene from TWOK (another clumsy, yet still vastly superior, film), but one-dimensionally. In the Nicholas Meyer picture, Kirk's apple-chewing is not only a sign of bravado, nor even a way to quench hunger (valid for the lying-low, biding-time scenario of II, but not really for XI's much simpler and less protracted circumstance), but a clear religious allusion, given that Kirk is in a place reminiscent of the biblical construct of Eden, which was created by a GENESIS device, and that Adam and Eve were punished for eating from the Tree Of Knowledge (an apple has come to symbolise the "forbidden fruit", even though it was not adequately described in the original text) -- the allusion here is simple but powerful: Kirk will be punished for his arrogance/defiance; while Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for contravening the word of God, Kirk will lose his best friend to his worst enemy, the penalty for his presumptuousness, and be forced out of his paradisaical mindset and into a new frame of suffering and death.
Unfortunately, in STXI, Kirk is just, y'know, chewing an apple. There is no real subtext. It's a sign of his disregard for the "no-win scenario" and little else. Time and again, Kirk is proven right, while his superiors (or inferiors, I guess) lack the brains and the balls to actually take appropriate action, and Kirk succeeds not through mettle, perseverance or radical insight, but because he steamrolls over a mountain of incompetency to emerge "A1". In many ways, the apple-chewing is a motif; a motif that expresses the true measure of this film's cliche-ridden, superficial recapitulation of ideas already done better by other people in better movies, in a more astute and learned past.
