[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

1. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk to be born during this emergency?

No. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk's parents to be on the ship that Nero's ship encounters when it exits the spacetime warp? No. If you want to look for absurd coincidences, that is where I'd look.

If Winona was in fact an officer (a concept that spits in the face of my personal Nate-canon), why is she still on duty as a heavily-pregnant woman again?

Was she actively on-duty? I don't remember noticing.
And, yeah, it never occurred to me either to wonder whether Kirk's mother might be in Starfleet. *shrug*

Especially during a crisis.

I would consider that a mitigating factor, personally.

Couldn't the plot equally be served with him as a five-year-old visiting the ship?

The plot almost certainly could, but the story could not.

This is something that I felt was largely missing from Nemesis: a lot of the stuff felt (to me) devoid of emotional impact. When Picard and Data are trying to escape from Shinzon's ship, I didn't get a sense of "Will these two good guys escape from the nasty guys' clutches? Will they? Get up on the edge of your seat and don't you dare blink!" I got a sense of "Timeout while we watch two of the good guys zoom around an enclosed space on futuristic motorcycles." Maybe it was there and I was just not in the right frame of mind, but without some sort of emotional impact, a movie isn't likely to resonate with many viewers. Which is a bad thing.

I'm ambivalent about XI overall, but I felt that this first act was executed well (as opposed to, say, cheesily).

2. What was the purpose of driving a car off the cliff again? An action sequence?

And also to get a laugh at the expense of Kirk and his relative (brother? uncle? I forget). Kirk's relative got on the phone or something to Kirk while Kirk was driving the car and (poorly, IMHO) delivered a monologue in which, among other things, he warned Kirk not to injure his car, not even a little. So when Kirk overreacts to the cop and winds up trashing the car, there's a sense of "Ha ha, is he ever in trouble NOW!"

Not especially my kind of humor, but again there's that emotional impact and sense of consequences that a scene needs if it's to be remembered as more than just a really cool action sequence that will likely be forgotten about a few movies later. Whether done well or poorly, a movie has to have that if it's going to be more than a mindless popcorn flick, which is what I, for one, was afraid this movie would be.

The director does realize we're going to have much more impressive space battles later, right?

Er, well, I think I missed those. Maybe it's just me and my crazy, unrealistic preference for phaser beams that look like beams instead of like cactus needles or machinegun ricochets . . .

(Actually, off-hand, I'd say the aftermath of the battle at Vulcan was the most impressive scene of the movie for me.)

That still doesn't explain what Academy cadets are doing there. Maybe the engineering students, but Uhura? Can you say "shoehorned"? I knew you could!

Yeah. *sigh* At least the main bunch weren't all there.

While we're on this, I dislike the way McCoy got his nickname here. "Bones" is apparently an old nickname for a doctor, which is fair enough and presumably the original inspiration. But now it's soaked with bitterness, and McCoy, for all the grumbling and criticizing he likes to do, is not a bitter character. Not primarily, anyway.

(the Kelvin disaster forced Starfleet engineers to reevaluate every part of their designs)

That's an interesting thought. Hadn't considered that possibility.

And shipyards take MUCH longer to build than the ships that will be built there. You're telling me a shipyard capable of building the Enterprise was built in like five years? Can you say "implausible"?

Why would it have to have been built after the Kelvin disaster? Modified to keep up with the use of improved tech, possibly, but it could have been there already.

5. Seriously, were the bad guys just hanging around for 25 years doing absolutely nothing? You can't even toss in a temporal anomaly to freeze them in time for that long?

What would you have them do? As a mining ship, they probably don't have any probes capable of sitting in space, waiting to detect a particular ship's emergence from a weird twist in the spacetime continuum. Nor would I expect them to be capable of running down Spock's little ship. They have to sit there pretty much constantly.

That must have been pretty bad for the underlings, though. Bewildered and grief-stricken, all alone deep in the past, and they're sitting around, doing nothing in particular aside from trying to keep on their tiptoes while constantly monitoring a point in space to see if it ever blinks. Day in, day out, year in, year out, and they have no certainty that it will ever do anything but stare back at them blankly. Nero must have been a pretty effective leader to keep everyone in line for that long.

6. Spock is a professor? Um, what?

Well, there wasn't any Enterprise for him to be an officer on . . . *shrug*

7. "All the cadets are pressed into emergency service because the bulk of Starfleet is in the Laurentian System." Unless the Borg are attacking, the bulk of Starfleet should never be in one system, or even one sector!

Usually it's the opposite, eh?

Does make me wonder what's going on there, though.

And what about the professors at the Academy? Or those on leave elsewhere on Earth? Or the umpteen outposts elsewhere in the solar system?

No kidding. I guess that wouldn't be nearly enough to staff all the ships, though, so they're probably scattered in among the youngsters.

Come to think of it, though, the cadets might be best-situated to be getting training regarding the new starships. Since some of them would presumably eventually serve on them, it would make sense for them to occasionally engage in training scenarios, etc. that reflected the new capabilities. So they might have a bit of an edge as far as that goes.

8. "A cadet...that was under academic suspension for cheating...was made acting First Officer...and is now assuming command." Again, what? And a few dozen more times for good measure, WHAT?

I agree. Although, the thing is, presumably Kirk's performance in the scenario wouldn't count for much of anything after his first attempt, so I've always assumed that he kept trying out of sheer determination and orneriness, and there was no question of his improving his "grade".

To me, he ought to be suspended not for cheating but for deliberately violating whatever security precautions he violated to get at and alter the programming.

That wouldn't resonate with the audience the same way, though. I think a lot of the corner-cutting in the movie -- Kirk's promotion, Uhura and McCoy both being in Iowa, etc. -- was done for similar reasons. I don't agree with all of it, but I respect it more than I respect corner-cutting due to sheer laziness or stupidity.

Was it IMPOSSIBLE to do another time skip and have Kirk as a lieutenant helmsman or something so he still has to jump through hoops, but at least is in the line of succession?

Well, Pike did make Kirk first officer, and then Spock allowed Kirk to become captain. But those are field promotions and surely aren't guaranteed to be made permanent after the dust has settled.

This is undoubtedly another case of corner-cutting for purposes of effect. It would have been more realistic, as you say, to show a brief montage of Kirk rising through the ranks. It might have been more satisfying, too, to see glimpses of Kirk learning to control his attitude and maybe have Pike smiling approval in the background once or twice.

But TPTB decided to go for the big dramatic splash (and fulfill Kirk's earlier boast to Pike). Can't count on there being enough interest for another preliminary movie, you know, so we've gotta get everything in place during this one. *shrug* I agree, it was a ridiculous promotion, but I guess the alternative was to have the movie go a little too long for somebody's liking.