I am not going to review the new Star Trek movie.
Other people with a better command of the English language can do that, however, I am going to question the necessity of one particular scene.
Alice Eve, a deadly weapons expert and new crewmember on the Enterprise,
is caught getting changed by a drooling Kirk. As he is reduced to
stunned silence, she stands frontal to camera in her matching pants
feigning surprise at his cheek, playfully declaring, “I told you to turn
around.”
It’s like I was watching Carry On Star Trek as imagined by Michael Bay. You would hope filmmakers of Abrams caliber would concentrate on including scenes essential to plot, incidences which relate to character development and their battle with a particular fear or demon or shots that exist for little more then titillation.
In the case of Into Darkness, Kirks fear is loosing the enterprise and its crew, his “family.” Alice Eve confronting him with her glorious breasts (I can not question them, they are lovely) is not a fear he must fight.
He does not have a fear of breasts.
Or navels.
We have already seen Kirk liking the ladies, in this film he is seen liking two of them at once, so his inability to not peek at Eve getting changed (even though she asks him not too) is hardly shocking.
The man appreciates the female form. He is also not battling his obvious fear of intimacy by staring at Eve, as this is something he would do with any woman or alien who happened to stumble by his penis. In its simplest form it could serve to hint at a future romance, indicating to stupid viewers that he finds her attractive, but there are far less lazy and archaic ways to show this. There are prettier ways to paint that picture.
To contextualize the underwear shot.
Eve is getting changed into an outfit more befitting of a planetary mission, her skintight barely there Starfleet uniform is hardly appropriate for the examination of nuclear weapons, and therefore she much put on a skintight black onesie. This is a flimsy premise for the changing of clothes, as Bones also accompanies her down to the surface of the planet and in a similar outfit too, so unless they showed him asking Kirk to turn around whilst he changed…(actually they should have done, it would have been lolsome.)
Also if Bones had time to get changed in private, then Eve definitely had time to go to her quarters or at least find a toilet cubicle to undress in.
She isn’t even trying to seduce him. The undressing follows a chat about nuclear weapons killing everyone and how he screwed over one of her friends. Hardly the stuff to incite foreplay, more the stuff to indicate that she has Kirk pegged and this makes her blazon display non-sensical. I am all for being proud of your body, but in this context only if it served as a plot device.
I think what I found most offensive was the lack of subtly in the gratuity; at least the pointless underwear scene in the first film was sort of woven into the plot. And also Kirk was topless. Sure Uhura was in her pants for no reason explaining a future plot device, and yes, it was stupid, but at least it was balanced. Tit for ta. You could almost excuse it as a directorial compromise on J J Abrams part, but I doubt Into Darkness would have lost a million at the box office without a underwear shot, and although I expect it from lesser movies and film makers (Snyder, Bay, etc.) this is not some throwaway dumb action movie.
The first outing was almost the perfect sci fi reboot, treating the franchise with the respect it deserved and whilst we understood by bringing it into modern times a few lazy popcorn-munching notes would have to be hit, it was not for the sake of disillusioning Trekkies and underestimating the intelligence of the audience. The audience would not have been up in arms without a lady in pants shot, especially one as ill conceived and ill constructed as this. In fact it’s almost insulting to the audience to resort to such tactics. Abrams could have at least made this particular shot less full on, and without undermining the character with the ridiculous set up.
At least Uhura got a fully fleshed out character to balance out her boobs. Eve is barely on screen before we glimpse her in her pants.
The television show had an air of old fashioned sexism, but it was also landmark in its depiction of the first interracial kiss.
Would it not have been nice if this film followed that thread to the latter too?
