advocatus - 17 July 2009 07:44 AM
Uh… no. This story invents an entirely different “Jim Kirk” in order to hopefully appeal to younger movie-goers who don’t have enough of an attention span to sit still between exploding planets. Sorry, that’s the way I see it. 
Logical, considering the producers’ hope to attract a new generation (no pun intended) of fans.
From an “old fart” perspective, however, with a slight stretch I can also see an honest attempt to explain the beginnings of “the Kirk”, our real, somewhat quirky Kirk. As such I don’t think it was a totally outlandish portrayal, just not perhaps what some of us older fans remember. Young McCoy’s paranoias was just that, a portrayal of true paranoia which is defined as being an unreasonable fear. He was being quite unreasonable, but why would anyone expect him to get kicked off of a military shuttle craft which could be expected to be carrying any number of different kinds and/or status of people going up?
Current mores reflected in TV kid shows reflect rude, crude and self-centered selfish behaviour as well as an ongoing process of ridiculing parents and adults in general. There seems to be some agenda at work, but my own paranoia might be showing. Perhaps some of this new age kid stuff or agenda rubbed off into our movie?
As far as religion goes, any good movie or series will at some point have an opportunity to reflect the feelings of its creators, this being the crux of most of the concerns reflected herein. I don’t believe that any thinking person has missed the point that “Star Trek” has always been very progressive and that “religion” when depicted, was presented in a negative light, as something that has been held over from a past status quo or even something that was adopted, often in a state of confusion by groups of people (or aliens) whom both the “wise” Enterprise crew as well as ourselves (identifying with Kirk, et al) naturally considered as poor unfortunate and misled dupes. “Gods” or the like have also been easily dismissed as actually being some strange, alien life form regardless of their displayed abilities or powers. Perhaps we will actually come in contact with such one day, then what?
We as viewers and fans are placed on the inside of those particular jokes every time. “Why does God need a space ship?” realizes Kirk in one episode. Heck, we now know that even the planet outpost “Holy site” which the ever-spiritual Vulcans claimed most holy was actually a high-tech spy station working against the blue skin bunch while hiding under such a robe. We’ve also found out several times that the claim “Vulcans never lie” has proven quite false, so who can you believe in?
