Okay, so this thread's about a million years old, but I'm resurrecting it to say I was wrong.

Or, well. Maybe.

Tonight I was talking to somebody about this movie, and brought up (among other things) the whole "graduating Kirk straight to captain" nonsense that I mentioned in one of my rants here. The person on the other side of the conversation said something that stopped me dead in my tracks. I made her go back and explain it, and then again cause I'm dumb. She walked me through it, and I'm gonna try to explain it here, but I can't promise I'll get all the details right.

Here's what she said:

As a cadet, Kirk was actually a commissioned officer with the grade of midshipman. Midshipmen are outranked by all other officers, including warrant officers, but they're commissioned officers, and they're part of the chain of command.

So when he was aboard the Enterprise en route to Vulcan, Kirk's legal status was not in question. Although he was administratively grounded and shouldn't have been allowed aboard, the fact is he was aboard, and his grade made him part of the chain of command regardless of his administrative status in the Academy. (This would not have been true if he'd been subject to whatever Starfleet uses as its equivalent of the UCMJ. If Kirk had been under arrest at the time, it would have been a different story altogether.)

Now, just before Pike shuttled over to the Narada, he gave command of the Enterprise to Spock — verbally, but explicitly — and gave him his orders. In the same conversation, he promoted Kirk to first officer. That's the word he used: "I'm promoting you to first officer." What he meant was, "I'm assigning you to the billet of first officer, which by virtue of your low rank must come with a brevet jump-step combat promotion" to some higher rank, presumably commander. Though he didn't get it approved by anybody, and it wasn't done in writing or anything, this was a legal promotion.

The way my friend explained it, combat promotions are not uncommon these days among the enlisted ranks. Historically, they've been applied to enlisted men and officers alike. Jump-step promotions — where you go up more than one grade — are extremely rare, but not unprecedented. And it's also not unheard of for a promotion to be brevetted — that is, for the promoted officer to assume the privileges and duties of that grade before officially being promoted.

Anyway, point being, four different things happened in that scene, all of them legal under historical military tradition. Kirk was assigned to a staff position, he was given a combat promotion to the appropriate grade for an officer in that position, that promotion happened to skip over as many as eight grades, and Kirk was brevetted, so he could assume his duties immediately rather than having to wait until all that stuff could be formalized.

Stretching the bounds of plausibility? Yeah, big time. But in a crisis situation aboard a ship manned by trainees … I dunno. Seems to me it's not entirely insane. Maybe just mostly insane.

Anyway, here's the important part. Once promoted, a military officer cannot be demoted without due process. If we assume Pike was within his legal authority to promote Kirk in the first place — he wouldn't have been in the real world — then the only way his grade could have been reduced to something below commander is via court martial (or non-judicial punishment).

Once the crisis was over, Starfleet had themselves a whole lot of vacancies in the ranks, and a kid with demonstrated leadership abilities and the permanent rank of commander. It wasn't much of a jump, then, for them to bump him one grade to captain and send him off to make mischief.

I asked my friend if anything like that could ever happen in real life, and she said, "Could it happen? Like, is there any absolute law against it? No." But then she started rambling on about statutory minimum time in grade and promotion boards and my eyes totally glazed over. (Lawyer. Whaddya gonna do.)

So based on that flimsiest of justifications, I hereby officially withdraw my gripe about that one part of the movie. It stretches credulity to the absolute breaking point, but from what I got schooled on tonight, it at least makes a sort of sense.

(And yes, if that was Orci and Kurtzman's intent, which I don't believe for a second, then they could have at least mentioned it in passing somehow. But I can't figure out how to explain all that crap without stopping the story dead to do three pages of dialogue about Starfleet law. So in the spirit of Christmas I'll even give 'em a pass for burying the sense under a bunch of lens flares and explosions.)

Have any of you guys ever seen "Until the End of the World?"

I'm just glad the "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" score seems to have fallen out of style. Means I can get back to using it for parodies.

Zoidberg makes everything better.

Artificial gravity? Oh COME ON. Why not just throw out ALL plausibility and realism!?

JESUS.

See? That's what I'm saying. I really like the fact that the movie doesn't have a single obvious through-line, and that it doesn't fall apart if you look at it a little differently. All respect to Greg, but I think the fact that it's open to a variety of equally valid interpretations speaks to the film's strength, rather than its weakness.

Let us not lose sight of the big picture here. This movie is a thanatopsis, a meditation on death and what it means, and more importantly how people react to it. Tomas the conquistador seeks to dominate it with steel and blood. Tommy the scientist seeks to defeat it intellectually, through science. Tom the astronaut seeks to circumvent it through spirituality. All three are obsessed; all three act out their obsession in different, mutually orthogonal ways. But all three are ultimately foiled, and have to face the consequences of their failure. Tomas finds the tree of life, but is not granted mundane immortality by it. Tommy fails to cure his wife. And Tom's tree dies moments before Xibalba explodes, consuming him. At the end, each character achieves a sort of satori. Tomas literally becomes life, because that's what immortality means. Tom dives into a supernova, which is a not-at-all-subtle parallel to the tree of life of myth. And Tommy? Well, Tommy's moment of enlightenment is the most genuine of all. He stands over the grave of his beloved, smiles, says goodbye and literally moves on.

In the face of a story so ambitious and meaningful, I find quibbles about whether this scene or that one was a metaphor or what it means to be kind of beside the point. They're not unworthy questions to ask; like I said, I love the fact that the film stands up under the weight of consideration. But even if I thought the story just made no damn logical sense, I still wouldn't care, because it happens to be about something other than logical sense.

To me, anyway.

That was basically my interpretation too, right up to the point where you guys said something in the commentary about the very last shot, of Tommy looking at Izzi's gravestone. One of you guys (I forget who, sorry) pointed out that he smiled, and that that could symbolize the culmination of his arc. Which totally works as an ending scene; I would have been really unhappy if the film had ended with distant-future-Tom dying then flashing back centuries or millennia to see a guy still obsessed, just starting a journey the ending of which we'd just seen. Now, after having pondered it for a few days (as this movie always makes me do) I think I prefer to imagine the future storyline as the road-not-travelled, the logical extension of Tommy's obsession, which is averted at the very end.

I can't defend that interpretation on logical or storytelling grounds, but I think it just makes me happier.

The asymmetry is part of what I like about the story. If it were purely logical and internally consistent in all these easy-to-grasp ways, I think it'd be less special somehow. As it is, it's got just enough of a dreamlike quality to touch the ineffable.

You know, I rented that one more out of curiosity than anything, and I found myself enjoying it despite myriad obvious reasons not to.

Oh, there was skimming. There was definitely skimming.

This is Not the Book for You, apparently.

Though I did notice something when I transcribed it that I hadn't been aware of while I was merely reading it: commas. Lots of commas. (Cue seemingly endless racks of punctuation marks whooshing into an otherwise empty void.)