Enjoy!

It’s true, Uhura was, and likely still will be, the glorified telephone operator; a refreshing new look would be having a guy do that job. (Worf did, but he also was chief security officer, fired phasers, and did Klingon stuff.)

I still prefer both Uhura and Hoshi to Deanna Troi, though, who was kinda the same character except she picked up on thoughts and feelings instead of actual communications. (Very “feminine”.)

The practice became such a cliche that the very snarky online reviewers at Television Without Pity turned “Hoshi” into a a verb. (As in, the communications officer on the show _Battlestar Galactica_ “Hoshis” the other ships in the fleet to give them coordinates when they are getting ready to make a light-speed jump.) In response, the producers at _BSG_ introduced a new communications officer on the bridge of the Galactica and named him Hoshi.

I guess the point of this pedantic, geeky post is that I feel like I’ve seen people try to do what J.J. Abrahms did for Uhura before, and it ended up seeming so similar to the original iteration. Maybe it’s more noticeable over the course of a series than a two-hour movie, I don’t know.

Also, while the film encourages us to overlook Uhura’s special skills, let’s not forget that she is the one who actually saves the day. Remember, she finds and translates the message that alerts Kirk to the Romulan plot & it is her word, not Kirk’s, that gets both Pike and Spock to believe him.

(now I’ll shut up b/c my comment is longer than the post … sorry!!!)

Also, I think people are forgetting that the only scene in which new-Uhura’s linguistic talents are taken seriously, she replaces an incompetent Latino Communications Director who outranks her. He is the only Latino on the bridge and the only Latino not in a crowd shot in the Federation. Thus Uhura is the ultimate stand-in for race and gender b/c apparently you can have as many ethnic and alien bodies in one place at one time in Star Fleet but not more than one poc at a time.

@ Lance – actually the last few years of transformers, when they returned to their home planet, featured women transformers (most of whom were pink and extremely slender). I think there was some hope that they could do a spin off telling what the women had been up to b/c they were introduced at a time when shows like JEM and even Strawberry Shortcake were taking over the market. The Director of the first live action installment got massively criticized for failing to include the female transformers and his response was “I just couldn’t imagine how to fit them in.” (He actually said something very similar to this, tho I can’t say the quote is exact.)

@Jeremy Young – The reduction of Uhura to plot device is one of my major complaints as well. And as I note in my review, I think it is not only to highlight the conflict between Kirk and Spock (ie women as property) but also to support an underlining thesis about heroism as hyper-masculinity and heterosexuality. It is the same tactic they took in the alternate universe on the original series where Spock was Captain but also evil.

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While we are talking “uniforms,” I do think it is important to note that many updated movies have actually made the women’s outfits worse, neither reflecting the fashion of the time nor the original. Watchmen for instance actually shrunk and tightened the outfits on the women while bulking up the outfits on the men. (The exception was Dr. Manhattan and his periodic full frontal.) And while there are some men who are scantily clad, there are also men in full coverage – some to the point that only their chin is uncovered – and the full coverage/enhanced muscle suits are becoming standard in film adaptations. So it isn’t that we cannot find men in far less clothing but the fact that we have to struggle to find women with any clothes at all. The exception – X-Men, they have standardized uniform and w/the exception of Storm (who is also clothed head to toe) they mostly all wear it.

@Lance — “Look, I love these movies. I do. But to love something uncritically is to be foolish.” AMEN!