Wednesday, May 22, 2013

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY: One of the controversies about Star Trek Into Darkness is a brief scene showing Alice Eve in her underwear, and whether it's exploitative.  In the film itself, I didn't have much of a problem with it (though it's more than a bit gratuitous), but the fact that the shot appeared in basically every trailer and TV spot.  J.J. Abrams was on Conan this week to talk about it, and credit to him, he admits that the scene didn't work the way he'd hoped (more as a Kirk character beat than about Ms. Eve's physique) and show a brief deleted scene in which a shirtless Benedict Cumberbatch takes a shower.

9 comments:

  1. Hannah Lee11:57 PM

    Matt, you appear to have buried the lead:
    "... a shirtless Benedict Cumberbatch takes a shower."

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  2. Duvall12:03 AM

    The underwear scene was gratuitous, but the bigger problem was the way that Eve's character was completely superfluous to the story. Abrams could get away with putting Sydney Bristow in skimpy clothing because she was the lead character - it seemed like Marcus was only in the film so that the underwear shot could be included in the trailer.

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  3. Hannah Lee12:05 AM

    Though, in all seriousness, the way Eve's shot was used in the promos was pretty ridiculous, and seemed a transparent attempt to "sex up" the movie. Then, to see that it was also completely pointless within the context of the film made it even more ridiculous.

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  4. I'm undecided as to which was worse. The underwear...or the reveal of her character, which was so telegraphed that I actually groaned in the theater when I realized how far they were going down that road.

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  7. Mel Umbarger2:31 PM

    Marcus is important in the original Star Trek mythos -- I'm assuming she was introduced for her importance later.

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  8. I agree that they seem to want her to become a recurring/major character, which would help redress the gender imbalance in the original crew. But even if that's true, they should have found more of a point for her presence. I mean, even if you have the laudable goal of increasing the number of women on screen, it undercuts the goal if you can't make them relevant to the story, and then using them only as underwear models totally eviscerates the underlying good intention.

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  9. She does have a plot purpose in that she (admittedly briefly) serves as a device preventing the Enterprise from getting blown out of the water by her father.
    I'll also give credit in that she's not depicted as a damsel in distress (even if Kirk/Spock ultimately saves the day). She's shown as exceedingly competent at her job, on the level of or better than the Enterprise's own crew. (Also, she makes the bob cut work very well.)

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