More Spoiler Alert comments re the new Star Trek movie. I'm posting excerpts from this article because it augments those that I posted earlier about Uhuru and the role/s of race in the Star Trek series.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE RACIALICIOUS REVIEW OF STAR TREK
By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García

..."No, the new Star Trek (iTrek, for short) is not anything like the original series. That's the whole damn point, one that's acknowledged early on. This is a different timeline – doesn't mean prior canon doesn't count; just that the game is different from here on out.

And even then, this story and this ensemble nailed the most important aspect of any Trek movie – the relationships between the Enterprise's core group – while at the same time redefining them. In short: Uhura hooking up with Spock? Good. Uhura hooking up with Spock over Kirk? Great!

Speaking of Kirk, he's at the center of the biggest difference between iTrek and 8-Track Trek: Chris Pine's version is decidedly not the Alpha Dog here. In this instance, JTK is more like a wolf in the old Kipling poem: without the pack around him, he's effectively useless. He needs Pike to motivate him; he needs Uhura to confirm he's not talking out of his ass; he needs Sulu to save said ass on Nero's mining platform; and he needs both Spocks and Scotty in order to save the day. Everybody gets to shine, and the ensemble is so much the stronger for it."...

[Character Scorecard]

Uhura: No character benefited more from both the reboot and the re-vamp of their origin. Here Zoe Saldana got to fill Nichelle Nichols' roles and give us not just a determined, successful cadet, but one who brought a real skill-set to the table...

Sulu: Again, Kirk only survives the fight atop the first drilling platform because of young Hikaru – in a lesser movie, Sulu's "fencing" confession would have been a set-up to make him look inept in actual combat. We got quite the opposite here...

Spock: And now we come to the Big Other. The nature of Spock's heritage gets addressed early on, and it was a little ham-handed to see Vulcans being so openly prejudicial for two reasons:
1.Would Logic not show racism to be … well, illogical?
2.We never saw him encounter racism from anybody in Starfleet – weird to think of that as "wrong," but we'll talk more about Starfleet in a bit...

Starfleet: Ok, so all of the power players were men. This is nothing new, unfortunately. (According to Memory Alpha, of the admirals seen in prior canon, most were men, only four were POC, and the only female was Vulcan. Six women, including Voyager's Kathryn Janeway, were Rear or Vice Admirals.) But the shots of extraterrestrials and POC serving together, without anybody looking at anybody else as weird – Kirk was a misfit because he's just that big of a clueless putz – was encouraging in the sense that, rather than the audience getting the "lesson" of tolerance handed down as a plot point, we got to see it in action. Let's hope for some more active examples as the series continues. One more note: the doomed Capt. Robau of the Kelvin was played by Faran Tahir, an Angeleno of Pakistani descent."


http://www.racialicious.com/2009/05/12/back-to-the-future-the-racialicious-review-of-star-trek/#more-2439

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"POC" is a widely used (in Black blogging) abbreviation for "People of Color". "People of color" means people of all races & ethnicities except White people.