Last month TrekMovie reported some spoilers related to the Kirk family in the new Star Trek movie. Now a new interview with one of the actors in the film confirms that report and provides some new details.
[SPOILERS BELOW]
Kirk’s evil uncle
Our earlier reporting was based on comments from Star Trek Enterprise actor Dominic Keating, who stated that he auditioned for the role of “Jim Kirk’s uncle” which he later told TrekMovie was Jim Kirk’s “evil stepfather.” TrekMovie had confirmed that the role Keating auditioned for eventually went to Brad William Henke (a regular on the ABC show October Road). Now Collider.com has a new interview with Henke in which he clarifies the uncle/stepfather thing and elaborates on the ‘evil’ thing too, saying:
I play Captain Kirk’s alcoholic, abusive uncle when he’s a kid, and I treat him very badly, which forces him to go off and do what he does..
He talks more about his time on the set and what it was like working with JJ Abrams. Go to Collider.com for the full interview. Henke also confirms that he does not have any scenes with Chris Pine and only works with the actor playing the younger Jim Kirk (played by Jimmy Bennet). TrekMovie has also confirmed that neither Chris Pine, nor Jimmy Bennett has any scenes with Chris Hemsworth, who plays George Kirk (Jim Kirk’s father).
Henke in “October Road”
So George Kirk is an absent father? Adds an extra wrinkle.
i dont know. something tells me to be worried.
but ill wait for moree news on this one.
Jimmy! Go replicate me a beer. I said NOW DAMMIT!
#1
My gut says George dies early on or is off on assignment in the fleet.
starring Gary Busey as the Uncle
I wonder if this movie will mention the fact that young Kirk lived on that colony from Dagger or the Mind?
I wonder if he’s as mean as that other absent father, Jackson Roy Kirk.
#6 Sorry, that should have been Concience of the King
@ 3
But I donwanna replicate a beer!
3
wearing a black wife beater of course.
you know. black like the undershirts worn by the crew (and of course y not every one else) (u know continuity). and ’cause this is dark part of the story and the uncle.
Do they still make Bud Light in the future?
“I said give me the brandy!”
@8
yes i was wondering that too , cannon say kirk was on Tarsus IV colony when he was 12 i think ? .
# 2 “i dont know. something tells me to be worried.”
Voices…
Wow. This just keeps getting more interesting.
”I don’t want my pain taken away! I NEED my pain!” (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) lol and now we know what that pain is XD.
14
in my head.
Does this story seem way too long and elaborate for a 2 hour film? It just feels like we’re all over the place. When Kirk and Spock are young… when they’re at the academy… first mission on the Enterprise…. getting to know all of our famous crew…. our Spock Spock from the future….
16
quiet.
thats called continuity. :-D
hmm , well i guess as good story teller , can fit every part in . i wonder how long the movie will be , like i really dont think they would do a 3 hour epic like say lord of the rings (i wish they would i know trek fans would love it ) but if they do have to cut lots of stuff out , please please hope they put it on a special dvd (directors edition or something ) with the stuff they cut out actually integrated back in the movie ( not just extras) . it would make sense .
Sounds like a Mind Meld! sequence.
#18
Who says this movie has to come in under 2 hours? If it’s a captivating movie, people will come and sit for however long it takes to get to the end of the ride. 3 hours? Fine by me.
Something tells me that there is too much story and the suits at Paramount will start chopping pretty quickly to get it down to 2 hours- so just because an actor filmed some scenes, it doesn’t always follow that it doesn’t end up on the editing room floor. I’d hope Paramount will trust JJ Abrams with not only the first, but the final cut of the film. It’d be a shame if this movie ended up being directed by Alan Smithee. I hear they don’t do that anymore.
I actually love the idea of Jim Kirk being saddled with an alcoholic/abusive uncle. Not only does it add more dimension to the character, but it also validates the notion that this ‘Star Trek’ is definitely going to explore the human condition from all angles.
@22
no i agree , 2 hours would be more then fine my me and even 3 hours , but i know studio’s get scared of making long movie , as they think the average person will not sit there for that amount of time , really i was just making the point , that i hope anything they do cut stuff out, i hope it makes it on to a dvd an is integrated back in the movie ( something which i dont think is done enough , but paramount are not fools they know what stat trek fans are like , and if there was a special 3 hour directors edition dvd of the movie , i sure it would sell bucket loads )
On the 2 hour thing…
Remember… JJ Abe is well known for quick flashbacks laced throughout a story. The uncle may have a total of 29 seconds in the movie in a flashback were Kirk opens his eyes and we see he is in the middle of reprograming the Academy computers for the command leadership test.
12. jimj – September 13, 2008
“I said give me the brandy!”
LOL…….Enemy Within
Love it
So Kirk needs an abusive alcoholic uncle to get him to go into space…where did that come from? Sounds like a load of…psychobabble garbage to me. He can’t go for the wonder, for the freedom, for the desire to explore, for all the good reasons, he has to be driven by a traumatic childhood? This does not sound good at all. If this is indicative of how the new movie is going to be, I am down to very very very pessimistic about it.
>|>{
JJ Abrams is great with storytelling…. but I think that his flashback sequence tricks work better on TV than on the big screen. Flashbacks on the big screen just seem to come across as cheesy. It works on a larger scale like LOST because there’s multiple flashbacks…. and we see how they intertwine and learn more each time…. I don’t think that formula would work well on the big screen… but I could be wrong. Just throwing in my two cents.
As far as the length, nobody said it has to be 2 hours but that’s pretty much the standard. Two hours…. three hours… either way, people will “sit” through it. Have you seen how much movie tickets cost? Darn right I’ll sit through it. haha
Anyway, like all of us… I’m anxious to see what the final product will be, but I admit, I do have to be a bit pessimistic…. between all of that AND all of these spiffy battles we’re gonna see. It’s going to feel like a James Bond movie in the Star Trek world. (I say that only because those movies are around 2 hours and feel like so much longer because SO much goes on in them.)
Thoughts? :D
What the hell’s a Jonas Brother?
Darth”To Legit to Quit” BAllz
Terry O Quinn should play the Uncle.
I like this wrinkle in the Kirk story.
True Kirk is an idealist and he does want to explore but like most great in real life have had difiiculties growing up and them working through that makes them great!
You look at Kirk and you see a man with ambition who wants to excel and prove the doubters wrong.
And we all have people in our families who are less that tolerable.
You love them but dislike them.
Spock and Riker have had his father issues as well. May be that is what drew Kirk and Spock to each other as friends they share a similar experience with parental figures
-cs™
It’s a Kitchen Sink movie. It should be 3 hours but I recall a 2 hour running time being predicted (due to the number of pages in the script).
I heard the kitchen sink saves the Enterprise. It’s cool.
Yeah, those long epics never make money.
Titanic was about ten hours long and only ended up as the highest-grossing film of all time, with a total worldwide take of over $1.75 billion…
Anyone else think that Brad Henke looks a bit like a middle-aged William Shatner in that photo?
Lots of people have pain and family issues in their past. Believe me, I’ve met plenty of people who seem to be the most well-adjusted in the world, but their family history is . . . bizarre to say the least. It’s not psychobabble that Kirk leaves because of a bad situation at home. There are a lot of tragedies that force the most ordinary of people to leave home and move somewhere new to start fresh. There clearly were issues unseen in Kirk’s past. This is obviously one of them.
As for the doommongers, well, tough! I don’t know why they’re even bothering posting here. I think the new Doctor Who sucks, but I don’t spend all my time on Doctor Who fora bitching about it! Go set up a loser obsessives site equivalent to danielcraigisnotbond.com, then we can all sit around and laugh at you! Maybe be you should use a cannon (sic) as your logo! :p
BSG Trek anyone? *rolleyes*
sounds like Kirk is getting the cliche treatment of a bad or a sad child hood (Bruce Wayne) that creates this path to the military and Starfleet perhaps wanting to be a captain like his father before him (Adama, Skywalker).
I think really we don’t know much about where this uncle fits in – we know Kirk’s family – or part of it were killed by Kodos so perhaps Kirk then goes back to live with his nasty uncle witch then forces him to follow in his dad’s footsteps and join Starfleet – it does sound like a familiar plot line but i hope that Abrams has more up his sleeve than just Battle Star Begins Wars Trek: A New Hope.
You forget that Kirk was a survivor of the Tarsus IV massacre at the age of 13. If his parents were killed by Kodos then maybe he was raised by his uncle, who – as it seems – was an abusing alcoholic which made Kirk to go on his own ways…
Moving the movie from Christmas to May could affect the length as much as anything else. A longer movie means fewer showings for the theaters, which they don’t like, especially with potential blockbusters such as this one.
Drunk uncle of Kirk.. why didn’t they give that to Shatner ;)
Re: 22, 24, 25
I’d be fine with a longer pic too if it is good, but I’m a Trekkie since the age of about 4 (going on 42). My guess is it is going to be difficult enough to get the lay public’s butts in the seats of a Trek movie, unless JJ’s imprimatur carries that much weight, much less if you tell them: Star Trek, a 3 hour experience coming to a theater near you! Even if I am wrong, I’ll bet the Paramount suits are thinking the same thing. I think it’d be too much a hurdle.
@ 40 a good one lol
The whole thing sounds like a version of A Christmas Carol with Old Spock as Scrooge.
Gene Roddenberry once said Kirk was a blend of Captain Horatio Hornblower and Hamlet. (At least that’s reported in the Remastered Season One Box Special Features.) Hamlet… didn’t he have an evil uncle who became his stepfather?
”I play Captain Kirk’s alcoholic, abusive uncle when he’s a kid, and I treat him very badly, which forces him to go off and do what he does…..”
This is quite a revelation about one of the current maker’s ‘creative choices’ with the ongoing Star Trek story. It’s only a matter of my own personal taste, but seeing a ‘harrassed’ VERY young Kirk with a ‘problematic’ family background is not one that appeals to me in this Star Trek re-launch. I realise this is meant to be some kind of ‘origin’ storyline which eventually ‘leads into’ the events of the TOS series (I presume, from what we’ve heard so far), but I’d have preferred not to go that FAR BACK, where even Kirk’s CHILDHOOD has to be explained in detail…. This Movie has been previously described as ‘epic’, but I hope this means CINEMATICALLY ‘epic’ rather than LONG-AND–DRAWN-OUT ‘epic’ too, before we are allowed to get to the real adventure of the main plot. So I sure hope this is all merely dealt with quickly in some kind of very brief ‘flashback’-type ‘memory’ thing, rather than being a time-gobbling onscreen ‘exposition’ of all Kirk’s ‘family troubles’ at the beginning of the Movie…
As far as the eventual length of the Movie that others have mentioned here, I reckon it all has to do with the studio involved. Therefore if there is indeed footage for a two and a half hour to three hour long masterpiece say, then it will not surprise me to find that the ‘theatrical’ release will be TWO hours only, with an eventual DVD / Blu-ray release that only has this ‘theatrical’ release, but gives us J.J.’s ‘forcibly’ cut footage as EXTRAS only….BEFORE we are finally given J.J.’s WHOLE intended version long after that on yet another money-spinning DVD / Blu-ray release for the studio. Only at this far-off future point do we release it was a better Movie than what we paid to see in the first place. I hope I’m wrong….
That should be ‘realise’ that it was a better Movie…. I hate typos!
They forgot about several VERY long movies that were made, and shown in the Theaters in their entirety. They had an INTERMISSION then. In fact a lot of movies had INTERMISSIONS when they were longer than 2 hours. The Sound of Music, Gandi, The Ten Commandments. They were treated like PLAYS with TWO ACTS. I would not mind watching such a movie again, so long as it kept my interest, and was written well.
I LIKE THIS ANGLE.
Look, one can argue that Spock and his childhood has gotten the lion’s share of the character development and backstory over any other character in STAR TREK. It’ll be a nice change of pace to dig deeper into Kirk’s childhood and what makes/made his tick.
The IDEA holds tons of promise. The only area of concern is the EXECUTION. If it’s not handled with great acting, direction and writing, then yeah, it’ll come off as lame and obvious as the phrase “Jim Kirk’s EVIL stepfather!”
47 et al:
One of the differences between then – the 50’s and 60’s – and now, is that the studios are generally more concerned with the financial return on movies than character and story. Those movies also played much longer – weeks, months – then, as well. There was simply little to no competition, no filler crap each week to get braindead masses in the seats, so there was no need to get the income in the opening weekend and move on to the next movie.
Simply put, the more screens the movie can be played on, the more ROI you get from it. Back then, you had the *length of stay in the movie theater* to generate a regular ROI until the next one arrived weeks or months later. Now, it’s how many screens can you shoehorn it on during opening weekend so you don’t have competition every week, or rely on continuous length of stay.
To do that, the movie has to be able to be shown the maximum amount daily. At $10 a pop (on average) at 12,000 screens X three showings a day… big bucks. BUT you have to fit the time to the frame you can get that shown. You make a movie 2 hours and change, it can be done – if you have fast turnaround on prepping the theater for the next show. Make it three hours, and you’ve got yourself only two showings a day. That’s a loss of 12,000 screens X $10. Losing $120k a day, or more if it’s the weekend… not a good ROI.
LOTR got away with the extension of time based on being released during holidays where theaters are open earlier and longer, and got darn good word of mouth so it stuck around for months (EXTREMELY rare for first run movies in this day and age, you can admit). That extension was a bonus slop of frosting on the cake, but could hardly be relied on to happen. Any businessman worth a dime in his or her trade wouldn’t bet on that.
On that note, if it’s trimmed…. I can’t wait for the director’s cut on DVD. :D
BTW, forgot to mention, that 120k per day is *per person*. Some theaters can fit hundreds.