hiya :) I agree with everything you’ve written. carol’s characterisation was, like you said, handled better than i expected, but that’s purely because she had a select few scenes where she wasn’t being used as a pawn at a white man’s chess game. she was great in essentials: weapons specialist! disobeying her father’s orders so she can do what she wants! a woman allowed to be cunning without being a villain! but that was all ruined the minute kirk turned around (when she explicitly asked him not to) and she was reduced to a sex object. sigh. it all started to go downhill from that point on. the little scene with kirk in bed with two girls (who had tails of some description) must have been about ten seconds long and was totally superfluous in terms of the plot. we already know kirk is a womanizer; we see it in his confidence flirting with women, so do we really need to see it in action? no.
now let’s talk about uhura. look how revolutionary her character was in the original series! and now look what she’s been reduced to! when kirk’s emotions get the better of him, he is depicted as heroic; when the same thing happens to uhura, it only serves to create tension in her relationship (which is also frankly ridiculous if you ask me. i’ve seen people say that it’s a device to humanise spock, but let’s face it, he’s about 500 times more attached to kirk). did she have any lines that weren’t about spock? i’d like to watch it again to count. but i’m incredibly disappointed that one of my favourite characters from the last film, a frigging lieutenant on the USS Enterprise thank you very much, became a damsel-in-distress and The Overly-Emotional Girlfriend in one fell swoop.
i think it says a lot when a franchise that started off in the 1960s has barely evolved fifty years later. if you have the opportunity to reboot something, i feel you also have an obligation to modernise aspects other than just visual effects. J.J. & co failed dramatically in that department.