Breaking The Fire Didn't Bend Rule

So I'm at the movies the other day, and I see the trailer for the new Star Trek movie that's supposed to come out in May. And I don't really care as I grew out of the Star Trek universe many, many years ago. But...

You see, I watched the original series, and I've read lots of sci-fi, and there's just something about that trailer that is really, really bugging me.

In case you don't know, this movie goes back to the beginning, to when Kirk was just a literal space cadet and Spock was still supposedly battling emotions and McCoy was just a young country doctor and Sulu wasn't gay. And there's bit in the trailer where we see Kirk on a motorcycle and he's in a field somewhere, and off in the distance, he's watching them assemble a huge starship -- maybe the Enterprise.

Now any of you who know your beginning science -- as well as some of the show's history -- knows that the Enterprise was a ship built for traveling in outer space, where there is no atmosphere. It's not built to travel in an atmosphere -- a point made in the show a couple of times -- as it will burn up and fall apart and disintegrate. It's purely a space vehicle. Which is why, in the first movie, there's this endless sequence of Kirk in a shuttle craft flying around the brand new version of the Enterprise as it's being assembled in Earth orbit.

But in this preview, it's being assembled on Earth. And this bugs me.

A good friend of mine has this rule that I call "but the fire didn't bend" rule. It comes from Independence Day when there was a scene of fire exploding down a tunnel. And one of our characters ducks into an open door that is to the side. She doesn't close the door, she just ducks inside. But the fire just went right past her instead of coming into her space. And my friend just went nuts. The movie lost him at the point because the logic failed. Sure, that was a popcorn sci-fi movie that wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but because of that mistake, he couldn't see himself in that universe.

And that's where I'm at on this Star Trek movie. It hasn't even come out yet, but already it has failed "but the fire didn't bend" rule. A ship like that can't be built on Earth because it can't operate in an atmosphere. Yet in the movie, that's what they do. And I'm stopping now because my head's hurting.