Star Trek

[Jimmie Higgins]

Anyone seen the new Star Trek movie? I was entertained but also highly unsatisfied - I also thought there were some troubbling issues politically as well as with the plot.

I thought the first movie was very entertaining and enjoyable, if not all that inspiring or "deep". But for a summer movie it fit the bill better than most. It avoided a lot of the issues of "prequelness" that other franchizes fall into, but I felt this movie had a severe case of prequil-itus, where things happened, not because they made sense in the context of the movie, but because they reference the original.

My main political unease was the depiction of non-human civilizations and a strange "savagness" vs. "civilization" motif when it came to non-human humanoids.

[Prairie Fire]

Just saw it yesterday.



My main political unease was the depiction of non-human civilizations and a strange "savagness" vs. "civilization" motif when it came to non-human humanoids.


Yeah, at the beginning there, the crew are getting chased by spear throwing aliens who worship things at the drop of a hat. This mirrors the general perception of indigenous cultures through the eyes of the colonizer: superstitious fawning supplicants or whooping belligerents attacking the wagon train.

They could have made them slightly more 2-dimensional.

The Klingons portrayed on screen were black this time around. I also noticed that they had an entire sub-conflict about Uhura fighting with Spock about their relationship. I don't know if this was racial dog-whistle ( black womyn arguing with her man in public, in a "sassy" way,), or a commentary on Womyn in general ( you know how emotional and irrational *****es get :rolleyes:), or maybe a bit of both.

They also made gratuitous use of female sexuality. There's a whole scene where the Admirals daughter is changing clothes right behind Kirk, tells him to "turn around", and he peeks, just so that they could have a flimsy pretext to reveal her partially nude. This was a fragment that made the trailer, used to sell the movie. Because all Trekkies are guys; womynfolk only care about pretty shoes.

http://www.tacomaweekly.com/assets/tacomaweekly/upload/article/trekkies.jpg


The general plot has redeeming qualities.( Spoiler alerts).

In the wake of a terrorist attack, the Enterprise trails the culprit to the home world of their arch-enemies. It is revealed that the higher-ups in their own military command structure are deliberately setting them up to create a pretext to ignite a war with said arch-enemies. They defeat the warmonger, and prevent a war of aggression from taking place.

The real-world parallels are obvious, and in light of the geopolitical events of the last decade, it is progressive. If this had been a Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer project, the sentiments and the moral of the story would have been radically different.


Politically, it was a mixed bag. Still, too much beastie boys and lens flares for my liking (albeit, they are more infrequent and mercifully shorter this time around).