J Tyran said:
You think Star Trek: Nemesis is good, I think that gives an appropriate value to your opinions. Pines acting when he sees whatever ship that happens to be and realizes the mess he is in and that Pikes comment about getting his whole crew killed might come true is fairly good.
You claim Star Trek fans are in denial and its true, they are in denial but not for the reasons you give. The fans that are in denial are the ones that claim the new Star Trek films are nothing like the old ones when the opposite is true. They are exactly like the old ones, they just have modern SFX and modern action sensibilities.
Er... no. No, they're really not.
The old Star Trek series was a television show which challenged its audience. It wasn't about explosions or space ship battles. It was about putting the crew of the Enterprise in various ethically and philosophically challenging situations, and through them trying to get the audience to challenge their own beliefs and assumptions.
You know how the original Star Trek had a multi-racial, multi-gender crew? That was
unheard of at the time. The very premise of the show set up a future where humanity had overcome its petty tribal differences, and things such as racism and sexism were a thing of the past. This was a show that came out in the
Sixties, when racism and sexism were still common currency. Star Trek challenged audience members to look at their views on race, on gender, on nationality, and to see if they were really worth holding on to. It was the first show to portray on screen a kiss between a white character and a black one. That, at the time, was a huge Fuck You to establishment thinking, and it's one of the key moments of racial portrayal in pop culture.
Not only that, but the Prime Directive was a hugely important narrative tool that led to some incredibly morally challenging stories for the time. The Sixties was a period when people still clung to absolute ideals of Good and Evil, no doubt fuelled by the pervasive Cold War us-vs-them culture and the continued dominance of Christianity. With the Prime Directive, and its insistence that there can be no interference with the internal developments of alien civilisations, Star Trek created stories that went far beyond clear Good Vs Evil. Kirk, Spock and the crew were forced to face difficult decisions where
there weren't any easy choices. It's easy now, post Sopranos and The Wire, to take this ethically challenging narrative style for granted, but at the time it was unheralded. The original Star Trek series tackled themes of slavery, discrimination and war, and did so with a (for the time) incredibly enlightened and modern mindset. This was a show that challenged all the accepted bigotries of the day, and inspired millions of people around the world to dream of a future where discrimination and bigotry were a relic of history.
What did the Star trek reboot do to carry on that legacy? What great ethical conundrums were there? What analysis did it offer of human bigotries? What philosophical musings? The reboot film was a shallow action film with wonky storytelling that simply wore the face of Star Trek like Hannibal Lecter.
And now they're going to do it again with Into Darkness. Must we accept it? No. I will not sacrifice the old Star trek series. They've made too many compromises already, too many retcons. They rewrite the characters, and we accept it. They destroy entire worlds, and we accept it. Not again! The line must be drawn
here!
This far! No further! And I will make Abrams
pay for what he's done!
