Great piece showing ST: Into Darkness parallels with recent US political history (SPOILERS!!)
(If you've been living in seclusion the last few months and don't want to know the plot lines of ST: Into Darkness, stop now...)
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Now – is this Starfleet still based on the idealism of the 1960’s America? No. With STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, the Darkness of the film isn’t Khan. It isn’t the Klingons or the Romulans, it’s the Darkness that has infected policy in STARFLEET. In other words, this is a metaphor for a Post-9/11 America. In JJ’s Verse, he has a Kirk that doesn’t yet value the core beliefs of STARFLEET… Meanwhile, the rest of his crew… good souls like Spock and Scotty… They raise these issues with Kirk, but Kirk doesn’t want to hear it. He’s us. Kirk has always been us. But just like Kirk, we’ve changed.
Vengeance has become something our Country seeks. Since 9/11 – we have adjusted our core beliefs and laws to make things more convenient for a government that has been given a license to seek vengeance and protect us at all costs.
This STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS is about the very basis of what a democracy should be built upon. To serve as a reminder of what STAR TREK really meant, what we’re supposed to be not on our BEST day but on our WORST.
How far STARFLEET has gone is so far, that for a bit… Khan and Kirk are united in a fight against a monster of a ship called VENGEANCE helmed by Peter Weller’s Admiral Marcus – the man in charge of Starfleet – whose personal fear has hijacked this great institution. The invention of stealth, long-range photon torpedoes that can be fired from a great distance… sounds like DRONE technology. And when Spock and Scotty speak out against the use of that tech, that’s a conversation that we as a people are currently having.
We as a people are better than who we are right now, if we stop and think about the toll our post-9/11 policies have taken upon the character of our great nation. Remember, Shatner’s Kirk… at the end of SPACE SEED, set Khan and his people to live upon a planet where they would have a chance to live their dream.
In this post-Vulcan Starfleet, Khan was found. The rest of his crew were kept on ICE and he was evaluated and used to nefarious ends by a perversion of our Government. You could go so far as to say Khan is Bin Laden, an enemy that we once used for our own purposes against a common enemy, the Russians/Klingons here. When that partnership ended, and suddenly Starfleet comes under attack, he’s quickly assigned blame and eventually a mission is drawn up to assassinate him so he won’t talk. What KHAN has to say is something that Peter Weller’s Admiral can not allow to happen, because that story is a story that the people can’t be allowed to hear.
This is a very political film. Moreso than I ever anticipated going in.
More.
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/62477
