#i'm back on my star trek kick and i'm fuckin pissed

[criticalbread]

okay so i’m watching Star Trek: Into Darkness for only the second time, and for the first time since I saw it in theatres, and I’m so... it’s so bad? That doesn’t even deserve multiple question marks signifying uptalk, just a single, despairing one. 

I just... I can barely. The cold open on the ‘primitive world’ absolutely made me want to kick someone. I just know they did not consult anyone with any kind of anthropological training on that bullshit, instead settling to go with the most offensive and dated Victorian armchair anthropologist bullshit about a “”primitive”” “”””savage”””” society with its silly, silly spiritual religiosity but, oh, of course the moment they encounter “”””civilized”””” “”””””””””technologically advanced””””””””””” beings they literally throw down their holy object or text (LITERALLY chuck it on the GROUND) and start worshiping a star ship they saw for 30 seconds. Literally worshiping the “civilized advanced white men strangers” because obviously they would, right? Because obviously they would, obviously, OBVIOUSLY h o l y shit

they managed to start the entire film off on a truly offensive foot and then they just... they just kept going with it. doggedly.

Like, this movie disrespects its audience but also just disrespects the source material. Star Trek: The Original Series was so fucking ahead of its time. It was revolutionary. It predicted a peaceful future for all of mankind that, after having overcome the racism, sexism, conscriptive gender norms, capitalism, nationalism, intellectual apathy, violence and war-- after overcoming all this, they decided to take to the stars in a peaceful venture to meet other beings and learn from them. Star Trek TOS was not perfect because it was made by humans who are products of their times who view everything through the lens of their cultural experiences, but to laud it as anything but revolutionary would be to purposefully ignore everything it did with its airtime, from the very premise of the show to the characters and worlds chosen to fill it. It stood for the equality of peoples across all identities and respect across axes of difference in identity and experience.

Then we get this film that from the very start chucks all this down the chute with the way it frames society and Starfleet’s interaction with new worlds (the visual and textual storytelling juxtaposition of “primitive” new society vs the “advanced” humans/people of Starfleet, the simple “savage” life vs the complex, technologically developed “civilized” society, the belief that the basic truth of these differences, inherent within the peoples themselves, would lead a fully-developed and discreet socio-cultural group to worship the “advanced” outsiders from the very first encounter ugh i’m going to barf even saying this. This is literally a trope of old colonialist, racist anthropological thought that of course a primitive society would recognize the advanced nature of invading Western men and worship them as gods because ho ho ho the “savages” can’t tell the difference between technology and magic, men and gods, of course! get fucked). So from the very start the film shits all over that, and then within a half hour we get to see the Starfleet that they have decided on: not a peacekeeping, pacifistic, knowledge-seeking group of humanitarians, but a very American militaristic group. They even say it in the film! Scotty confronts Kirk about it! Right before he is forced to resign because that is not Starfleet and not what he signed up for!

And hold my fucking hat, because besides committing the sin of completely leaving behind its source material’s heart in the name of Cool Big Explosion And Man Pain, the film itself is just... badly written. Terrible! Kirk is on a mission to avenge his fallen father figure Admiral Pike and so agrees to go on a militaristic hit-mission with some fun weird missiles on his ship. Spock tries to talk him out of it by pointing out its complete lack of moral grounding because Vulcan culture is utterly committed to non-violence and the preservation and sanctity of life and, hello, this is immoral even by America’s (immoral) modern standards of justice (no trial, etc.). Spock tries to talk him out of it and when expressing his own belief fails, he simply says he hopes Kirk will take the time to come to that moral conclusion himself (As, you know, presumably a good person); Kirk goes to talk to Scotty, tries to force him to sign the missiles on board; Scotty quits, aaaaaaaaand five minutes later on the bridge Kirk is like, “Listen everyone we’re just going to go capture this guy and not use any kind of missiles to kill him, k, thanks”. Like. Did you decide this in the walk to the bridge? Before you even dumped Chief Engineer status on Chekov (out of the blue, as if Starfleet wouldn’t have a structure of command that has someone under Scotty waiting and willing and actually assigned to take over in the case of his leaving, death, or absence)?

Like, my dude, you literally could have turned around since y’all h’aint even left yet. You can dump the damn missiles back onto the loading docks because you’ve decided you don’t need them, call Scotty and apologize, get him back on board gods be willing, then go back on your merry way! Cool! Capture the guy! Why are we leaving Scotty and Keenser behind? Besides for to add to the contrived plot of this movie which requires these useful fucking missiles as a plot devise and source of conflict?

(I’m literally watching this movie in a boba cafe and clasped my hands over my mouth when Scotty was shucked off by the plot! What! I’m not even emotionally invested in this terrible film and I! Was! Appalled! Bring Scotty back you cowards, you absolute reprobates, what are you even doing this is a Star Trek film.)

I’m like forty minutes in to this fucking movie and I already have so much to complain about, from an anthro perspective as well as a media studies perspective AS WELL AS someone who fucking loves TOS. We haven’t even gotten to the bit about Khan’s identity, or the whitewashing of the character and the huge step backwards THAT was, or how Uhura’s character was fundamentally flattened down to nothing more than a two-dimensional FemaleTM role consisting of “fights with my boyfriend” and “i’m here to emotionally support the male frontrunners because female nurturance”. And let’s not forget the use of women’s unclad bodies as props and voyeuristic objects, and why the fuck would James T “I Respect Women” Kirk be watching a woman undress when asked to turn around Y’ALL

I’m gonna keep watching but god and jesus know I’m gonna have something to say within like... twenty minutes.