Downs – "I Traded My Eyes"

Warp Speed to SPOILERS!

One common complaint with the JJ Abrams Star Treks is they don’t have enough “philosophy.” Ie. a Star Trek movie should have an allegory or a main point, whereas the NuTrek is more of an action movie in space.

I held that opinion myself until a day or two after seeing Star Trek Into Darkness, when I got hit with some fridge brilliance. Kirk averts war with the Klingons by doing the right thing. He disobeys an order in order to do things by the book.

And Kirk defeats a terrorist not by killing him with a cruise missile, not through torture, and not by busting in and shooting him in the head. He brings the terrorist back for trial. Granted, cryosleep is such an extreme violation of habeus corpus that would make Dick Cheney blush with shame. But c’mon, this is the biggest liberal statement in Star Trek since the interracial kiss.

They don’t make a big deal about it, but it’s there if you want to look for it.

Other than that, I’d say I dug Into Darkness more than the median. It had its share of plot holes, but I put it in a category with Looper and Dark Knight Rises rather than Prometheus. I think a Star Trek movie is practically impossible (I’ll talk about that next week), but I think Abrams & Co. came about as close as can be expected.