First, let me correct your erroneous fanboy misconceptions. Kirk didn't cheat on any test to gain entrance into the Academy. How you arrived at that conclusion if you're "a longtime Trek fan" is a mystery. Kirk cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test, as depicted in the film, after having taken the test twice before and failing both times. Kirk didn't fail because he was inept or because he screwed up in any way...he failed because the test was designed to BREAK EVERYONE WHO TAKES IT. No one wins the test. The character of the person taking the test is being evaluated. Academy instructors want to see how officer candidates handle challenging, life-and-death situations with the Kobayashi Maru test.
Kirk cheated because he was sticking his thumb in everyone's eye. He saw through the test after failing it twice. That's why in the new film, Kirk was depicted as being so cocky and glib while he cheated his heart out. His belief that there are no "no-win" scenarios very much demonstrated his character, as did his cheating so openly and publicly.
Since Kirk isn't depicted as cheating in any other Academy endeavor (you know, like tests where applicable knowledge could eventually be a true matter of life or death) and since the character as a whole doesn't cheat anything but death time after time, it is silly to say cheating is the BIG, WEIGHTY ETHICAL DILEMMA of the movie. I think the BIG, WEIGHTY ETHICAL DILEMMAS of this particular movie were A) To see how much smoke the filmmakers could blow up the butts of all Trekkies everywhere in the world, and B) How much cash they could make in how short a period of time.
In short, Kirk cheated on one test to say "Screw you" to not only the people who came up with the test, but to the whole concept of the "no-win??? scenario, not because he was a poor or lazy student who couldn't cope with his peers.
Oh, and author Marc Bain is 100% correct to question the loud, flashy, and obnoxious nature of the movie versus the thoughtful character driven work that preceded it. This was an incredibly over hyped film that was a mediocre Hollywood style entry in the series as a whole. Why it's being praised as heavily as it is remains one of the great mysteries of the moment.
PS: Way to tip your hand there with the Republican bashing. You brought politics up, not the other guy. Raw nerve much?
Enterprise Ethics
The original 'Star Trek' series dealt with important issues of the day, while the new film is all explosions and action.
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Despite whatever robots and aliens roam the landscapes of science fiction, the genre's real subject has always been people. Since "Star Trek" first hit the airwaves in 1966, the show has worked as part of this tradition, using extraterrestrial settings to ask ethical and philosophical questions about the way people behave. In this way, the TV series commented on most of the big issues of the past 40 years: war, sexism, racism, animal rights, the environment, religion, sexuality.
In an episode titled "Plato's Stepchildren," for instance, Captain Kirk tells a slave who's been treated unfairly because of his appearance, "Where I come from, size, shape or color makes no difference." This was in 1968, when the civil-rights movement was still very much battling for equality, and only seven and a half months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was also in this episode that Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, played by the actress Nichelle Nichols, who was black, shared television's first (fictional) black-white interracial kiss.
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"[Star Trek] motivated us to think about things that most people either don't think about or take for granted," says Judith Barad, a professor of philosophy at Indiana State University and coauthor of "The Ethics of Star Trek." "I think—and this is why it's lasted—it gave us a vision of hope for the future, a goal that we could all aspire to."
The latest film version of "Star Trek," however, is more brawn than brain, and it largely jettisons complicated ethical conundrums in favor of action sequences and special effects. The film shows the beginnings of the Enterprise crew, tracing how Kirk, Spock and the others came together. All the character quirks are there, and the Enterprise is rendered more realistically than ever, but what's missing are the typically progressive politics and moral dilemmas that made the original "Trek" more than a space-age adventure show and helped earn it legions of ardent fans. Where the series often condemned conflict and advocated forgiveness, the new film depicts a violent and war-torn future, reveling in big explosions and revenge. In one noteworthy scene, an offer of mercy to the villain by the Enterprise crew becomes an apparently pleasurable opportunity for retribution, leading to a screen full of twisting metal and laser fire.
Not that earlier iterations of "Star Trek" never indulged in laser battles, but the high points of the series generally involved stories that focused on sophisticated philosophical or ethical ideas. In one fan favorite, an episode from "The Next Generation" titled "I, Borg," the Enterprise discovers a wrecked ship and its lone survivor, an adolescent Borg. The Borg are an alien species that, though made up of individuals, act as a single consciousness, connected to each other through a cybernetic network. They have a history of belligerence, having once kidnapped Captain Picard and attacked and virtually wiped out the race of another character, Guinan, played by Whoopi Goldberg. Much of the episode focuses on Picard and Guinan struggling with their impulse to destroy the Borg. As the Borg, cut off from the collective mind, begins to recognize itself as an individual, so do Picard and Guinan. The drama is mostly internal, and the main themes are empathy and forgiveness. It is, in a sense, the antithesis of the new movie.
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