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?
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Enterprise Ethics
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"'Star Trek' is not about the special effects. It's about the human condition," says Susan Sackett, who was a longtime assistant to "Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and a production associate on several "Trek" projects. "There were lessons to be learned in a lot of the episodes, and people were better for it."
Science fiction, by nature, comments on the time in which it's made, postulating a future that is either better or worse depending on what we make of the present. When "Trek" first appeared, race relations, the women's movement, the Vietnam War and the Cold War were key social issues, and the show dealt with all of them, even if obliquely. Lieutenant Uhura was the first black female character on television with a major role. One crew member, Pavel Chekov, was Russian, even though the Soviet Union was considered the biggest threat to the U.S. in the 1960s. Even the crew's first rule of conduct, the Prime Directive, essentially stated that they were not to interfere in the development of other cultures. According to Sackett, that was Roddenberry's way of criticizing U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Roberto Orci, who co-wrote the script for the current film with Alex Kurtzman and whose previous projects include "Transformers" and "Mission: Impossible III," doesn't agree that the ethical questions that were so prominent in "Star Trek's" history are absent from the new movie. "The whole movie is an exploration of what it is to cheat." (Cheating is, in fact, one theme in the film.) According to Orci, who says he's a "Trek" fan, the goal of the film was to introduce the characters to a new generation of fans while satisfying longtime Trekkers. To do this, the movie's creators had to choose which aspects of the old "Trek" to keep and which to lose. What went was an image of the future in which war, if it occurs, is with alien races, not between humans. "Some of the complaints about [earlier versions of] "Star Trek" have been that it got a little bit too utopian," he says.
"Trek" wasn't always that way. "The City on the Edge of Forever," from the original series' first season, has as an important plot point an alternate timeline in which an antiwar activist inadvertently helps Nazi Germany win World War II. It's also true that the original series was sometimes guilty of the vices it chastised. The women of the Enterprise wore miniskirts and go-go boots; Kirk was always sleeping with conspicuously attractive female aliens; and the show's main heroes—Kirk, Spock and McCoy—were all white men. And some critics have argued that the ethical points were often handled obviously. Sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card says that in the best fiction, these points are incorporated beneath the surface of the story, and that makes them more effective. In "Trek," they were blunt, a sign that the writing was poor, he says: "[Ethics] are obviously being discussed, which is why Roddenberry is given so much credit for being so deep. It's simply proof that he was incompetent at it."
Still, the show's hopeful tack—artful or not—was groundbreaking for its time and resonated with generations of viewers. Orci says he and Kurtzman deliberately tried to make the new "Star Trek" reflect its time in the same way the original series did during the '60s. "We consciously, without trying to hit it over the head, related [the movie] to the recent events of this decade, [one of the biggest] being September 11," he says. Maybe so. But their vision of our time is perhaps less optimistic than Gene Roddenberry's original, 40 years ago, and the big moral lessons are nowhere to be found. Sure, it's just a summer blockbuster, but by leaving out the spirit of ethical inquiry, the new "Trek" isn't true to the show, or its fans.
© 2009
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