Editor’s Note: This article was first published in May of 2013. It is being reprinted as part of a new weekend series at PJ Lifestyle collecting and organizing the top 50 best lists. Where will this great piece end up on the list? Reader feedback will be factored in when the PJ Lifestyle Top 50 List Collection is completed in a few months…
Some things about Star Trek apparently never change…
Leave aside the fact that the second episode in the relaunch of the Starship Enterprise should have been called Star Trek: Into Derpness. Try to get past the fact that Bones McCoy kind of looks like Dan Rather and speaks in Rather’s bonehead country-fried metaphors, or that Uhura keeps whining at Spock for not being a caring enough lover (what’d she expect when she started dating a Vulcan), or that the filmmakers don’t even pretend to come up with a valid reason to show curvy blonde actress Alice Eve (who plays a new character) in her underwear, or that a fratboy actor as lightweight as Chris Pine would have had a hard time nabbing a role as a private first class in a 1940s war movie.
Let’s get to the issue none of the liberal writers will touch: What does this movie tell us about Hollywood and the War on Terror? First, that la-la land thinks the war is over. And second, the filmmakers now feel the coast is clear to resume their normal anti-American propaganda.
The far-left stance of the movie is fairly overt. Things gets rolling with a terrorist attack in London launched by a mysterious rogue officer (Benedict Cumberbatch, whose acting is so superior to everyone else’s that it’s like watching John Gielgud do a guest shot on Friends). Wedged amongst the reams of techno-gobbledygook in the script, here are four ways the movie is infecting young minds with left-liberal rubbish. (Mild spoilers follow, but I’ll keep it vague.)
1) The Voice of Reason and Morality Warns that It’s “By Definition” Immoral to Kill a Known Terrorist on a Foreign Battlefield Instead of Bringing Him to Trial.
On a mission to hunt down the murderous Harrison (Cumberbatch), Spock (Zachary Quinto) tells the hotheaded Kirk (Chris Pine) that assassinating the terrorist — whose lethal acts Kirk and others have eyewitnessed — would be obviously wrong. Director J.J. Abrams and his team of hack screenwriters (Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof) are striking a stance on the demise of Osama Bin Laden so extreme that no one to the right of Michael Moore would dare utter it. But because the message is concealed in a noisy blockbuster, the filmmakers are hoping they can get away with it.
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2) Search Within for True Villainy.
It’s an article of faith on the Left that the U.S. is ultimately to blame for Osama Bin Laden because we backed the Afghanistan Mujahideen in their 1980s fight against the Soviet Union, and some of our weapons fell into the hands of their successors in the Taliban. The notion dovetails perfectly with the loopy John Lennon pacifist fantasy that if only one side — us — would stop being combative, then there would be no more wars. While it can make for a more enriching movie experience to have good and evil mixed up a little, the heavy-handedness of Into Darkness clearly places its sympathies in the Blame America First camp.
3) “The Enemy of my Enemy Is My Friend.”
This phrase, repeated by Kirk and often associated (as Spock replies) with Arab folk wisdom, is meant to signify Kirk’s tendency to lose his temper and think with his gut. Ultimately, Kirk’s approach is the right one considering the forces he’s up against (and Spock’s repeated warnings that he’s about to make a colossal blunder never pan out, making Spock a sort of C3PO minus the shrillness). But the purpose of the line in the script is to confuse Western tactics with those of Islamism — to effectively state (as John Le Carré made a career of arguing in his Cold War spy novels) that we’re no better than they are.
4) The Big Concluding Speech.
In case you missed any of the signals scattered throughout the movie, Abrams’ writers tell you exactly what to think about the War on Terror in the closing seconds. One of the leads argues in the end that there will always be those who will wish to do us harm — but that to stop them we risk awakening evil in ourselves. Sure, and Guantanamo must be closed immediately, right, fellas? Amusing as it is to realize that Hollywood is well to the left of even Barack Obama — and that this is just the beginning of the age of disguised cinematic attacks on The One from the left — the moral equivalence argument simply won’t wash in a country that welcomes and celebrates immigrants like the Tsarnaev brothers, only to be savagely attacked in return. Sorry, Hollywood, we’re not just like them. We’re better.
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