Posts tagged ‘Star Trek’

In loving memory of the hopes I had cultivated of actually doing NaNoWriMo this year, I’ll be attempting to post at least something to atypicalreview every day of November. Two things today though, to make up for yesterday.

As those of you who will have read Jackson’s Star Trek review will one day know,¹ this year J.J. Abrams brought us a pretty impressive film. I was even able to rise above my childhood Doctor Who versus Star Trek rivalry to enjoy it. Perfectly paced, funny, exciting, moving.

It’s just out on DVD, Blu-Ray, and iTunes as well. May I caution you as an aside; do not just buy it on iTunes. It’ll cost you $25 there, but for an extra $5 you could get the blu-ray edition which comes with its own digital iTunes copy. Even if you don’t have a blu-ray player, one day you might. Think about it.

Anyhow, that’s not the point, as you may have guessed from the picture up in the top left hand corner.² What people often rightly applaud Star Trek for is its agenda of social progress and togetherness and the triumph of humanity against its base urges. The first inter-racial kiss on television. The first romance between a cyborg and an artificial intelligence.³ So it surprised me somewhat to be watching the scenes deleted from Star Trek and to find a pretty ropey scene between our hero Kirk and an Orion woman. Allow me to paraphrase:

KIRK: I’m really sorry. I realise it looks like I used you shamefully but I won’t actually come out and say that I did. I’m very awkward right now. I’m even a bit reluctant to make eye contact with you but I clearly have on several occasions in this sentence.
…pause…
You’re not Gaila, are you?

For those playing at home, that’s a joke about how all girls with green skin look the same and how Kirk can’t tell them apart. And we’re not talking about girls he’s barely met. We’re talking about girls he’s slept with. Take a moment to think about just how that’d play if, say, Kirk had the same issue but with Uhura and another girl of similar skin colour.

Luckily, it didn’t make it to the film. But not because it was in bad taste — in fact, J.J. and his crew still seem to think it’s really funny. It’s all a bit weird. How tragic that on the same day that I note that anti-robot stereotypes are on the decline, we see once again the ugly face of intergalactic racism. Truly, equal rights in genre movies is an ongoing battle.

1. Patience my children. Remember the parable of the Not Fade Away review. ↩
2. I reserve the right to one day change the layout of this website and not update this sentence. ↩
3. Well, almost-romance. Curse you, Voyager! ↩

A review will surely appear, but until it does, I feel like somewhere on this site we should add our voices to the choir and mention how awesome Star Trek is. Or, as Hoyts cinema insist on calling it, Star Trek 11 — a name that completely works against the way they’ve been trying to market it. There’s a reason why we didn’t see Batman V or James Bond 22.