Star Trek: Into Darkness

[aelfgyfu_mead]

It's all spoilers, just so you know.

I didn't like the reboot for reasons I won't bore you with outside of a cut (but inside of a cut, it's too dark to see

Comments

[joonscribble]

Thanks for the article! I'm interested to know if the author's opinion has changed at all now that the movie's come out. As good as BC was in his portrayal, I couldn't help but notice that his Khan was written pretty flatly. Montalban's Khan wasn't the most complex villain ever but he certainly had more going on than BC's Khan. In that way, I was almost happy that if Khan was going to get re-written as a 2-dimensional terrorist, making him White felt somehow "better." Not that "better" is exactly the word. Perhaps the lesser of two insults?

I also think it's a problem in a series of movies where white, blue-eyed Kirk seems to be captain of the Enterprise for behaving badly, and most of the people under him are not white (or are half-Vulcan) but much better behaved!

I can't quite decide if this is an issue with the current filmmakers or an issue of them trying to translate a very dated trope to modern times. No one blinked an eye back in the day when Montalban was cast as an Indian character (in darkening foundation make up no less) and I'm sure no one batted an eye at the idea that heroism = white men behaving badly. But the whole idea of the very White Kirk basically disregarding rules and getting rewarded for it while those who are non-White who behave according to the rules and are ignored feels more problematic now.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

As good as BC was in his portrayal, I couldn't help but notice that his Khan was written pretty flatly.
Yes! I found myself having sympathy for the character, and I credit that totally to the actor: I couldn't help but be moved when he talked about his people, but that didn't make sense of the things he did in the movie. I'd start to feel sympathetic, and then I'd remember that he killed 42 people just to get the higher-ups of Starfleet together so that he could kill one of them in vengeance, and my sympathy evaporated.

Montalban's Khan had more depth partly because he had more backstory, in "Space Seed"-but he had also been clearly driven to the edge of sanity by the two decades of suffering he and his people had endured. We got to see him interact with his people, which BC's Khan didn't get to do because they were all frozen.

I did wonder after I posted if the movie-makers actively chose not to have the man who bombs London and makes quite a mess of San Francisco be non-white. We're told that Khan is "savage," so it's not as if a person of color playing the character would avoid racefail for the movie either! So, yes: perhaps the lesser of two insults.

I've heard that Benicio del Toro was offered the role but turned it down-but of course he's no more Indian than Ricardo Montalban! Here's an article; I don't know how reliable it is. Why they then offered it to BC is anyone's guess.