Thursday, May 16, 2013

I Don't Care If You Don't Get It

From a piece on Benedict Cumberbatch (the best name in show biz since Stirling Silliphant), who's in Star Trek Into Darkness, which opens today.

In the film there’s a debate among Starfleet personnel over how best to extract an enemy in a distant part of the galaxy — and whether that enemy should be subjected to due process.

The British actor says: “It’s no spoiler I think to say that there’s a huge backbone in this film that’s a comment on recent U.S. interventionist overseas policy from the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era.”

I see. So they finally decided to do Paul Kinsey's script.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well movies comment on current political conditions all the time and as long as they are not to agitprop or obvious that's generally fine. I think the question of "rendition" or the concept or outsourcing unpleasantness or compromising certain principles for the sake of other ones (or however you want to frame it) are all great themes to take on. However I do object to the notion of a "backbone" of a film that's a "comment"- that just fails basic literacy. (Does the New Yorker still do "Block That Metaphor"?)

8:19 AM, May 16, 2013  
Blogger LAGuy said...

Science fiction is a great forum for commenting on issues of the day--unless it's wrenched into a situation (are you listening, George Lucas?) or done ham-handedly, and Cumberbatch's comment suggest this film will be a bit less subtle than "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield."

11:31 AM, May 16, 2013  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

George Lucas wasn't bad actually-only the true believers seemed to mind much

7:39 PM, May 16, 2013  
Blogger LAGuy said...

He wasn't bad originally, but then he decided to respond to George Bush with lines about how we vote away our freedom and how you can't just call things evil--jarring lines that not only didn't fit the situtation well, but went against everything he'd built up in Star Wars.

8:12 PM, May 16, 2013  
Anonymous Lawrence King said...

I wonder if Starfleet will reject the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld tactic of imprisoning people without due process, and elect an enlightened Federation Commissioner who will replace imprisoning-without-warrant to killing-by-robot-without warrant? And then in the next scene, all his enlightened constituents will cheer for him without ever feeling hypocritical?

Naw, that's too far out for science fiction.

5:08 PM, May 17, 2013  

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