You wanna stick with Montalban, Javier Bardem!
Because that guy ain't caucasian and successful. /S
Really, this whole shebang about Khan being whitewashed is the most irritating, obnoxious hollywood ****fest that has crossed my eyes for the past month.
That's mostly because the *only* redeeming quality of ST:ID *IS* Cumberbatch.
But not all - really, the "whitewashing" discussion ought to be interesting, yet it is not. The true fact is that this ain't your granddaddy's Star Trek. Roddenberry's Star Trek was always about crossing really outlandish boundaries of social norms. A Black Woman as the fourth-in-command inside the Federation flagship! A Russian helm! An alien
second in command! Next, a bald guy in command (and French!) because "no one in the 24th century will give a damn if you are bald or not"! A frakkin
android as a commander inside your own flagship! A Woman as captain!
You would think that coming into the 21st century, new "frontiers" could be crossed? No. J.J. doesn't give a **** about social revolutions and a vision for the future. He wants an adventchur in spaace with lazors and "punch-its" and warpships and Xplosions and ****.
Or I am being too grumpy. He *did* place two hot furries having sex with Kirk after all. Real social revolution right there.
That's the real victim here. Without this soul, Star Trek ain't anymore itself, people feel it and then say stupid things like "Ahh, yeah Cumberbatch was badly cast COZ HE'S WHITE". Really. Is that the problem here? Because I can write a wall of text comparing this ****fest of a movie with the original one to which this tries to pay homage to. I'll spare you the wall, just bear with me for a paragraph or two.
The original movie had multiple layers of thematics that were pervasive in the entire movie that danced between each other, collated several different scales of problems and made sense of them all together, tying themselves amazingly well at the end. Spock gives the book
A Tale of two cities as a birthday present to Kirk, a middle-age-crisis man who is unsure what to do with his life, but the words in that book will be the most important lesson. The "sci-fi-problem" in the movie is a weapon that is a creation device. Brilliant connundrum, philosophically fascinating, which at the same time marks the endgame with Khan and the rebirth of Kirk's soul symbolized by the terraforming by the Genesis device. Its destructive power symbolized Khan's dark want of revenge, Moby Dick and so on and so on.
What to make of this new charade of a flick? Is there even anything to read in it other than click-BOOM bazziiiin, ZUT, punch it!,letsgo,WARP, OMGITSKHANwithBASSVOICE!splash,TREASON!Laz0rBEAMrocktRUNRUNRUN Win!! ?
Any motif? Any symbolism at all? Isn't the new not-really-a-sacrifice in the end
NOW WITH A TWIST! just tasteless? I mean really, now they are not even allowed to die in present-day films?
I didn't like this one movie. One. Bit. And I couldn't care less about what race is Cumberbatch, FFS.
PS: You know, now that I think of it, it has another redeeming quality: it understands its complete camp-****ty quality and dares to cast Robocop as the main antagonist. I was always waiting for ED-209 to come up and shoot everyone up and turn the movie into something at least
true to its material.
