"Are you Starfleet or private security?" Lieutenant Commander Scott asks a man—a very big man—who is pointing a phaser at him. "You look like private security." And "Star Trek Into Darkness" looks like an allegory about drones or civil liberties—or something. But in neither case are the questions posed answered: the big man with the gun is swept out of an airlock before we learn whether he will reveal the twenty-third-century name for Blackwater. (There will be spoilers in this post.) And by the time, close to the end, a falling spaceship slices into some tall, shining skyscrapers, causing the towers to collapse on themselves, the movie's efforts to make a coherent point about counterterrorism have already done the same.
The setup to the movie does have promise. There is a mystery attack on a library that kills a few dozen people. Starfleet gathers its commanders, including James T. Kirk, who is in trouble for recent rule-breaking. (Long story, involving a volcano: basically, Kirk was more of a humanitarian interventionist than the Prime Directive allows.) Kirk correctly but belatedly guesses that there will be a follow-up attack—the model is the second I.E.D. that takes out the first responders, a sequence we've seen often in the past few years—and watches his mentor die. Someone called John Harrison, supposedly a member of Starfleet military intelligence, is identified as the terrorist. He has fled to the federally administered tribal areas—actually, to an uninhabited region of the Klingons' home planet. It would be an act of war for troops from the United Federation of Planets to just march in. So Admiral Marcus, a hawk, tells Kirk to go to the edge of the Neutral Zone with secret torpedoes he's not supposed to open and fire one at Harrison. "This is a manhunt," Marcus says. Don't try to capture; just kill.
This would, Spock reminds Kirk, be an extrajudicial assassination, against the preference of the United Federation of Planets for trials. Scotty objects to having to sign for torpedoes when he is afraid they might mess with his engines; he quits, telling Kirk not to fire them. Maybe one of those objections is why Kirk, approaching the edge of the Neutral Zone, decides to disobey orders and lead a landing party to capture Harrison. (And here is a spoiler: he is really Khan Noonien Singh, a character previously played by Ricardo Montalbán and now by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose name fits the allegorical venue.) Is it because he believes in the law, or just that he is curious and likes a good fight? Kirk tries to capture Khan not because of his judicial instincts but because of his martial ones.
The anti-drone argument that "Star Trek" goes for most is not one having to do with due process or civilian or collateral casualties (a random Klingon patrol is wiped out as a result of their landing) but an essentially emotional one: they feel strange. It doesn't seem right, or like a fair, forthright fight. They are uncanny—that, in the movie, bodies turn out to be cryogenically frozen in the torpedoes just underscores this aspect. One doesn't want to dismiss this complaint; but it is inadequate. Is our discomfort telling us that we should inquire more about drones, or are we just Luddites who need to get used to the technology?
rest http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/05/is-star-trek-into-darkness-a-drone-allegory.html
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