I caught a few minutes of the movie Star Trek: First Contact. This 1996 flic is based on time travel, with the crew going into the past to prevent the conquest of the Earth by the implacable and soulless Borg.
In the scene I viewed, Captain Picard --who was assimilated into the Borg hive and then rescued from them-- mows down a few of them with a machine gun. He does this with understandable feeling. And when the last of them falls, right in front of him, he raises the weapon up with intend to smash the creature with it.
At his side has been Alfre Woodard, playing Lily Sloane. She intervenes to prevent him from crushing the apparently dead Borg.
I'm no fan of Ms. Woodard. She is like a lot of actors, who always seem to play the same character no matter which character they are playing. Robert Redford is another offender here. The list is long. And the typically high-minded pacifistic Star Trek character makes her even less appealing.
Not only does she intervene with Picard, but her attitude is not compassionate, but self-righteously horrified. This is part of what I have come to loathe about Roddenbury's project. Nothing is more natural for a man --or a lot of women, frankly-- than to kill with rage, understandable and well-justified rage, someone or some group which has done what the Borg have done. In the Star Trek world, there is no more malignant or dangerous group then the Borg. In this scene, Sloane/Woodard is entirely focussed on reining in Picard to the measure of her moralism. Yeah, I loathe that stuff.
In one of the TV episodes, I, Borg, Dr. Crusher and Geordi and Guinan all convince Picard not to use a single Borg, who develops a sense of individuality, to reprogram and destroy the whole hive. That would be, horrors, "genocide."
This kind of frankly narcissistic hyper-morality makes me completely nuts and I have come to smell it all over the series.
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1 comment:
In defense of Robert Redford, I would like to point out that he glorify'd the psychopathic outlaws "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" -- a movie that also trivializes women as simple-minded sex doll. ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at least allows women the alternative of being either a simple-minded sex doll or a b-llcrushing control-freak). "Sundance" as the name for RR's film company suggests he still admires the values of that movie.
jpmills
P.S. Redford and Newman's "The Sting" also liberates women from oppressive middle-class values like old-fashion'd respect. For example, whore and (when you get too old or worn-out looking) whorehouse madam are fine career choices for young women experiencing the new possibilities open to them in the 1970s when "The Sting" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" were made.
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