Inter-Cultural Humanity: Star Trek:Insurrection

Being fundamentally unfamiliar with the Star Trek series, I will attempt to naively speak of this film in the sense that I have perceived it while watching. Almost immediately, this film presents the recurring argument of natural versus mechanical that we have witnessed in so many of the films that we have watched. We are introduced to the Ba’ku village, which is obviously beautiful and pure at its foundation; we see Earth’s beauty and our minds merrily run around with the children playing through the paths. This village vaguely reminded me of Mount Olympus, home of the immortal Greek Gods – serene, peaceful, and all things natural (other than death, that is). Juxtaposed proximately alongside this tranquil village was the invisible observation deck of the federation intruding in. Once again, we are presented with a sort of negative outlook on the monsters that are equipped with gadgets and laser-beam transducers. The Ba'ku village shows that a potential method of solving the problems presented by Latour is by not creating our advanced monsters at all in the first place. 

Another representation of this technology is the chief operations officer and android, Data.  Exposed to the fully natural world of the Ba’ku, he is inherently unlike anybody else in the village, and on the ship for that matter. Precisely because of this, I believe, he was the perfect character to initiate the intrusion into the Ba’ku village. He is forgivable of his error because it was a blunder in programming and command that caused him to attack, and once again, he becomes his lovable character once the intrusion is over. Throughout the movie, Data shows his yearning to be more “human,” and his interaction with the child, Artim, shows this as he expresses his lack of a true childhood. At the resolution of the film, Data is more free, playing as a child would amongst the hay. Artim introduces Data to a more “human” culture of fun, and Data absorbs and carries this with him into the rest of his life. Data, however, has many more human characteristics than many of the other robot characters we have encountered in the other films we have watched. This serves as an alternate solution to Latour's issues of “loving our monsters” --  perhaps, and unfortunately, what it takes to be more sensitive to our monsters is making them more familiar to our culture and more similar to us in general. 

An intriguing element about Star Trek is that Data, the artificial life, is not the strangest and most unknown form of life in the film. The film actually presents many monsters that are essentially “real” but extremely unlike any species we have seen. Interestingly, the Ba’ku, the pure and highly venerable race in the film, is the group of individuals that was chosen to look most similar to humans. Despite how dissimilar these distinct groups appeared to the visible eye, they were considered variable races rather than entirely different species. Amongst humans, more genetic variation actually exists within races (80%) than between them (20%). This idea was depicted well in the movie, since the races that seemed so alien-like were actually related to one another to their core genetically. This relatedness presents the idea that the most obvious physical appearances cannot serve as the primary means to show what is actually in our DNA. Despite the battle between the Ba’ku and Son’a, this film presented a more united and joint depiction of the world and the many cultures and races that are present throughout our world.