I've only just gotten into TNG and sporadically watched TOS, so I'm not a die-hard at all, but this is so far from what Star Trek is it is truly repulsive. "I thought we were explorers," Scotty protests right around the time I thought the same thing, but the idealism of Gene Roddenberry is unfashionable, so instead we get slick cynicism and an utter lack of consequences. To begin the film with a casual violation of the Prime Directive that…

I don't see how anyone walks away from this thinking it justifies torture, but there's still something off-putting about that final image, with all its "Was it worth it?" properties. It frames the waste and rot of the War on Terror as a measure of what we lost in terms of our true selves, as opposed to taking stock of the astonishing collateral damage we amassed just to kill one man. (A far more appropriate closing would've been the last…