It is looking unlikely that director Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek movie will see the light of day, which is a shame as the project is just the shot of creative energy that the franchise needs right now. Star Trek began life in 1966 as a sci-fi television show, and since then the influential franchise has gone on to include thirteen feature films, five television shows, three streaming series, and another two animated shows. The upcoming Star Trek: Prodigy, recently teased at Comic-Con, will be the twenty-fourth project in the show’s sprawling canon.
However, while there is no lack of Star Trek projects currently in production, there is a distinct lack of invention present in some of the franchise’s most recent movie outings. 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness and 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond were both solid sci-fi action efforts, but both lacked the verve and surprises of, for example, the playful Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. However, one proposed Star Trek project could change that—if the movie is actually made, that is.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood helmer Quentin Tarantino expressed interest in shooting a Star Trek movie as early as 2017, and the director’s vision for the franchise harkens back to the out-there theatrical efforts that made the ‘80s movies in the series so successful and well-remembered. Like Tarantino’s proposed Rambo reboot, his Star Trek movie would be a radical reinvention of the series that has been described as a gangster movie, taking inspiration from the original series outing “A Piece of the Action.” That fun, out-of-the-box film episode mixed hardboiled gumshoe detective tropes with the Star Trek franchise’s standard sci-fi action to great effect, but Tarantino’s movie would have also looped in some time travel to truly up the ante. Judging by producer Mark L Smith’s recollection of Tarantino’s pitch, the proposed Star Trek story sounds wild and weird—which is exactly the tone missing from the safe recent movie outings.
With smaller budgets and less expectation attached to them, the Star Trek television shows are uniformly performing pretty well as the franchise has been able to take risks on interesting efforts like the animated sitcom Star Trek: Lower Decks. However, as big-budget blockbusters, the Star Trek movies have been lackluster despite the best efforts of Fast and Furious franchise mastermind Justin Lin. Even Lin’s fast-paced and action-packed direction could not elevate the generic stories of the recent outings, whereas something out of left-field like Tarantino’s wild pitch could reinvigorate interest in the franchise with casual fans.
According to Smith’s comments on the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast, Tarantino’s movie would have functioned like the many standalone episodes of Star Trek that took the cast off a surreal adventure without worrying about the overarching series story. Per Smith, “Kirk’s in it… All the characters are there… You would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on.” From this description, Tarantino’s Star Trek movie sounds like exactly the kind of high-spirited, fun movie the franchise needs to bring back fans who are not wooed by the more self-serious side of sci-fi. After all, in all its iterations Star Trek has remained a fun franchise, and Tarantino is the perfect director to bring this quality back to the forefront of the series.
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