STILL BOLDLY GOING
Star Trek tries to beam a new path to the big screen, with Tarantino’s ‘earthbound gangster’ idea in play
When he rebooted Gene Roddenberry’s beloved Star Trek in 2009, filmmaker J.J. Abrams altered the long-running sci-fi series’ timeline for good. So it seems apt then that in an alternate reality, a fourth film in the revamped franchise led by Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk would have already been in theatres by now.
Shortly before 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, producers said the next film would once again delve into a time-travel plot that would have seen Kirk crossing paths with his father, George (played by Chris Hemsworth), “a man he never had a chance to meet, but whose legacy has haunted him since the day he was born.”
But with Beyond only managing to leg out a tepid $338 million in worldwide box office receipts — and Pine and Hemsworth both wanting bigger paydays — Star Trek 4 hit a roadblock.
Interest in the franchise wasn’t dead, though, with Quentin Tarantino and S.J. Clarkson both turning in treatments for a new film.
After several stops and starts, a new instalment in the continuing adventures of the USS Enterprise conceived by Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley was greenlit in 2019.
Called a “new beginning,” the storyline would not have brought back all of the original Abrams cast — which featured Zachary Quinto (Spock), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Karl Urban (Mccoy), John Cho (Sulu), Simon Pegg (Scotty) and the late Anton Yelchin (Chekov) — but a rumoured pandemic-themed plot involving a virus that rages across the galaxy caused the studio to rethink how it wants to proceed with a fourth movie.
With Star Trek: Discovery, Picard, the animated Lower Decks already on screens and a Michelle Yeoh-led spinoff in the works, the franchise is enjoying renewed fan interest on TV. So it’s possible we may have seen the last of Pine’s Kirk on the big screen. But Paramount is leaving the door open a crack, since no fewer than three ideas are still possibilities to breathe new cinematic life into the series.
The original TV series launched in 1966 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture opened in 1979, spawning five movie sequels and several TV spinoffs, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Enterprise. Paramount retooled the franchise in 2009 under Abrams and two more movie sequels in that timeline followed — Into Darkness in 2013 and Beyond in 2016.
After news broke that Hawley’s film has been delayed, more details surfaced regarding Tarantino’s take, which Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith fashioned into an R-rated “Pulp Fiction in space.” According to Deadline, Tarantino’s story is “based on an episode of the classic Star Trek series that takes place largely earthbound in a ’30s gangster setting.”
“That Pulp Fiction-y aspect, when I read the script, I felt, I have never read a science fiction movie that has this (stuff ) in it, ever,” Tarantino said last year in an interview with Deadline. “There’s no science fiction movie that has this in it. And they said, ‘I know, that’s why we want to make it.’ It’s, at the very least, unique in that regard.”
The Oscar winner has long-maintained he will only direct 10 feature films and in recent months he has indicated he may only take an advisory role if his Star Trek idea comes to fruition.
“I think they might make that movie, but I just don’t think I’m going to direct it,” he told Deadline. “It’s a good idea. They should definitely do it and I’ll be happy to come in and give them some notes on the first rough cut.”
Two early episodes that might serve as inspiration include The City on the Edge of Forever, which found Kirk and Spock travelling back to 1930s New York to try to undo a future set in motion by Mccoy, or A Piece of the Action, in which the crew of the Enterprise find an Earth-like planet modelled on Al Capone-like gangsters.
A time-travel narrative involving Hemsworth’s George Kirk is also still a possibility, with the script for that movie already completed.
Deadline says a decision on where Star Trek beams to next on the big screen will come in the next several weeks, but suggests Hawley and Tarantino’s versions “might serve the franchise best as Logan-like spinoffs.”
But with storylines flourishing on TV, the Star Trek property might have a longer life as a serialized space drama with plots that will boldly go where the core series hasn’t yet gone on the big screen. We’ve already seen that with Patrick Stewart’s revisionist take on Jean-luc Picard in his spinoff series that aired earlier this year. Maybe it’s time to see a new crew rise to fight another day.