Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Sci-Fi: What could Quentin Tarantino do with Star Trek?
BACK IN December 2017, reports surfaced that Quentin Tarantino had pitched a Star Trek movie. The very proposition of unleashing the mind behind Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction on the Star Trek universe tickled a part of my Trekkie brain that I didn’t know existed. But there was a second part to the rumour – something that anyone who knows Tarantino’s work could have expected: the film would be R-rated. But does the series really need that?
Star Trek always possessed an optimism that made it an outlier in the world of science fiction.
Star Wars has ‘war’ in the name, a conflict still ongoing 40 years later. Alien shows space as a place filled with inaudible screams.
Even in Wall-E, humans live in a dystopia. But the Star Trek universe was hopeful. The entire show rested on the premise that humanity had overcome its base failings – war, poverty, reckless consumerism – and joined into one human family, a member in a greater alliance called the United Federation of Planets. Characters still had demons (see ‘The Enemy Within’, TOS Season 1 Episode 5), and Klingons and Romulans would always prove troublesome. But humanity’s future looked bright. That gave Star Trek a perspective that has become scarce in modern sci-fi.
Star Trek wasn’t necessarily better than other sci-fi television or movies. It was just different, a uniquely compelling escape from the genre’s usual action-hungry, gore-filled movies and TV series. Besides, Star Trek’s legion of fans exist, in part, because its content – while thought-provoking – was also family friendly. Kids could grow up wanting to fight a Gorn like Kirk, or explore the galaxy like Picard.
But in the past 20 years or so, Star Trek has slowly retreated from creator Gene Roddenberry’s original vision. This shift is quite obvious in new shows such as Star Trek: Discovery, where unnecessary violence is commonplace. But the seeds of this modern Trek era were planted in 1996 with
First Contact. Unlike Generations or Insurrection – which were weird and inconsistent, but still ambitiously heady –
Contact was more about violence and explosions, with Jean-Luc Picard transforming from the philosopher captain into a rip-shirt action hero.
In 2002, Star Trek: Nemesis saw even more wise characters take sharp turns to violence. And seven years later, JJ Abrams’s reboot would put action at the forefront
while mostly ignoring Star Trek’s legacy of exploring the various complexities of our existence. It was a move that Abrams would double down on in Into Darkness, which features Spock – Live-Longand-Prosper Spock – mercilessly beating Khan Noonien Singh almost to death. Add in Discovery, and Tarantino’s R-rating would be another step in Trek’s decadeslong transformation.
That doesn’t mean his Star
Trek couldn’t work. Tarantino has a deep catalogue of critically acclaimed films to his name. It’s hard to argue against seeing a Star Trek film considered for an Oscar. And more importantly, he’s a fan. In several interviews, Tarantino’s love for Trek (and William Shatner) is obvious. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said, ‘I love William Shatner as James T Kirk. That’s why I like Star Trek. The reason I like Star Trek more than I like Star Wars is: William Shatner is not in Star Wars.’
And ultimately, an R-rating can mean different things. Karl Urban, who plays Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy in Abrams’s Trek series, has read Tarantino’s script and spoke about it at the Trekonderoga convention. ‘You shouldn’t worry that it is going to be full of obscenity and stuff,’ he said. ‘If someone gets sucked out into space, which we have all seen before, we might see them get disembowelled first.’ If this is the case, rated R for ‘space death realism’ is much more compelling than ‘Captain Kirk now curses a lot’.
Whatever happens, Tarantino’s Trek would be a huge moment for the franchise. His film could very well determine if there’s still room left in our galaxy for hopeful and complex sci-fi, or if Star Trek will continue its path into forgettable, action-packed oblivion.