Quentin Tarantino About to Suck Klingon Toes
The Star Trek franchise is at an all-time low at the moment. The newest television series, Star Trek: Discovery, is being used as a last ditch attempt to rescue the flailing CBS All Access streaming service, and it’s been overshadowed by the vastly superior Seth MacFarlane Trek pastiche The Orville. The reason for that is MacFarlane has an ability to take something, strip it down to its skeleton and then lay his own voice on top of that skeleton while keeping all the important parts of the original in tact.
There might only be one person in the world who is as good as MacFarlane at pulling off that feat of storytelling, and that person is Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s films have tackled a number of specific genres, like heist films, exploitation flicks and westerns, and made films that are part reinvention, part homage and all brilliant. And now he’s set his sights on Star Trek.
According to Deadline, Tarantino is in talks with Paramount and J.J. Abrams to write and direct a new Star Trek film, something that could be just the shot in the arm the struggling film series needs. After a strong start with 2009’s Star Trek, the series struggled with the disappointing Star Trek Into Darkness. Last year’s Star Trek Beyond was a solid film but failed to attract much attention at the box office.
There’s not a lot of information about the film at this stage, and it’s not a sure thing (though I can’t see Tarantino, perhaps the greatest filmmaker who’s still working, being rejected from much of anything). What we do have are some rumors and snippets that tell us what form a Tarantino-directed Star Trek film might look like. Abrams said last year that Chris Hemsworth was coming back to reprise his role as the late George Kirk in the fourth film of the reboot series.
We also know, thanks to a commenter at Birth.Movies.Death., that Tarantino talked at length on an episode of The Nerdist podcast about what he’d do if he could make a Star Trek movie in 2015. And what he said at the time is he thinks the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the director’s favorite and one of the franchise’s best, would be an excellent starting point for a feature film with a bigger budget and more time to explore the characters.
Tarantino’s theoretical workshopping of a Star Trek film lines up pretty well with the idea of Hemsworth’s return to the franchise if that idea he discussed with Chris Hardwick and Mitt Mira turns out to be the basis of his current pitch. Regardless, I personally hope that Tarantino and Abrams’ meeting bears fruit, and we get to see Quentin Tarantino’s vision for Star Trek for ourselves.
