The Star Trek Trilogy With Christopher Walken Sounds Wild
We arguably wouldn’t have the current explosion of Star Trek content if not for the success of the reboot trilogy kicked off by director J.J. Abrams. Those films gave a fresh update to the characters of The Original Series that successfully drew engaged new fans while bringing new ones into the fold. But we almost got a very different trilogy altogether: Band of Brothers writer Erik Jendresen began writing a trilogy of films for Paramount that would have focused on the Romulan War and Kirk’s ancestors, including a great-grandfather played by Christopher Walken.
Interestingly, the tone of his planned films was much darker than the Star Trek reboot films that we eventually got. In fact, the tone was darker than most of the series in this long-running franchise. The Star Trek property that most tonally matches what Jendresen wanted to do was Deep Space Nine; that’s unsurprising considering that it remains the only Star Trek series to make ongoing war a major focus of multiple seasons.
In Erik Jendresen’s planned trilogy of Star Trek films, Christopher Walken wouldn’t play a major role in the first one (which was going to be titled Star Trek: The Beginning). Instead, the protagonist of the planned first film was Tiberius Chase, and this Captain Kirk ancestor is a leader who helps take charge in Earth’s fight against the Romulans. As for the Romulans, their intent in this movie was to exterminate all the Vulcans on Earth, which adds a creepy element of ethnic cleansing to an already frightening war.
We’re confident that Star Trek fans would have turned out for this first film even without the presence of Christopher Walken. That’s partly due to the premise. The Earth/Romulan War is something the franchise has often referred to but never shown, and it would be very cool to see it play out on the big screen. Despite not being a major fan of the franchise, Erik Jendresen knew the lore that nobody in the Federation knew what the Romulans looked like in The Original Series, and he enjoyed the writing challenge of coming up with scenarios where nobody would survive their alien encounter to report back on what the Romulans look like.
Jendresen didn’t share too many details regarding Christopher Walken’s character, but we know that he would “leads this group of xenophobes” and inhabit a “subterranean cavern with all of these ancient rotting Nazi UFOs.” However, the focus of the first and subsequent films was going to remain Tiberius Chase, a man who defies Starfleet orders by the end of the first movie and tries to take the war to the Romulans in their own area of space before trying to find his way back home. According to the would-be Star Trek writer, he “was looking forward to inventing the adventures of Odysseus on his way home, back to Penelope.”
If the combo of the Romulan War and Christopher Walken doesn’t already have you wishing you could see this film, here’s the kicker: it was going to be filled with Easter eggs for Enterprise fans. Jonathan Archer’s name was going to be mentioned, we’d see the Columbia NX-02, and we’d even get to see the MACOs do what they do best when fighting Romulans. Sadly, this planned trilogy never saw the light of day, and all these cool plans were effectively beamed out in the aether, just like Captain Archer’s dog.
Erik Jendressen’s entire script for his Star Trek movie is available online and you can read it right here.
Source: The Fifty Year Mission
