Star Trek Can Still Be Saved By Hollywood’s Best Director
Quentin Tarantino has made one hit movie after another, and fans have been looking forward to his next film with bittersweet anticipation. Previously, Tarantino announced that his 10th and final film was going to be The Movie Critic, a movie meant to cap off an absolutely historic Hollywood career. Now, the director has suddenly announced he won’t be directing that movie, meaning there is a chance (albeit a slim one) that we could get a Star Trek film directed by Tarantino.
Quentin Tarantino And Star Trek?
To understand why Star Trek fans are excited about the director’s sudden decision to drop The Movie Critic, we need to return to one of the weirder chapters in Tarantino history. Back in 2017, there was a shocking announcement that Paramount had accepted a Trek movie pitch from the Pulp Fiction director.
Considering that Trek as a franchise is about peaceful exploration and Tarantino is known for his trademark mixture of gore and vulgarity, Trek fans couldn’t help but wonder what such a movie would be like.
Pulp Fiction Violence In Star Trek?
Years later, screenwriter Mark Smith, who helped with the Star Trek script Tarantino had written, revealed what the veteran director wanted to do with this sci-fi film.
Apparently, it was going to have a “hard R” rating and include “some Pulp Fiction violence.” It was going to have the “edginess” and “flair” everyone associated with the Django Unchained director (albeit with less foul language), and it had the perfect plot to channel Tarantino’s trademark excess.
Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek Movie
The exact details of this unmade Star Trek film plot are unknown, but Quentin Tarantino wanted the movie to mostly be set on Earth and have a predominately gangster setting.
Before you roll your eyes too hard, the franchise has been here before: The Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action” featured a planet where a ship that visited a distant planet a century ago left a book about various Chicago mobs.
This caused the entire planet to model their civilization around 20s-era gangster culture, and Captain Kirk is forced to become more capo than Captain in order to survive.
Quentin Tarantino’s 10th Film
From the outside looking in, it certainly sounds like the Star Trek film Tarantino wanted to make would have been a spiritual reboot of that TOS episode.
Why did we never see such a cool idea on the silver screen, though? Tarantino is oddly obsessed with making his 10th movie his last (if you’re curious, he counts the two Kill Bill movies as a single film), and Mark Smith claims that the director got cold feet because he wasn’t sure if a Star Trek movie was really how he wanted to end his career.
How The Movie Critic Factors In
That brings me to why there’s such a slim chance that we’ll still get a Star Trek film by Tarantino: while he has suddenly dropped plans to direct The Movie Critic, he still plans for the next movie (whatever it is) to be his final film.
If he were to bring his Star Trek gangster movie to life, that means he would have to suddenly embrace the idea of such a film being the last one he makes. That may not sound very likely, but nobody expected him to suddenly drop plans to make The Movie Critic.
So he could very well change his mind about making a Trek gangster movie his final cinematic endeavor.
Better Than Star Trek’s Current Plans
Another way we could get a Star Trek film from Tarantino is if the director changes his mind about only making 10 films.
Again, this is only a very faint possibility, but I can’t help but hope that we will get to see a visionary film set mostly on the strange, not-so-new world of planet Earth.
It already sounds far more exciting than Paramount’s plans for a lame Star Trek origins movie, and Tarantino might be able to make a relatively stale franchise feel free again.
Plus, if a character should bring some Bajoran cuisine to France, we could finally get an answer to the most burning question of all: what do they call a hasperat with cheese in Paris?
