I enjoy the Tarantino films, but I don’t want them anywhere near Star Trek.
I really dislike what’s happening with ST lately; what was in my childhood a hopeful message for how much humanity could achieve when we finally get our shit together, is now just another action movie / drama template. Government bad, corruption everywhere, war for the sake of war, etc.
I’m certain Tarantino would double down on that and I just don’t want it.
Government bad, corruption everywhere, war for the sake of war, etc.
I’m certain Tarantino would double down on that and I just don’t want it.
Tarantino is kind of a bellwether for the mostly apolitical right-wing (but non-fascist) middle-class majority of the US population, the movie "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" convinced me of that. It also convinced me that Tarantino himself has lost the plot, or actually never really had it. He reminds me a bit of Beavis and Butthead, kind of just watching movies and TV all the time, sorting everything into the binary categories "cool" or "sucks", except he actually goes out and makes films that glorify all he thinks is "cool" which happens to be a cross-section of all media that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity.
So he likes Star Trek. Congratulations Tarantino, your "geek" bona-fides are authentic, but like the rest of the right-wing (non-fascist) middle-class majority, you really have no fucking clue and don't care about the political origins of Star Trek and are just itching to erase them so you can make it into another "cool" movie that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity. You can fuck right off, Tarantino.
right-wing (but non-fascist)
you keep using these words but they don't mean what you think they mean.. People who are right wing support fascism. Full stop. They don't have to mean to, but they actively do, and what I assume is an attempt to spare their feelings (though the reason doesn't really matter) is just more confirmation for their cognitive dissonance that they're not doing anything wrong.
I very much agree with everything else you said, but I can't grasp why you would make the extra effort to pander to them like that, it's bizarre.
You do realize that's like saying all people who are left wing support authoritarian communism right? Neither extreme is healthy.
People who are right wing support fascism. Full stop.
I very much agree with everything else you said, but I can’t grasp why you would make the extra effort to pander to them like that, it’s bizarre.
You are right, and I also agree with you, so let me just clarify... there is a difference between people who unconsciously support fascism merely because they are apolitical, and people who are very deliberately fascist, as in enthusiastic supporters of the Republican party.
Most fans of US movies are indifferent, and do not think of themselves as political beings. They think of themselves as just "ordinary." Like a fish not knowing what water is, "ordinary" for an average US citizen is about as close to fascism as a person can possibly be without enthusiastically actively waving around swastikas -- but there is still a difference between "ordinary" apolitical people like Tarantino and all of his fans who think of him as edgy, and someone actively wishing to purge the world of all non-white people. That is what I mean by "right wing" and not fascist.
I think it is important to draw that distinction because I don't like blaming apolitical people for being the victims of US mainstream cinema brainwashing.
Ok, so you're not talking about right wing people then (or more accurately - conservatives), you're talking about centrists and liberals (who are not left wing) (edit to add: while claiming to be "apolitical", looks like Tarantino has donated to the DNC in the past, so that tracks).
I know that's uncomfortable to hear, but it's the truth, and to those willing to sit with that discomfort and challenge their bias, I recommend taking the time to read this and this.
Show me a moderate Democrat in the US and I'll show you a moderate right winger in the world. From a world perspective, the US hasn't had a left leaning president in the last 30 years or more. The US lost its left at some point, and advocating for sensible policies became its new left. Outside looking in, Bernie is a centrist or at most left-of-center.
So if your reference is the full spectrum, the majority of the US population is right wing, a good portion of it radicalized fascists. Now if your reference is the severely skewed Overton window of the US, then yeah, all right wingers are fascists.
Have you tried strange new worlds?
Also Lower Decks is incredible. A Star Trek show that makes fun of itself and the franchise but is still narratively driven and... entertaining.
I call it the Omniman/Homelander distinction
That is to say, is the deconstructing work made by someone who gets the message of the work being deconstructed or not.
Omniman is a complex look at the stated origin of Superman being sent to earth, and the paternalistic nature of what exactly Jor'El wished for Clark to do with the benefits of Earth's environment, and also a look at how even despite that, Superman would have been capable of learning to be a true hero without that guiding hand of a human upbringing, and that some of his spark isn't nature or nurture but just that drop of empathy it takes to make someone see helping others as worth it for its own sake.
Homelander is a wankfest about how bad superhero comics are written by a guy who wrote an entire series about how he believes everyone secretly wants to be a murder rapist and is just "brainwashed by societal bullshit" to not acknowledge it.
Yeah, I prefer the positive role models & society present in 90's trek. You don't get that much in nutrek.
You should check out Strange New Worlds then, it's a return to episodic form
I kinda feel like I just don’t have the heart for ST anymore. Picard was the final nail in the coffin, I am all out of trust for the modern generation of writers.
I’ll just watch TNG through every couple of years and be happy in my bubble.
You must have hated DS9.
I see TNG with mostly 2D characters where the Federation and its ideals are the main driving force of the plots. When they deviate from that is when you get bad episodes (cough Sub Rosa cough). The characters had to shed some of their depth and become idealized for message to shine through.
On DS9, you have a gritty view of a frontier without the influence of the Federation. The evolution of the characters and how they react to the changing reality around them is the center stage, and for that you need 3D, flawed characters to build development arcs upon.
Then on DSC you have perfect 2D characters in a corrupt world and the show is about Michael Burnham but she's also perfect and I can't see what message they're trying to send.
I think DS9 set a precedent that was bad for the franchise, but I don’t hate it; the show felt like it understood its roots. I took DS9 as a way to explore how federation values addressed a galaxy not quite there yet.
It didn’t diminish the hopeful future by saying that “actually the federation is evil" it just said “listen, we still have work to do”.
Watching Cisco wrestle internally with reconciling who he knew he was supposed to be while the galaxy tested that was at least interesting on an intellectual level.
I think that bit of nuance got lost though, so I do kinda wish it had never happened.
FWIW, I recall an interview with Tarantino on YouTube somewhere in which Trek came up, and he was asked to name one of his favourite episodes.
To my surprise he named Yesterdays enterprise. He genuinely seemed to love it and remembered a lot of details about the plot. The other he mentioned is city on the edge of forever.
So while many might react to the idea of an R rated Tarantino Trek film negatively, I’d be quietly optimistic that he has good taste in Trek and would have a good core of a premise and story. I suspect he’d also handle the characters well, knowing how to balance campiness, seriousness and comedy.
EDIT: Found the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyD7CFnFH3A
It's from 2015. Go to 3.47 for the relevant section. Interestingly, rewatching it, the prompt of the conversation was "what Star Wars movie would you like to do" and Tarantino responds with he'd rather do a Trek film.
And to further my point, he's main point is that so many good episodes from Trek, especially the original series, could be made into movies.
When you came to space dock here, did you notice a sign out in front of my station that said "Dead Romulan Storage"?
Man, now I'll never find out how many times Samuel L Jackson can be called the n-word on the bridge of the Enterprise...
I understand hesitancy for an R-rated Star Trek movie, and I also understand that Tarantino's style isn't for everyone, but that said- he always puts a lot of effort in to crafting a good story, and there's always a ton of attention detail. His movies are never shallow pandering cash grabs like certain other directors who will remain nameless here.
So while a Tarantino Trek movie sounds very weird on the surface, I think he's far and away earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to making any movie at this point and I would welcome his perspective.
Not that it's ever gonna happen, of course. But if we do ever see a new movie, I would far prefer an auteur over a plug-n-play disneyfied cash grab like we see with the MCU, Star Wars, and basically any other pop culture franchise.
Tarantino movies do tend to feature the hard r pretty prominently.
I feel like in the best case it would have been a catastrophe that somehow manages to fall together in a way that actually works, and in the worst case it would have just been bad to the point of being offensively bad, appealing to neither regular filmgoers whole also pissing off established fans.
... But it also feels like giving a chainsaw to a bear: You know whatever's gonna happen you're not gonna like, but also you kinda want to do it just to see what it is.
Your last analogy made me snort my 3 sleeping partners (human canine and feline) awake.
Also spot on. But I really don't want to see it. But I'm sure I'd be entertained by reading about the result.
It would have been like the mirror mirror episode only with more of Uhuras feet.
I like star trek, and I like R-movies. I don't know if they will mix well.
Hopefully better than Discovery gratuitously using the F word.
It used it once and the line was over science saying "This is so fucking cool". The Picard show used it more frequently.
Yall really get butthurt over a show when half the problems you have with it you've imagined and invented lmao
But that one time it was used VERY GRATUITOUSLY (a youtuber told me that makes sense).
Either talk about the plot, set a production date or stop writing these nothing articles.
I mean, no duh Tarantino would do a Trek movie that has lots of blood. To be familiar with his name is to know that's his style. Just tired of years teasing how great something WOULD'VE BEEN but not saying why.
I'm a big Qentin Tarantino fan, but I never felt he was right for Star Trek. Not his type of movie IMO. But what the fuck do I know.
I just left a comment with more detail elsewhere, but at this point I think he's earned the benefit of the doubt. Tarantino-Trek sounds like a weird combo, but based on his spotless track record, I would be surprised if he somehow managed made a stinker.
A team of section 31 assassins armed with katanas are beamed aboard the enemy starship with orders to take out the top leadership?
For anyone interested, Tarantino spoke ad lib about the idea of making a Trek film back in 2015. I mentioned this in another comment here but didn't have the link to the interview.
The interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyD7CFnFH3A
Go to 3:47 for the relevant section. Interestingly, rewatching it, the prompt of the conversation was "what Star Wars movie would you like to do" and Tarantino responds with he'd rather do a Trek film.
He's main point is that so many good episodes from Trek, especially the original series, could be made into movies, and cites specifically City on the Edge of Forever and Yesterday's Enterprise, which certainly indicate that he has some good Trek Taste.
I mean, of course it was going to be R-rated, Quent doesn’t exactly make family-friendly pics.
But also, why is everyone always trying to make Star Trek edgier these days?
Re: edgier Trek:
For me, I feel like we’ve had so much ‘positive utopia’ Trek, that more of the same just gets a bit boring. There’s also the fact that life today is different compared to when Trek first aired. We’re more aware of some of those sharper edges and want to see them represented in media.
From a practical standpoint, there’s also ‘we can, so we do’. When Trek aired on regular TV, you couldn’t drop an F-bomb, much less show actual gritty stuff. With streaming, there’s no reason to hold back. Which gives writers more room to explore.
Lucky they made DS9 before TNG had even finished, then.
We didn't really get more of the TNG side of things with the TNG movies. Then they moved on to JJA Star Trek, which wasn't much of anything, not dark, not utopian, just references.
While Discovery was in part based around rescuing an ultra-fascist from another universe.
It took bringing back Picard himself to approach doing what they once did decades ago. And I guess not let the actor have too much say over the script, if that's what messed up the movies.
While Discovery was in part based around rescuing an ultra-fscist from another universe
You mean part of a single episode. Saving her was never planned in the first place and was even a surprise to the character in the moment. when she comes back she actively fucks everything up and is constantly at odds with everyone. So no part of it was based around her at all. Unless you're talking about the season 3 two partner in which case it's two episodes but that's still very distinctly not the entire show. It's also AGGRESSIVELY Star Trek to help others you have differences with. Starfleet goes out of its way to do that constantly in TNG even if it might put them at risk too.
Not to mention the fact you say after TNG that the older style was dead as if Voyager doesn't exist. Then you mention Picard bringing back the old style which is an utter lie. Picard was willing to execute a prisoner. The first two seasons are nothing remotely like TNG and the third season is an even further detraction. Doesn't mean it's bad but it is aggressively different.
Gettin real tired of y'all just blatantly lying because you don't like a thing and wanna slander it.
So, set on Qo'noS?
As a longtime Trek fan, I’m certainly in favor of it. There’s plenty of things to work with; things implied but never really shown. Which is why I also liked more recent Trek projects like Strange New Worlds and Picard. They have a bit more grit to them.
Tarantino’s trek would not have been for everyone… but it certainly would’ve been a massive hit. Even if you hate his other work, you can’t help but be intrigued.
I'm guessing it would have really leaned into the colonial pulp fiction aspect of the original series.
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