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.
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.
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.
You should check out Strange New Worlds then, it’s a return to episodic form
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.
So I agree mostly, but classic Trek also had plenty of looking at the present and past showing how bad things were/are/can be. It’s a hopeful message in that we can change and solve problems, but it doesn’t totally ignore issues either.
I do agree the drama and action is a negative for it though. Some amount of its fine, but ST is about considering our reality through the lense of sci-fi and aliens, not just brainless entertainment. Star Wars already exists in that market. ST needs to do what it does well and not worry about trying to be as big as Star Wars. Endless growth is only going to kill the franchise.
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.
City on the Edge of Forever is the best TOS episode in my opinion, and surpasses 90% or more of all Star Trek across all the series.
It’s good to know he knows his Star Trek. But I still wouldn’t want a Tarantino Trek movie — unless, of course, Avery Brooks reprises his role and recites Ezekiel 25:17 and has a phaser with Bad Motherfucker etched on it. That’s a Trek movie I’d watch.
Pure marketing piffle.
Paramount would never let a Hard R Trek get made. Not only is it the completely wrong tone for Trek (even if you rate the JJ Abrams movies) but it would seriously harm ticket sales as kids and young teens would be prohibited from going to the theater to see it. Imagine Kirk and Spock sitting around, smoking weed, talking about their favorite obscure 2200s films while holding knives to each other’s nutsacks.
They only started talking about Tarantino directing a Star Trek movie in order to build hype for the new Trek shows that are of dubious quality.
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…
