Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek movie was a gangster flick

Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek film was a gangster flick.

By the sound of it, the proposed Star Trek film by Quentin Tarantino, which is thankfully not going forward at the moment, was supposed to be in the same vein as the Original Series episode A Piece of the Action. Tarantino tapped Mark. L. Smith to help write the script with him and Smith recently took to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast and shared Tarantino’s ideas for his movie, which was basically just Star Trek meets gangsters.

Smith was quoted by TrekMovie.com as saying;

"Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys. I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on. There’s all this other… it’s really wild.…Guys like Quentin can do stuff that the rest of us can’t. So they are going to trust him because they know what they’re going to get is going to be something that’s going to be talked about for years. And it was. The script, it is so Tarantino, and it’s hard-R [rated] and it’s violent. It’s got all these great elements. And I guess Paramount has done different things and kind of veered back on Star Trek. They probably feel like Tarantino is worth being able to veer off path and always come back."

The film will not be going forward with two other Star Trek movies currently in the works. One being Star Trek IV, featuring the surviving members of the Kelvin cast, and another, completely original idea.

Quintin Tarantino’s Star Trek is too far away from what the brand is

New Pepsi and New Coke failed because the fanbase wanted Pepsi and Coke. They didn’t want it to be changed. The new Star Wars films failed because they were, well, a mess. Star Trek isn’t blood, guts, and violence. That’s not what fans of Star Trek want, nor is it what is expected.

More from Movies

• Rod Roddenberry is trying to obtain the missing Enterprise model
• Nicholas Meyer admits he doesn’t understand J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies
• 3 reasons why a Star Trek prequel series or film about Khan would succeed
• The 3 best Star Trek films across each and every era of films
• 3 reasons why a Star Trek prequel series or film about Khan would fail

A big issue with the more modern Star Trek properties is their desire to be something other than Star Trek. Like it’s somehow passe to make a show like the Original Series or Deep Space Nine. Holding humanity to a higher standard is out the window, instead, the series is centered around broken people, who commit mutiny, treason, get drunk and high, and engage in extreme body horror scenes.

It isn’t something to chase towards, it’s become something to run from. We all wanted to live on Deep Space Nine but who wants to live on the Cerritos?

This is the failing of Star Trek and Tarantino. The franchise has already moved so far away from center that bringing on Tarantino makes sense to some people. Yet, how? There’s no reason to bring on Tarantino to do a Star Trek film when the man is only known for his exploitation pictures.

Every one of his films is violent, bloody, and brutally hard to watch. That was never what Star Trek was supposed to be. Tarantino would do far more harm to the established fanbase of Star Trek than he would help.

Keep him away at all costs.