Not so long ago, the idea of Quentin Tarantino making a Star Trek movie seemed as far out as a tribble one day captaining the starship Enterprise. Perhaps that’s why QT shelved his long-mooted “R-rated”, ultra-violent take on the Apollo-era optimism of Gene Roddenberry – or perhaps he just figured he had other projects worth prioritising.
Back in 2017, Tarantino publicly pitched the idea of a feature-length riff on the 1968 original series episode A Piece of the Action, which is set on an Earth-like planet where a 1930s gangster culture prevails. At the time, the space saga was in mainstream blockbuster mode on the big screen, thanks to the series of JJ Abrams-produced films, and was just beginning to find its feet once again on TV with the first series of Star Trek: Discovery. It was not a period in which the franchise seemed suited to Tarantino’s intense yet insouciantly loquacious, magpie-eye style.
Fast forward a few years and Star Trek seems to be in a much more creative space. The deeply retro Strange New Worlds (I can still hear the unexpected brilliance of that splendid musical episode in season two ringing through my cerebrum) boasts an almost Tarantino-esque sense of cosmic opulence, so confident is it in applying fresh spins to a series that’s now well over half a century old. Even Black Mirror spotted that there’s spiky fun to be had satirising the original series’ cheesy idealism. Perhaps Tarantino was onto something after all?
Writer Mark L Smith, who was hired by Paramount to write a long-since-abandoned Star Trek script for the Pulp Fiction film-maker to direct, seems to think so. Speaking to Collider, he confirms the film would have been bloodthirsty and not a little sweary.
“I think his vision was just to go hard,” revealed Smith. “It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. Not a lot of the language – we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world – but it was just really the edginess and the kind of Tarantino flair that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”
Just how close did this thing come to being made? Smith suggests that the project – one of a number of abandoned movies that were at some point lined up to follow on from 2016’s Star Trek Beyond – was really abandoned because QT couldn’t get his head around the idea of it being his 10th and final film.
“This was such a particular, different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it, that it fit my kind of sensibilities,” said Smith. “So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number – his kind of unofficial number of films.
“I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across. So the script is still sitting there on his desk.
“I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film. Not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was a balls-out kind of thing.”
The fact that there is an actual script out there somewhere will fuel the nerdy fantasies of those of us who love to imagine those “lost” movies that never got made. But it sounds very much as if Smith’s screenplay was written entirely with Tarantino in mind, which means it’s highly unlikely to ever see the light, now that the director has announced something called The Movie Critic will be his 10th and final film.
Perhaps this is for the best. Whatever you think of Tarantino, he’s the only director out there who can pull off such high-end riffs on gloriously fringe motion-picture magic; the culture-vulture auteur with the freakishly alchemical ability to turn trashy midnight madness cinema into critic-baiting, Oscar-winning movie gold. Asking anyone else to shoot the Star Trek script would be like finding a stash of unrecorded Beatles songs and suggesting someone other than John, Paul, George and Ringo bash out a new album.
On the other hand, we already know Tarantino doesn’t seem so worried about outstaying his welcome, so long as he’s allowed to continue creating in other media. If Smith’s script doesn’t work as a feature film, is there any reason it couldn’t be rewired for a future small-screen episode? After all, stranger, wonderful things seem to be happening every minute in the modern Star Trek era.
