Eight years after Star Trek Beyond, Paramount is preparing to revive the Star Trek franchise on the big screen.
Longtime X-Men producer Simon Kinberg is in talks to produce a new Star Trek feature for Paramount Pictures. If successful, this could lead to him taking more active creative roles in the franchise’s film division.
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The project Kinberg is considering is already in active development. Toby Haynes, who directed episodes of the Star Wars series Andor, is set to direct, with Seth Grahame-Smith on script duties. The film is reportedly set decades before the events of the 2009 movie directed by J.J. Abrams, likely around modern times, and will involve the creation of Starfleet and humanity’s first contact with alien life.
Wasn’t that movie called Star Trek: First Contact?
Who’s asking for that?
Does America really want a fourth Star Trek franchise in nearly as many decades? The challenge with rebooting this series is that the newer actors can’t match the iconic original cast. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and others had true star power. The Next Generation had Patrick Stewart, but the rest of the cast felt more like TV actors. The Chris Pine generation never seemed like adults; they always felt like kids pretending.
In today’s world, it’s hard to see this casting problem improving with a fourth franchise. It’s likely to be filled with more modern social themes. The justification will be that Star Trek has always been politically progressive. In the sixties, the show’s progressivism was about professionalism, equal opportunity, individual liberty, and a strong foreign policy based on peace through strength.
Why revisit this when the original Star Trek series and its six subsequent movies are available on Blu-ray?
In 2023, I rewatched Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016), and they simply don’t hold up. They lack the humanity of the originals, replaced instead with action and adventure. I’d prefer the often-criticized Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, with its exploration of spirituality and humanity, over that empty trilogy any day.
Star Trek lost me when they introduced Gay Sulu and made election denier Stacey Abrams the President of Earth.
“New” used to mean new. Now it feels like incoming junk.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is receiving five-star reviews from readers. You can read an excerpt here and find an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
