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Noah Hawley might be the weirdest fan in show business. He makes shows about well-established and beloved properties, tackling the X-Men in Legion, the Coen Brothers’ filmography in Fargo, and xenomorphs in Alien: Earth. And while he fills those shows with the sort of attention to detail that usually marks fan-centric works—see the pseudo-Nostromo in Alien: Earth or the flying saucer from The Man Who Wasn’t There in Fargo‘s second season—Hawley also has wild takes on the source material.
So it’s a little surprising to learn that Hawley’s now-canceled Star Trek movie sounds like, well, Star Trek. Speaking with the Smartless podcast (via TrekMovie) hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, Hawley explained his approach to property. “I thought, everything [in franchises] is war, right? Star Wars is war, and Marvel is war,” he explained. “But Star Trek isn’t war. Star Trek is exploration, right? It’s people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy.”
Those words are music to the ears to Trekkies everywhere. As much as new Star Trek as we’ve had over the past 16 years, “Trekking” hasn’t always been the focus. We’ve had people running up and down hallways in the J.J. Abrams movies, lots of crying it out on Discovery, and so much insight into Spock’s love life on Strange New Worlds, but despite the last example’s title, not a whole lot of seeking new life and new civilizations.
On one hand, the franchise has to grow and evolve as times change, and we don’t necessarily need TOS‘s over-reliance on meeting god-like beings on another planet that looks like Earth or all of TNG‘s beigeness. There’s nothing inherently wrong with season-long arcs, exploring the emotional stakes of characters, or even references to classic series. But as demonstrated by its need to keep doing prequels or simply remix existing alien races, as Star Trek: Academy seems to be doing, the franchise has forgotten how to boldly go.
And if there’s one thing Hawley loves to do, it’s to go boldly. He made the xenomorph just one of several monsters in Alien: Earth (all hail Eyetopus!) and Legion had more surreal dance numbers than it did mutant on mutant battles.
By all accounts, his Star Trek movie would have done the same. His movie was rumored to involve an all-new crew, investigating a virus that wiped out various planets. “It was an original story that was not Chris Pine-related, nor was it Captain Kirk-related,” Hawley recently told Men’s Journal. The only connection to established stories would have involved “an unboxing of Data, the idea of the android. And that was to become an element in the films.”
On Smartless, Hawley said Paramount loved the idea and gave it the greenlight, but then a regime change stalled things. A new head took over Paramount‘s movie division and “the first thing they did was kill the original Star Trek movie,” Hawley explained. And they killed for one reason: it went too far into new territory, straying from the Kelvin movies that fans already knew. “They said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it? Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe?’ And so [the movie] kind of went away.”
First, Hawley’s movie was replaced by a fourth Kelvin film, which would have seen Pine’s Captain Kirk reunite with his father, memorably portrayed by Chris Hemsworth in the 2009 movie. But contract negotiations and schedules prevented that from happening, and now Paramount has announced a different film, this time from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
At this point, we don’t know what Goldstein and Daley plan to do. And with season two of Alien: Earth now in production, we know that Hawley is busy making the world of xenomorphs weird again. But whatever happens, we can’t help but mourn the loss of a Star Trek story that put trekking first, that cared more about smart people using their training and competence to help others than it does explosions or name drops or whatever the heck Section 31 was.
Until then, we can just hope that Goldstein and Daley remember that Star Trek is about astronauts on some kind of star trek, even if they don’t get quite as weird as Hawley surely would have been.
The post Noah Hawley’s Canceled Star Trek Movie Actually Understood Star Trek appeared first on Den of Geek.
