Another day, another reason to really freaking hate the idea of a potential Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie. In an interview, Tarantino revealed that he does not seem to understand what timeline his film would take place in.
“Now, I still don’t quite understand – and J.J. can’t explain it to me, and my editor has tried to explain it to me and I still don’t get it … Something happened in the first movie that kind of wiped the slate clean? I don’t buy that. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate it. I don’t … fuck that! Alright? I don’t like that,” Tarantino told Happy Sad Confused host Josh Horowitz, as reported by TrekMovie.com.
He later said, “I want the whole series to have happened, it just hasn’t happened yet. No, Benedict Cumberbatch or whatever his name is, is not Khan. Khan is Khan. I told J.J. I don’t understand this, I don’t like it. And he went: ‘Ignore it! Nobody likes it! I don’t understand it. Do whatever you want. If you want it to happen in the exact way it happened on the series, it can.'” He then went on a tangent about how William Shatner’s Kirk is the reason he loves Trek, which makes me dislike the character of Kirk for the first time.
Okay, first of all, Abrams owning up that no one likes Benedict Cumberbatch is wonderful, because that was a terrible decision, but no, the films can’t happen the same way as the series did. You can’t go back to Vulcan for “Amok Time” because Vulcan doesn’t exist any more. Kirk probably wasn’t on Tarsus IV, because that would’ve been too much trauma to heap on his already troubled past. There are things that can’t happen because of the timeline change. You can’t retcon your retcon.
Spock, in the first film of the Kelvin timeline, has a whole, very clear monologue about how they are in a new timeline. There are two Spocks for a while. Kirk is different. Spock is different. The entire crew is different. There isn’t a way for them to retcon that a film starring a Chris Pine Kirk is in the Prime timeline. It just doesn’t work. And if you’re a fan of the Pine-era films, it is not a difficult concept to grasp.
Also, if you want to direct a Star Trek movie, you have to understand the timeline! It really isn’t that hard to understand, to be perfectly honest. Spock Prime goes back in time through a wormhole alongside Nero, Nero destroys the USS Kelvin and kills George Kirk and later destroys Vulcan, and the timeline is therefore changed. It’s not rocket science. It’s easy enough that even Bones—who is, damn it, a doctor and not a physicist—understands it.
There’s also the fact that, if a person of color or a woman who wanted to write or direct a Star Trek film said they didn’t understand the timeline, they would be ripped to shreds. Just because you’re Quentin Tarantino doesn’t mean that you get to flaunt your lack of knowledge about the franchise as you act like you’re better than it because you want to make Pulp Fiction in space. Seriously. Imagine if a woman said, “I don’t understand the timeline.” You know what Twitter would be like.
We’ve been over every reason for why Tarantino needs to be pointedly steered away from Star Trek, and this is just the latest one on the list. If Tarantino cannot even grasp the basic ideas of his timeline, and if he shows blatant disrespect for the work done previously, he shouldn’t be allowed to tackle the fourth film in the series. It doesn’t make sense.
(via TrekMovie.com, image: Paramount)
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