(Editor’s note: this article was written by our friend Mark from the Disembodied Beard)
I’ll make this short. Star Trek and Star Wars aren’t the same. It’s not an apples to apples comparison. You can’t ask someone if they’re a “Trek” or a “Wars” person, because that’s not a real dichotomy. Star Wars is a frenetic opera. Star Trek is Shakespearean theater in the best sense. You can like both, because they’re wildly different things to like, though you might not realize it after watching Into Darkness.
For this reason, Paramount trying to make Star Trek 3 like Guardians of the Galaxy is an awful idea. There’s no nice way to say it. Guardians is also an opera. A really good one, at that. It’s such a good opera, I hope the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII sat up and took notes. But wanting Star Trek to be that way means you don’t know what Star Trek is. Have you watched Star Trek? Go back and binge on The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine. Do you realize how much talking there is? How much standing, deliberating, thinking happens in a 45-minute episode? Enough to fill a Lucas Films CGI department.
I’m an old man. I have been since I was a child. So maybe “I’m just bitching,” as my ailing grandmother once said to her shocked family. But Star Trek is special. It’s unique and lovely, and it’s art. I know that because it’s transformative, because it leads the viewer to new information and new ways of seeing old information. It does something no one else has been able to replicate. It’s why fans like me long for another Trek show; television could use it. The problem is, no network is going to pick up a Trek series with that trademark tone if Hollywood keeps setting a skewed Trek agenda. Which is why, if there are any movie executives reading this, please, hear me out: think Gravity, not Guardians.