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Pulp Enterprise? What Tarantino's Star Trek movie could be

Rumor has it filmmaker Quentin Tarantino wants to make a Star Trek film. Here are our ideas on what Tarantino should do with the Enterprise and its crew.

Bonnie Burton
Journalist Bonnie Burton writes about movies, TV shows, comics, science and robots. She is the author of the books Live or Die: Survival Hacks, Wizarding World: Movie Magic Amazing Artifacts, The Star Wars Craft Book, Girls Against Girls, Draw Star Wars, Planets in Peril and more! E-mail Bonnie.
Bonnie Burton
3 min read
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What kind of hijinks would Captain Kirk, Spock and the rest of the U.S.S. Enterprise get into with Quentin Tarantino at the helm?

Paramount

If rumors are true, the Enterprise crew may be boldly going where no Star Trek film has gone before -- into the hands of Quentin Tarantino. 

Star Trek's modern-day movie reboot kicked off with the 2009 "Star Trek" film directed by J.J. Abrams and penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, and continued with the same director-screenwriting team for the 2013 film "Star Trek: Into Darkness." In 2016, Justin Lin directed "Star Trek: Beyond" with a script from Simon Pegg and Doug Jung.

Now it looks like indie movie director and screenwriter Tarantino wants to put his own spin on the crew of the Enterprise.

Tarantino has come up with a great idea for a Star Trek movie at Paramount, according to reports Monday night from Deadline and Variety, and Abrams plans to assemble a writers room to possibly make a movie based on the idea.

Paramount declined to comment on any specifics of the idea, but we have a few suggestions on what a Tarantino Star Trek might look like. 

Reservoir cadets

Why do students at Starfleet Academy have to be so goody-goody? What if a handful of cadets went off the rails and decided to be very, very bad? In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The First Duty," we finally see Wesley Crusher go down a dark path by keeping the truth about a fellow student's accidental death secret to prevent expulsion from the Academy.

In the end, Wesley does the right thing and speaks up. But what would happen if members of Starfleet Academy decided to go rogue and turn into thieves? It would be fun to see a Tarantino-style heist story (especially one gone bad) happen in the Star Trek universe. 

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We love Worf, but not all Klingons drink prune juice. 

Paramount

Klingons unchained

In the entire cinematic history of Star Trek, we've never seen the Klingons go completely violent. Klingons have performed intense rituals and fought battles against infringing Enterprise crew members. But with Tarantino's darker influence, maybe we'll finally get a very bloody version of the kind of violence Klingons can be capable off. 

They are a race of fearless warriors, so why not show fans the kind of brute savagery that lurks inside of every Klingon? Imagine a "Kill Bill" or "Django Unchained" revenge film where a wronged Klingon decides to murder everyone who betrayed him.

True Vulcan romance

Tarantino isn't just known for foul-mouthed characters who kill each other while spouting a litany of pop culture references. He also has a knack for showing both the bonding and destructive power of love.

"True Romance" is an unconventional love story about a guy who gets visions from Elvis and the call girl who loves him. But what if we finally saw a movie completely about a Vulcan love story? 

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Spock in love? We demand an entire film dedicated to unhinged Vulcan romance.

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Vulcans are known for suppressing their emotions. Vulcans strive to live by logic and reason with as little emotion as possible -- following Surak's code of emotional control. 

Yet when Vulcans can no longer manage their emotions they suffer extreme cases of rage and passion. Imagine what Tarantino could do with a Vulcan who can no longer control his or her emotions. Better yet, what would a Tarantino-style mind meld or pon farr ritual look like?

Pulp Enterprise

Tarantino is a very talented storyteller, especially when it comes to weaving separate stories into a larger, connected narrative. "Pulp Fiction" showed what happens when a multitude of quirky characters collide into each other, in a tale that is anything but linear. 

What if Tarantino showed us multiple perspectives from everyone living on the Enterprise including a warp core engineer, a bartender working in lounge, a medical officer or the person in charge of the holodeck

There's no way that every single person working on the Enterprise has a strong moral compass, and Tarantino knows how to exploit those weaknesses in characters best on a big screen. 

What would you like to see Tarantino do with the Star Trek universe?

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