Once upon a time, Quentin Tarantino wanted to make a Star Trek movie. In 2017, he went to Paramount Pictures and pitched a Star Trek movie that the company was excited to accept. When fans got wind of the event, everyone began talking about what Reservoir Dogs in space would look like. There were fan posters, memes, and pictures of Tarantino in a Starfleet uniform; nearly anything you could imagine was created. Why? Because perhaps it’s just so unfathomable to imagine Tarantino breaking out of his regular genre to take on not only an aesthetic we’ve never seen from him before but also a universe that, at its core, preaches a moral harmony amongst all things. If nothing else, it would certainly be new.

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But in 2019, he admitted he was “steering away” from the idea to make Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It might have been for the best. Tarantino is known for his abundant but somehow never gratuitous or excessive violence. His movies often contain mysteries to which the answers are never revealed. And you will seldom see a happy ending from the auteur, but you will always walk out of the theater feeling satisfied.

While Star Trek may use these types of elements here or there, the real line to draw is that the space odyssey truly believes in humanity’s transcendent good, and that’s not what we see in Tarantino’s films. So if Quentin Tarantino had made a Star Trek movie, would it have been more Star Trek or Tarantino?

Tarantino vs. Star Trek: Two Different Styles

     Paramount Pictures/Miramax Films

The first place a lot of our minds go when thinking about Tarantino in space is to one of his gangster-heavy movies. We’d expect to see two space cowboys on the run from Starfleet with some highly valuable information or experimental weapon. And that’s not the angle we normally see from Star Trek. Most of the time, the audience only gets to see the top brass. Even in Deep Space Nine, most stories came from the upper echelon of Starfleet officers aboard the space station. After years of series and movies, probably only the parody series Lower Decks has given us a steady stream of narratives that occur outside the bridge.

There isn’t even a huge demand for that type of story. When Star Trek builds on its previous paradigm, it’s done with a conspiracy, like in Star Trek: Into Darkness, or to look at some long-standing existential question, like in Picard. But in the most popular Star Trek projects, what we see are well-developed complicated characters. And Tarantino is great at that. Typically in a series, it will take a while to establish a relationship with the starring roles. A captain of the Enterprise will have to go through several trials before the audience can think to like them. But Tarantino can get us intimately acquainted with a character in the space of a single conversation. The type of interaction you see is so unabashed and quickly cut to the point that you don’t often have time to ask how a situation developed. You are simply presented with what is and must take those facts without questioning them.

Another common theme in many Tarantino movies that would conflict with the Star Trek paradigm is his characters’ complete disregard for law and order. Star Trek, perhaps right down to its core, argues that out there, in the deep dark void of space, you can still trust in things like logic, science, and the order humanity has been able to pull from all this chaos. Tarantino does quite the opposite. In his movies, no rules guide a protagonist when making difficult decisions. He can only trust his gut. When Star Trek makes it to these points, it’s only after everything else has failed.

The Movie

     CBS Studios/Miramax Films

It’s important to note that, in a Quentin Tarantino movie, you will never see an impressive structure or huge artifice unless that artifice is the design of a powerful criminal enterprise or a murderous car. So to set a Tarantino movie in a Star Trek universe, it might involve a ship like the Enterprise, but it would be more likely to see the film on a human colony than it would be to see it on a science vessel on a mission of peace.

It would be easy to think Tarantino would use the Klingons as his source of violence. In Tarantino’s hands, a race defined by strength and honor might seem slightly different from what we’ve seen before. Tarantino would probably think that, despite being written to be violent, they aren’t violent enough. We might have seen something similar to the bloody fear of how the Gorn are portrayed in Strange New Worlds right now. In fact, it might have even been something closer to Alien than Star Trek.

Tarantino’s small-time gangsters would probably find their tiny world connected to the gigantic operation that is Starfleet and, in a deal with the Klingons, come to find themselves asking whether personal gain is worth the future of humanity. Because Star Trek always asks big questions, and Tarantino makes those questions relevant on a personal level, the marriage of the two would take a galactic problem and put it in the hands of an unlikely hero who was motivated, only at first, by personal gain.

Alas, it seems Tarantino and Star Trek fans may never know what could have been.