These feel like more than cheap copies of their predecessors, even if Simon Pegg’s Scotty will always have his detractors for playing the character with more clownish flamboyance than the late James Doohan would ever have considered. And yet there is much to like about the new cast, from Chris Pine’s amiable Captain Kirk to Quinto’s taciturn Spock – and especially Karl Urban’s pleasingly cynical Bones McCoy. The old certainties of Star Trek – the cosmic melodrama and blokey bonhomie – have to some extent been stripped away and replaced with something a little more generically Hollywood. But it’s become clear that there is a certain type of Star Trek head that absolutely detests everything about this new version of the venerable space saga: from its focus on action over ideas to its decision to humanise Zachary Quinto’s Spock by pairing him with Zoe Saldana’s Uhuru. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the films were holding on to the hardcore fans that have supported the series since its beginning. During the same period, dozens of Marvel and DC superhero flicks have beaten that figure, while every Star Wars film (bar the middling Solo) has hit $1bn or more. No film since Abrams’s 2009 reboot has so far made more than $500m at the global box office – which given that these movies have all been critically acclaimed should be all the more shocking. These films are relatively big-budget affairs – all three movies in the trilogy so far have cost at least $150m in production bills alone – but they do not make the big bucks that would be expected of similar productions. Hawley simply must make a Star Trek movie that fans of the original series and its successors can embrace, and retain the dynamism, thrills and spills of the Abrams years. Amid reports that Fargo and Legion’s Noah Hawley is to write and direct the next film, this is surely a critical stage for the saga if it is to survive in its current incarnation. If hardcore Star Trek fans do not much like the current series of movies introduced by JJ Abrams a decade ago, we should wonder what they do want to see.
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