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By Chris Snellgrove
| Revealed
As a franchise, Star Trek is at one thing of a crossroads, with Paramount canceling reveals like Discovery and Decrease Decks and seemingly going all-in on an upcoming origin movie that threatens to retcon out of existence a few of the franchise’s most vital lore. I fearful I’d lose my decades-long ardour for Gene Roddenberry’s magnificent universe, however then one thing superb occurred: I found 765874 Unification, the most recent fan movie from OTOY. It’s designed to have fun the thirtieth anniversary of Star Trek: Generations, and because it moved me to tears, I noticed this was the very best Trek content material I had seen in years.
As OTOY’s most passionate followers already know, calling this a “fan movie” severely undersells it. In spite of everything, sci-fi fan movies often devolve right into a bunch of shoddy laptop graphics and explorations of alien planets that invariably seem like somebody’s yard. Happily, 765874 Unification has the very best doable manufacturing high quality, and it was produced in collaboration with each William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy’s property. Due to that collaboration and a few digital wizardry, the movie is ready to painting a de-aged Captain Kirk (Sam Witer) assembly with Spock (Lawrence Selleck) earlier than the well-known Vulcan dies within the Kelvinverse.
The de-aging course of isn’t as seamless as what you’d see in a Marvel movie, but it surely’s nonetheless almost good; for that matter, it’s superb to see a small firm’s digital manufacturing in a position to very almost maintain tempo with a company monolith that often cranks out billion-dollar films. What struck me most concerning the de-aged Kirk, although, is that the pc results did nothing to dampen the important humanity of Shatner’s basic performances. The characters don’t communicate on this movie (although we get temporary audio from The Wrath of Khan), however the captain’s expressions assist to totally promote the emotional impression of his closing assembly with Spock.
When you’re an actual stickler for canon, it’s best to know that the premise doesn’t actually make a lot sense. There could be no logical method for the very lifeless Captain Kirk to go to Spock on his deathbed, a lot much less a deathbed in a unique universe. After all, it is a Star Trek: Generations tribute, so my headcanon is that we’re seeing the model of Kirk that also resides within the Nexus lengthy after his precise demise. Plus, as Spock himself reminded us in The Undiscovered Nation, logic is just the start of knowledge, not the top of it.
Hopefully, Paramount may have the knowledge to understand that this free fan movie is all the things that audiences really need from a Star Trek movie. It’s an immaculate love letter to the franchise that facilities on the connection between characters whose friendship crosses time and house. It’s the final word realization of Spock’s transferring declaration to Kirk when he died for the primary time in The Wrath of Khan: “I’ve been and at all times shall be your good friend.”
Sadly, it doesn’t sound like we’ll be getting a lot of this sort of content material from Paramount within the close to future. Whereas Unusual New Worlds is every kind of great, the subsequent Trek movie from Paramount will reportedly be an origin movie specializing in the start of the Federation and humanity’s early contact with aliens. For these preserving observe at house, we already noticed humanity’s first contact with aliens (within the appropriately titled Star Trek: First Contact) and we already noticed the start of the Federation (on the finish of Enterprise). In different phrases, the brand new movie will likely be a inventive retread that threatens to retcon beloved lore out of existence.
Star Trek Might By no means Be This Good Once more
The inevitable failure of that origin movie makes me nearly unbearably unhappy for my favourite franchise, however OTOY’s 765874 Unification provides me hope. With or with out Paramount, there’ll at all times be passionate followers who’re keen to hold the torch even within the franchise’s darkest hours. And will the franchise die altogether, properly, Spock himself is proof that demise is just not the top and that there are at all times prospects, each for Star Trek and its most devoted followers.
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