Star Trek Movie Potentially About Corruption In Starfleet

It seems the next Star Trek movie is moving along in its scripting phrase. The writers and directors of the film, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, spoke about the story. The short of it they are seeking to tell a story that is mostly independent of continuity that will hopefully be open for non-Star Trek fans and one that examines Starfleet and what could happen if its power was abused. 

 For The Discourse podcast, they compared their movie to two films with Goldstein saying “We’re less focused on, like, what continuity we’re in, which timeline. It’s more about how do we bring this franchise to audiences that don’t necessarily consider themselves Trekkies? What can we do that hasn’t been done before? Our approach is to really look at it from a question of, what is this institution of Starfleet that’s at the heart of ‘Star Trek’? And what would happen if all is not well in that institution? The movie that we talk about as the comp is ‘Training Day.’” Daley followed up saying, “And ‘Crimson Tide’. Those are the two that we sort of used as our spiritual benchmarks.” 

They also spoke with Inverse with Goldstein saying the goal of the project is to bring in new fans, "I mean, look, we don’t want to rely on fandom. We don’t want to just hope that there are enough fans of the original [TOS] or The Next Generation or whatever who will turn out for this. We want to just make a great movie that lives in the world that people are familiar with — some people are familiar with — and that others will discover. And then, with good fortune, we launch a new franchise into existence." 

In both films, it could be argued their commonality is the person in position in power intentionally (Training Day) or unintentionally (Crimson Tide) abusing their power for what they think is the greater good. That is just one interpretation but extending that to Trek, it would mean one possible story could be Starfleet captain in a position to cause great harm and thinking he is doing what Starfleet would want or possibly pushing against what Starfleet ordered. Which is actually a pretty standard Star Trek story. Not that I suspect these writers would know that as get impression their knowledge of Trek is limited to some of the movies and maybe a few episodes here and there. Which I suspect for current Paramount regime is a a strong reason for choosing this pair to write a script that they may or may not greenlight.

Any case, too early to get too excited as Paramount has been wanting to do a Trek film for 10 years and this is around script attempt number 8 or 9 that has been publicly revealed. No telling how many script attempts that never revealed to the public. The sticking point remains budget as suspect Paramount wants a film that is budgeted for $100 million or less and entirely designed towards bringing in new fans which is hard to do for any franchise. Especially harder for a franchise as famous as Star Trek and its tendency to be CGI heavy. This is before get into the merger and the debit it will create. As always time will tell.