And if there’s one thing Hawley loves to do, it’s to go boldly. He made the xenomorph just one of several monsters in Alien: Earth (all hail Eyetopus!) and Legion had more surreal dance numbers than it did mutant on mutant battles.
By all accounts, his Star Trek movie would have done the same. His movie was rumored to involve an all-new crew, investigating a virus that wiped out various planets. “It was an original story that was not Chris Pine-related, nor was it Captain Kirk-related,” Hawley recently told Men’s Journal. The only connection to established stories would have involved “an unboxing of Data, the idea of the android. And that was to become an element in the films.”
On Smartless, Hawley said Paramount loved the idea and gave it the greenlight, but then a regime change stalled things. A new head took over Paramount‘s movie division and “the first thing they did was kill the original Star Trek movie,” Hawley explained. And they killed for one reason: it went too far into new territory, straying from the Kelvin movies that fans already knew. “They said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it? Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe?’ And so [the movie] kind of went away.”
First, Hawley’s movie was replaced by a fourth Kelvin film, which would have seen Pine’s Captain Kirk reunite with his father, memorably portrayed by Chris Hemsworth in the 2009 movie. But contract negotiations and schedules prevented that from happening, and now Paramount has announced a different film, this time from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
At this point, we don’t know what Goldstein and Daley plan to do. And with season two of Alien: Earth now in production, we know that Hawley is busy making the world of xenomorphs weird again. But whatever happens, we can’t help but mourn the loss of a Star Trek story that put trekking first, that cared more about smart people using their training and competence to help others than it does explosions or name drops or whatever the heck Section 31 was.
Until then, we can just hope that Goldstein and Daley remember that Star Trek is about astronauts on some kind of star trek, even if they don’t get quite as weird as Hawley surely would have been.
