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By insisting on an adult rating, Tarantino confirms that his Star Trek will be a gritty reboot. This already sounds like a bad idea, because Tarantino’s brand of sex and violence is fundamentally unsuited to Star Trek. It’s also a textbook example of a depressing Hollywood trend:
J.J. Abrams already did this to Star Trek in 2009. While Abrams’ Star Trek is a fun blockbuster, it misunderstands the Original Series cast and what they stood for. His version of Kirk is an arrogant frat boy who treats women like crap and forms an antagonistic rivalry with Spock. He’s also motivated by daddy issues, an overused theme among male filmmakers.
If you watch the 1960s show, you’ll understand the difference. William Shatner‘s Kirk is a charming romantic lead, a thoughtful leader, and kind of a bookworm.
Toxic masculinity is a formative theme in gritty reboots. Zack Snyder did something similar with Batman v Superman, and Guy Ritchie is the king of this phenomenon. He rebooted King Arthur (a romance!) as a macho gangster story, and Sherlock Holmes as an action movie peppered with no-homo humor.
But what about non-gritty reboots? What would they look like?
middle-aged fanboy filmmakers CANNOT RESIST taking classic stories about Nice People and rebooting them with toxic masculinity
Holy fuck, yes. That’s exactly what’s happening.
And it’s pretty much always the (male) hero and other male characters that were admired in the original that gets the edgy backstory and high dose of toxic masculinity and red flags for abuse.
It’s like a tactic:
“My aggressively misogynistic behavior seems to be increasingly unacceptable in modern society, time to reverse that by giving it new rolemodels.”
