WI Star Trek by George Lucas

I read somewhere that in the early seventies George Lucas seriously offered to purchase the rights for Star Trek of Roddenberry. What would the Star Trek Motion Picture and Star Trek in general look like if made by Lucas?

Actually, both Steve Spielberg and George Lucas made the short list of possible directors for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I've always wondered what a Spielberg/Lucas Star Trek movie would be like.
 
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Look at Lucas' films in OTL before Star Wars, namely THX-1138 and American Graffiti. The first - a bleak dystopian view of the future, the second - a happy, ensemble pic. All this tosh about a hybrid Trek/Wars motion picture is precisely that: tosh.

The way I see it, Lucas would probably go for the Motion Picture rather than Phase 2 (to bring in the money) and make it a proper ensemble film with more space battles rather than what we saw with the mysterious V'Ger. Lucas is influenced by Japanese cinema so he'd be more likely to make use of the Romulans rather than the Klingons which would give him a natural outlet.

Assuming box-office success, I think a Phase 2 would be inevitable but it's difficult to say whether he'd keep the same cast as the original series or make changes. I could see more use of alien races but I doubt whether the concept of the Ferengi would exist on the grounds that Lucas himself is Jewish.
 
Actually, both Steve Spielberg and George Lucas made the short list of possible directors for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I've always wondered what a Spielberg/Lucas Star Trek movie would be like.

Oh, well that makes sense.

... But that's still different: Lucas would be the director for the film, not the franchise showrunner. Lucas would be in charge of the film's direction, not in charge of Star Trek as a whole.

Still, this is an interesting WI. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, directed by George Lucas. Hmm...
 
Oh, well that makes sense.

... But that's still different: Lucas would be the director for the film, not the franchise showrunner. Lucas would be in charge of the film's direction, not in charge of Star Trek as a whole.

Still, this is an interesting WI. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, directed by George Lucas. Hmm...

A lot depends on how much script freedom he has. Even Spielberg couldn't have done much with the stinking turd of a V'Ger plot. Drugs really were prevalent at the time, weren't they? Apparently the bad ones that make Disco seem cool, not the good ones that can produce cerebral philosophical psychedelia.

However, stylistic and pacing differences alone could have made a much better movie. Get rid of the long, dragging scenes of Spock floating and replace with something more interactive and tension-building. Make V'Ger actually mysterious and menacing, not just weird and amorphous.

Of course on the bad side either Spiel or Lucas could create something more akin to the pointless-action-heavy, predictably-plotted, emotion-milking melodrama that both at their worst can succumb to.
 
"Use the force, Jim!"

Hell, expect more flagrant Hero-centricism rather than ensemble casts. Vulcan mysticism gets more Asian...and more flagrantly magical with more flagrant "dark sideism" to the Romulans. Use of untranslatable beeps and squawks in language rather than "universal translation into Midwestern English". Simplified dialog all around. Technical Language simplified greatly: technobabble loses its pseudo-scientific edge becoming more pseudo-pseudo-scientific ("Repolarize the phase-inducer coupling converters" to "have a go at those power couplers, will ya?"). More rogues, crime, grit, disagreement, and gray area within the Federation. More Orions/Ferengi. And droids, droids, droids!


time to close the thread. Geekhis just summarized everything of worth :cool:
 

JJohnson

Banned
If Lucas had a run at Trek, we'd get the absolute last time available on DVD ever (until 2 years later) special edition version....every 2 years. And then edits that change the movie and add nothing but newer special fx into the mix, rereleased into theaters again. And then a whiny brat know-it-all kid who can fix warp drive better than a 30-year engineering veteran who turns out to be James T Kirk, who will somehow date and marry a woman who's 20 years older than him...oh, wait...
 
If Lucas was brought on to do the first Star Trek movie, he would certainly understand it is not the same thing as Star Wars. He would almost certainly be constrained to tailor a Star Trek film fairly closely to the the television show. The film would have the same basic cast of characters, with the same general personalities and relationships. It would have the same basic back concept (based in "our" future, a federation of planets based on vaguely enlightenment ideals, etc). However, I suspect he might play around with the details of the bacsktory quite a bit such as:
(1) Clear good guys and bad guys - perhaps an "evil empire" the federation was struggling against (in most of the "real" Star Trek films the enemy is not usually a whole society or people, but some sort or renegade)
(2) Some non-cannonical surprises connecting the characters "Jim, I am your father", etc
(3) More acknowledgement and respect for spiritualism and mystery.
(4) More action with clear military/battle resolutions rather than talking the enemy to death
(5) Robots - possibly even one as a main character
(6) More "alien" aliens in and outside of the Federation

Actually, certain aspects of the new movie (the rebellious barfighting young Kirk, the bullied and conflicted Spock, Kirk being marooned by Spock on Ice Planet Hoth to face giant monsters before meeting with an equally outcast Scotty and his Jawa assistant, and the whole prequel thing) sound very much like the kind of directions Lucas might have gone in if he was given the freedom.
 
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