By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Everyone’s talking about Star Trek again. Unfortunately, they’re talking about it in the context of the franchise being dead.
If you’re looking to lay blame for its death on someone, you should probably put it on Alex Kurtzman. He’s been in charge of the franchise since 2009’s Star Trek. He’s also the producer of Paramount+’s newly released Star Trek: Section 31, a straight-to-streaming movie so bad that 58% of Star Trek fans who responded to our poll voted to demand that Paramount delete the film from the internet.
So what happened? What does Alex Kurtzman have to say for himself? His response, in a nutshell, is this: Star Trek is a safe space, so it’s okay to make a terrible movie.
Is my summation an exaggeration? Here’s the exact quote from his interview with TrekMovie, in which they asked him what he would say to fans worried about Section 31.
“I think you you tend to find Star Trek because you feel somehow like you don’t fit in, right? And Star Trek becomes a safe place that tells you it’s okay to be different. It’s okay to be a misfit. And this is a movie about misfits, right?”
Following that horrific quote, he launched into a rambling word salad about “protecting our freedom,” and then, he sunk even lower. He tried to argue that the best way to protect Gene Roddenberry’s dream of a bright future is to make movies about horrible people doing horrible things.
Here’s Kurtzman:
“So ultimately, I feel like what we’re saying is that in order for Starfleet and that beautiful vision that Roddenberry had of this optimistic utopia, in order for that vision to exist, in order for the light to exist, you need people who operate in the shadows. And it’s a yin and yang. You can’t have one without the other.”
In Alex Kurtzman’s head, there is no such thing as a bright and happy future for humanity because you can only have one if it’s balanced out by something awful. In Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry’s dream cannot exist.
He then went on to try to paper over his failures by wrapping himself in LGBTQ+ iconography, saying of his terrible movie, “And in that way, I think it’s just another color in the rainbow of Star Trek.”
In my 0-star review of Star Trek: Section 31, I asked whether it was possible for a film to be fundamentally evil. Now Star Trek fans have an answer. If you’re looking for evil, look no further than Alex Kurtzman.
