Quentin Tarantino Can’t Make Sense of the Star Trek Movies Continuity

Quentin Tarantino is working on a Star Trek project with JJ Abrams and Paramount Pictures. Little is known about the story, but Tarantino has now said that the film will indeed take place in the “Chris Pine timeline.” That seems to indicate the film will follow Star Trek Beyond as the next installment in the Kelvin Timeline Star Trek film series, but Tarantino seems a bit put off by the entire alternate timeline idea.

Tarantino talked about it on the podcast Happy Sad Confused with host Josh Horowitz. He says, “I still don’t quite understand, and JJ can’t explain it to me, and my editor has tried to explain it to me and I still don’t get it…about something happened in the first movie that now kind of wiped the slate clean. I don’t buy that. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate it. I don’t — f*** that…I want the whole series to have happened, it just hasn’t happened yet. No, Benedict Cumberbatch or whatever his name is is not Khan, alright? Khan is Khan. And I told JJ, like, ‘I don’t understand this. I don’t like it.’ And then he was like, ‘Ignore it! Nobody likes it. I don’t understand it. Just do whatever you want. If you want it to happen the exact way it happens on the series it can.’”

If Tarantino is reading, we’re here to help! Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek movie revealed that the planet Romulus was destroyed by a supernova sometime after the events of the previous Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Nemesis. Spock tried to stop the supernova before it could destroy other planets by creating a black hole to counteract it. The vengeful Nero, captain of a Romulan mining vessel, pursued in his ship, the Narada. Both the Narada and Spock’s ship were thrust backward in time by the black hole Spock created. The Narada emerged as Winona Kirk went into labor, giving birth to her son, James Kirk, as his father, George Kirk, sacrificed himself to ensure his family and the crew of the USS Kelvin would escape the Narada’s attack.

That event created the alternate timeline now known as the Kelvin Timeline. The Narada‘s sudden appearance with technology from the future was enough to convince the United Federation of Planets that it needed to devote more resources and energy into developing weapons and technology for defense. The untimely death of Jame Kirk’s father set him on a different path than the one he took leading into Star Trek: The Original Series. Nothing would be the same.

Tarantino sounds as if he’d preferred the films to have been straight prequels to The Original Series and it seems like he’ll treat his own Star Trek movie as if it were a prequel.

What do you think of Tarantino’s take on the Star Trek movie timeline? Let us know in the comments.