Star Trek 4: Noah Hawley Reveals More Details About His On-Hold Sequel

Noah Hawley was to direct the next Star Trek movie, in which he would have introduced a brand new Starfleet crew and challenged the tenets of the United Federation of Planets. The film is now in “stasis,” possibly due to it being a story about a virus that may hit too close to home with the coronavirus pandemic’s currently affecting everyone’s reality. Hawley hasn’t given up on the movie. In a new interview, Hawley — whose work includes creating the television shows Fargo and Legion — revealed more on what he loves about Star Trek and how that would influence his Star Trek film.

“What I love about Star Trek is that it’s not a war story. It’s not a story in which might makes right,” Hawley told Observer. “It’s a story about exploration. It’s a story about creative problem solving. My favorite moment in all of Star Trek is in Wrath of Khan when Kirk puts on his reading glasses to lower Khan’s shields. It’s a brief moment that is so exhilarating because he’s using the best tool he has, which is his mind. As much as I like the Chris Pine movies they were mostly about running from one end of the ship to the other to put out a fire, to stop a thing, and then before he could catch his breath he had to do something else. They’re much more action movies and what I wanted to get back to was this idea of humanity justifying existence in the universe by showing its best qualities.”

Hawley revealed previously that the film wouldn’t be about a known Star Trek crew and touched on his approach to Star Trek continuity in a previous interview. “We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard,” he said. “It’s a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with Fargo, where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love.”

Hawley’s take on the next Star Trek movie is one of three potential Star Trek films in the works. Another, the original pitch for Star Trek 4, involves time travel and Captain Kirk’s father. The third comes from an idea by Quentin Tarantino and is inspired by the gangster-themed Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action.” A script exists based on Tarantino’s pitch, though Tarantino has since distanced himself from directing the movie.

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