By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a franchise, Star Trek is at something of a crossroads, with Paramount canceling shows like Discovery and Lower Decks and seemingly going all-in on an upcoming origin movie that threatens to retcon out of existence some of the franchise’s most important lore. I worried I might lose my decades-long passion for Gene Roddenberry’s magnificent universe, but then something amazing happened: I discovered 765874 Unification, the latest fan film from OTOY. It is designed to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Generations, and as it moved me to tears, I realized this was the best Trek content I had seen in years.
As OTOY’s most passionate fans already know, calling this a “fan film” severely undersells it. After all, sci-fi fan films usually devolve into a bunch of shoddy computer graphics and explorations of alien planets that invariably look like someone’s backyard. Fortunately, 765874 Unification has the highest possible production quality, and it was produced in collaboration with both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy’s estate. Thanks to that collaboration and some digital wizardry, the film is able to portray a de-aged Captain Kirk (Sam Witer) meeting with Spock (Lawrence Selleck) before the famous Vulcan dies in the Kelvinverse.
The de-aging process isn’t as seamless as what you’d see in a Marvel film, but it’s still nearly perfect; for that matter, it’s amazing to see a small company’s digital production able to very nearly keep pace with a corporate monolith that regularly cranks out billion-dollar movies. What struck me most about the de-aged Kirk, though, is that the computer effects did nothing to dampen the essential humanity of Shatner’s classic performances. The characters don’t speak in this film (though we get brief audio from The Wrath of Khan), but the captain’s expressions help to fully sell the emotional impact of his final meeting with Spock.
If you’re a real stickler for canon, you should know that the premise doesn’t really make much sense. There would be no logical way for the very dead Captain Kirk to visit Spock on his deathbed, much less a deathbed in a different universe. Of course, this is a Star Trek: Generations tribute, so my headcanon is that we are seeing the version of Kirk that still resides in the Nexus long after his actual death. Plus, as Spock himself reminded us in The Undiscovered Country, logic is only the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.
With any luck, Paramount will have the wisdom to realize that this free fan film is everything that audiences really want from a Star Trek film. It’s an immaculate love letter to the franchise that centers on the relationship between characters whose friendship crosses time and space. It’s the ultimate realization of Spock’s moving declaration to Kirk when he died for the first time in The Wrath of Khan: “I have been and always shall be your friend.”
Sadly, it doesn’t sound like we’ll be getting much of this kind of content from Paramount in the near future. While Strange New Worlds is all kinds of wonderful, the next Trek film from Paramount will reportedly be an origin film focusing on the birth of the Federation and humanity’s early contact with aliens. For those keeping track at home, we already saw humanity’s first contact with aliens (in the appropriately titled Star Trek: First Contact) and we already saw the birth of the Federation (at the end of Enterprise). In other words, the new film will be a creative retread that threatens to retcon beloved lore out of existence.
Star Trek May Never Be This Good Again
The inevitable failure of that origin film makes me almost unbearably sad for my favorite franchise, but OTOY’s 765874 Unification gives me hope. With or without Paramount, there will always be passionate fans who are willing to carry the torch even in the franchise’s darkest hours. And should the franchise die altogether, well, Spock himself is proof that death is not the end and that there are always possibilities, both for Star Trek and its most devoted fans.