Every now and then, a mooted movie project just sounds so right that you can almost touch it, even if it has about as much chance of actually being shown in multiplexes as Vladimir Putin does of winning the Nobel peace prize. Reports this week suggest that Cate Blanchett, the much garlanded doyenne of serious cinema, was not so long ago being lined up to star in a Star Trek movie for Noah Hawley, the director of Fargo (the TV edition) and Legion.
Regular readers of this blogpost will be aware that Paramount decided to go a different way with the next instalment in the continuing adventures of the Starship Enterprise. They’re bringing back Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto’s Spock, along with their rebooted comrades from the JJ Abrams-led trilogy, but Wandavision director Matt Shakman will be the man in the command chair instead.
That means that we’ll start hearing things leaking out about how Hawley’s version might have gone down, and one of these nuggets is Blanchett involvement. Exactly what role she would have played is not public knowledge, but the thought of the Australian actor as the captain of her own Star Fleet starship, battling weird-looking aliens and discovering anomalies in deepest space is so irresistible that it probably is already happening right now in a much cooler alternate reality than the unfortunate one we happen to be living in.
Why Blanchett has only appeared in a handful of major genre projects in her career – her Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the son of Odin’s nefarious sister Hela in Thor: Ragnarok spring to mind – is a mystery. Few other actors can chew scenery with such lustful ferocity and mischievous glee as the awards-season favourite. Yet so often she seems restricted to the kind of movies that only critics see.
Perhaps Blanchett’s infuriating absence from genre fare is down to the fact that, on occasion, she has clearly chosen the wrong projects. Spalko may be Steven Spielberg’s favourite Indie villain, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull itself was a pretty clumsy attempt to jump the shark from swashbuckling archeological fantasy to po-faced sci-fi. Which brings us to Blanchett’s latest foray into mainstream cinema, the forthcoming video game adaptation Borderlands.
Whuu? I hear you ask. Yes, Blanchett is to take the lead in a big-screen take on the 2009 open world first-person “looter shooter”, as Lilith, described as an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past who reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora (no, not that one) to find a powerful tyrant’s missing daughter. The movie is being directed by Eli Roth, he of the Hostel movies and that god-awful remake of Death Wish. It all sounds about as tantalising as a tasty bowl of Klingon gagh.
Can’t we just get Hela back in the Marvel game? The Asgardian deity may have died at the end of Ragnarok at the hands of the fire demon Surtur, but how exactly do you kill off the Goddess of Death? I mean, there have to be screenwriting workarounds here to help restore her to the action. After all, DC brought Superman back with a box of nonsense and some sticky back plastic!
If that’s not on, perhaps Paramount can find some way of featuring Blanchett in Star Trek 4 after all. It needn’t be a huge role: she could be revealed as Scotty’s more elegant, slinky sibling, or as the leader of a race of all-female extra-terrestrials who are about to achieve civilisational nirvana when Kirk accidentally drops a thousand tonnes of tribbles on their capital city. We’ll take anything at this point. Just please don’t waste a double Oscar-winner in a bad Eli Roth video game flick.
But hey, this is Star Trek we are talking about. Perhaps we can just pull out the old “red matter” and create an “alternate timeline” in which this article never had to be written because Hollywood studios make better creative decisions. And if not, maybe it’s time to Ragnarok the whole darned place to fiery oblivion.
