Entertainment
Paramount Just Used AI To Ruin Star Trek's Best Character
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a franchise set in the far future, you might expect Star Trek to make some definitive, sweeping statements about the use of AI. However, various shows and movies have presented this technology as something of a double-edged sword. In Star Trek, AI powers the ship’s computers and holodecks, and it helps bring the beloved android officer Data to life. But AI is also responsible for numerous existential threats to the entire galaxy, including everything from evil androids like Lore to weapons of mass destruction like the Planet Killer and Control. Star Trek is ultimately very wishy-washy about this technology, presenting it as both a game-changer and a life-taker.
In the real world, the good of AI is quite outweighed by the bad. Sure, it can help you write emails and generate images, but it’s also being used by massive corporations to cut corners and give paying customers cheap slop, all so some rich exec doesn’t have to pay some poor, overworked creative. Now, Star Trek has officially become part of the problem. Recently, Paramount seemingly used AI to create a thumbnail of William Shatner for Paramount+, and it created the stupidest-looking image in Trek history. Unfortunately, this is now the inevitable future of the franchise: a studio phoning in even the most basic creative efforts, all to please a fandom that is quietly dying.
Meet AI Slop Captain Kirk
This story begins with the worst streaming service ever created: Paramount+. Like all streamers, this platform provides thumbnails for various movies. Normally, this is just a still from the film. For example, when you scroll down to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, you might see an image of James Doohan giving his best thousand-yard stare. If you scroll to Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, you might see that melty-faced weirdo that Dr. McCoy tries to hitch a ride with. However, when fans recently scrolled to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they saw an insanely ugly image of William Shatner that was seemingly created by AI.
The image features Shatner staring into the camera with a relatively sedate look on his face. He is wearing a suit and tie, which is properly absurd. Not only does Admiral Kirk never wear this suit in The Wrath of Khan, but the only time he wore anything remotely like this was when he donned a pinstripe gangster suit in the Original Series cheesefest episode “A Piece of the Action.” The most notable thing about this thumbnail on Paramount + is that one of Shatner’s eyes has a weird red glow around it. The whole thing is surreal and looks like what would happen if the Borg decided to assimilate Don Draper.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
So, what the heck happened here? On Bluesky, Ryan Estrada seemingly cracked the case. The image of Shatner’s face mostly does come from The Wrath of Khan. It’s from the scene where Kirk completes a retinal scan before accessing classified information on Project Genesis. In the movie, this is an extreme close-up of Kirk’s face, one that cuts off his chin and almost everything above his eyes. The shot works well in the movie, but it would look absolutely terrible as a streaming thumbnail. Estrada’s theory (and one I certainly agree with) is that Paramount fed the movie image to a generative AI and asked it to flesh out the rest of his body.
However, the AI took more than a few liberties with Shatner’s character. It basically ruined the actor’s hairline (something previously only God could do), making Kirk look like a slicked-down Wall Street broker. It put him in a business suit for completely unknown reasons, making the image look instantly out of place as a Star Trek thumbnail. Most bizarrely, it didn’t remove the red light from the reticle scan, making Kirk look like he’s got the galaxy’s worst case of red eye (maybe the waste extraction department was slacking). As ugly as it is, though, the worst thing about this AI slop is how damn lazy it is.
AI Slop: The Future Of Star Trek
Star Trek is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary, and Paramount is hoping to revive the entire franchise with a brand new movie. But why would anyone want to watch a film by the same creatively bankrupt people who had to use AI to make a freakin’ thumbnail? These execs are stewards of the coolest sci-fi IP ever created, but they couldn’t be bothered to simply take a suitable screencap from The Wrath of Khan. Sadly, this AI screw-up is an indictment of what Star Trek has become: lazy slop made by lazier creatives who hope you’re too stupid to care about how bad this franchise has become.
They’re wrong, obviously, and Paramount is about to learn a very bitter lesson: the only thing they can’t gin up in AI is fans who actually care about Star Trek anymore!
Entertainment
Netflix Just Added The Extremely R-Rated Crime Thriller Secretly Made By Film's Greatest Director
By TeeJay Small
| Published
If you’re a sucker for a good crime thriller, you’re probably already aware of the hit 1993 movie True Romance. This genre-defining film is packed to the gills with foul language, graphic violence, and some supernatural themes that make the whole thing feel like a fever dream lost in time.
Though it was considered a box office failure in its day, True Romance has since garnered a massive cult following. If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, or you’ve streamed it, now is the right time. Netflix just added True Romance.
Long before True Romance was dancing across the silver screen and upsetting the prudes at the MPAA, the film was being penned by a young, up-and-coming Quentin Tarantino. This is the very first feature-length screenplay the Pulp Fiction filmmaker ever wrote. Portions of the first act and some of the pop culture-focused dialogue were lifted right out of Tarantino’s own unreleased short film, My Best Friend’s Birthday, which he made while working at a video rental store in Los Angeles.
Tarantino originally intended to direct True Romance himself, but by the time the script was gaining traction with producers, he had already moved on to a new project that would ultimately become Reservoir Dogs. So he sold the screenplay, used the money to finance his own debut, and let Top Gun director Tony Scott take the wheel.
This has become the subject of tons of debate among film nerds, as some fans believe True Romance is a shadow of what it could have been with Tarantino behind the wheel. Others, including Tarantino himself, have lauded Tony Scott for bringing the intense screenplay to life and offering a more saccharine ending than what was originally on the page.
The plot of True Romance centers on a young couple named Clarence and Alabama. They meet at a movie theater, quickly fall in love, and decide to skip town together after a whirlwind date. The only problem is, Alabama is a woman of the night, and her pimp Drexl Spivey doesn’t take kindly to the loss of revenue.
Prompted by the ghost of Elvis Presley, Clarence murders Spivey and snags a duffle bag of blow from his workplace, hoping he can sell it off to finance his new life. Predictably, the young couple’s troubles don’t end there, as they contend with gang members, police, and a world that seems to want to keep them apart.
The whole adventure feels like a very 90s take on the classic tale of Bonnie and Clyde, complete with some added racy elements. For many fans, True Romance represents the gold standard of crime thrillers.
Christian Slater gives a career-defining performance here, alongside top-tier showings from Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, and Christopher Walken. Several big-name actors appear in minor bit parts as well, including Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, and the late James Gandolfini, of The Sopranos fame.
Whether you’re a die-hard fan or you’re looking to catch it for the very first time, you can watch True Romance on Netflix today. Just prepare to hear some really outlandish stuff, especially if you’ve got any Sicilian ancestry.
TRUE ROMANCE REVIEW SCORE
Entertainment
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Mashable Deals
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Mashable Deals
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s Biggest Star Will Never Return To The Franchise
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
To this day, William Shatner remains the face of Star Trek. It was his weirdly compelling performance that helped transform The Original Series into a breakout pop culture hit. Later, it was Shatner’s charisma that gave the TOS movies their charming mainstream appeal. Shatner’s Captain Kirk is such an iconic figure that the franchise has tried to bring him back to life with multiple actors. But for all their talents, performers like Chris Pine and Paul Wesley could never match Shatner’s iconic (and certainly iconoclastic) performance. Because of that, the producers of the most popular current Trek show did their best to put Shatner’s Kirk onscreen again.
We first found out about this when Shatner himself mentioned being approached by some unnamed Star Trek producers. Recently, NuTrek guru Alex Kurtzman and some of his fellow producers gave an interview to Polygon where they admitted that they made an effort to bring Shatner back for Season 4 of Strange New Worlds. It would have been quite fitting: not only is SNW one big love letter to The Original Series, but this year is the 60th anniversary of the franchise. Unfortunately, Kurtzman and company couldn’t make it happen, which makes it official: after decades of producers trying to bring him back, William Shatner will never return to Star Trek, the franchise that made him famous.
Strange New Worlds And A Familiar Actor
Strange New Worlds is a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series that focuses on the adventures of Captain Pike, who commanded the Enterprise’s first five-year mission. The show features several new actors playing familiar characters, including Ethan Peck as Spock and Anson Mount as Spock. Paul Wesley plays the younger Kirk, which leaves the obvious question: how, exactly, was the show going to bring back the 95-year-old William Shatner to play the same character? Through the magic of the multiverse, of course!
In an interview with Polygon, Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman said that his biggest regret was that they never managed to bring William Shatner to homage the Original Series episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” This is the famous episode where Kirk falls in love with a woman whose activism keeps America out of World War II, allowing the Nazis to rule the world. To save the future, Kirk is forced to let her die. Goldsman wanted an SNW episode portraying Shatner as a version of Kirk who had stayed in the past to stay with the woman he loved, the future be damned.
Mirror, Mirror, On The Screen
According to Akiva Goldsman, the Strange New Worlds writers developed several scripts and tried to bring William Shatner each season, but it never happened. Now that Strange New Worlds has wrapped production, and no new Trek series is on the horizon, it’s unlikely we’ll see Shatner play Captain Kirk on the small screen again. Plus, given that Paramount wants to reboot Trek as a film with completely new characters, we’re equally unlikely to see Shatner’s Kirk on the big screen again. This is doubly sad because different Star Trek producers have been trying to bring him back for decades.
When Star Trek: Enterprise was first airing, William Shatner himself approached Trek guru Rick Berman with an idea. Over lunch, the actor pitched the idea of a two-part episode that returned to the Mirror Universe and showed the evil version of Captain Kirk as an older man. It was a great idea, but there was just one problem: Shatner was asking for too much money. While he didn’t name an exact amount, Berman told The Shuttlepod Show that “the number was probably 8x more than the studio had any interest in.” However, Manny Coto liked Shatner’s idea, which is why we did eventually get a two-part Mirror Universe episode, albeit without Captain Kirk.
He’s Not Dead, Jim!
After Enterprise prematurely ended, fans worried that the franchise might be dead. Fortunately, Star Trek (2009) brought everyone’s favorite Original Series characters back with new actors, new stories, and an entirely new universe (the Kelvinverse) to play in. Leonard Nimoy appears to help pass the baton to yet another new generation of Trek performers, and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman originally wrote a scene where Spock had a pre-recorded “happy birthday” message from Shatner’s Kirk. But Shatner wanted a prominent role where Kirk was somehow still alive, suggesting the writers canonize his novels where Kirk is resurrected. Feeling that more Shatner would overshadow the younger performers, Orci and Kurtzman wrote him out of the film altogether.
Without William Shatner, Star Trek would likely have never become such an outsized pop culture phenomenon. Previously, his returns (first, in The Animated Series, and again in the TOS movies) helped reinvigorate the franchise, and he played a major part in helping the Next Generation cast transition their characters from TV to film. Clearly, Shatner never lost his love for Kirk: not only did he make multiple attempts to return via TV and film, but he wrote (along with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens) an entire series of books about Kirk coming back to life and having more crazy interstellar adventures.
Outside of books, though, it seems like Kirk’s Star Trek adventures have come to an end. He won’t pop up in Strange New Worlds, and he’s deeply unlikely to make any kind of appearance in Paramount’s upcoming reboot film. That’s unfortunate for all of us who would love to see this iconic performer play his most famous character, one last time. Whether or not Shatner ever makes a triumphant return, though, we’ll always remember him for two things. First, boldly going where no actor has gone before. And second, letting generations of fans tag along for the ride!
Netflix Just Added The Extremely R-Rated Crime Thriller Secretly Made By Film's Greatest Director
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