Gort vs The Borg: Star Trek Renegades
When JJ Abrams dropped the baton of Star Trek’s proud legacy and pooped on it, various fans picked it up, washed it off and made their own Trek movies in their mum’s basements to release on YouTube. The films are universally cack, but a lot of fun, which makes them right up our Jeffries tube. Voyager cast member Tim Russ, however, has taken to Kickstarter and crowdfunded a new fan film with a B-list cast in the hopes that he can make something that’s actually good. So red alert, Trekkies, let’s find out if Star Trek Renegades succeeded.
A bunch of dudes in inarticulate plastic masks are destroying planets using technobabollocks. Walter Koenig from the original series, who is now so old he’s starting to look like Mr Burns, teams up with Russ and Grant Imahara from Mythbusters to stop them, but everyone he talks to about it gets blown up in a convenient health and safety fail. Naturally, his only recourse is to recruit a ragtag group of space pirates to take on the alien army because YOLO.
Nathan Fillion is piling on the pounds, Jewel Staite is pregnant and Morena Baccarin is banging Commissioner Gordon, so Russ recruits a bunch of mental ex-Hollywood-A-listers in a rather spiffy ship that looks like an S&M Enterprise. Heading them up is Xena’s evil daughter, who also happens to be the child of Khan Noonien Singh, somehow, despite not being Mexican; but she has inherited Khan’s hair. She agrees to go on this suicide mission against a psychotic alien army with advanced tech because Russ agrees to tell her what happened to her mother if she should somehow make it back. We could have saved her the bother and told her that her mum caught a parasite puppet to the brain before Trek 2.
Backing Xena’s Daughter up is one of the freed Borg from Voyager, played by the same actor as the series; Sean Young, because this is the only work she can get now; Edward Furlong, who appears to be playing himself; a Breen, Star Trek’s version of Princess Leia’s bounty hunter disguise; a burly Bajoran; and a big-boobed lady with deus ex machina powers. Off they merrily all go to take on the enemy fleet, pursued by Corin Nemec, playing the second-most inept captain in Starfleet history after Janeway, who doesn’t seem to have got the memo that they’re all on the same side.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Koenig gets involved in a pretty gruesome storyline involving his granddaughter, whose acting is so bad she makes it an art; a big-boobed, blue-skinned, lesbian mind-rapist; and a Romulan whose only contribution to the story is to shout “look, an assassin!” and vaporise some poor dude who seems to just be checking Twitter. The always-welcome Robert Picardo even turns up in a cameo to have some holographic, long-distance nookie with Sean Young. In fairness, that’s probably the only safe way to interact with her.
Things muddle along from there and, despite losing any semblance of plot in the middle, build to a fairly-epic conclusion. Not a lick of it makes sense scientifically or in terms of character motivation, but the film looks great. Despite Russ seeming to be convinced that slow motion can make anything dramatic and some very-shoddy editing, there are some awesome effects, some lovely design and a respectable amount of work put into making a series of empty rooms look like spaceship interiors… if you squint a bit…
The big question, however, is: does it feel like Trek? Alas, not remotely. The tone is more in keeping with Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade, which is about the worst thing you could say about anything ever. It is, however, good fun and it’s almost a shame this is flying the Trek banner as it’s only harmed by being compared to such a classic franchise.
The film is basically screaming “we’ll tell you WTF is going on if you make us a series, please, please, please” and it seems likely Russ has drummed up enough to do some webisodes, so we’re getting more Renegades whether we like it or not. To be honest, that’s not a horrifying prospect.
Star Trek Renegades is available in its entirety free on YouTube, as below, but if you’d like to contribute to keeping Sean Young off the streets, you can buy a copy through their website (if you can get it to work).
Originally published at dayhwstoodstill.tumblr.com.
