Star Trek Axanar: I’ll be honest and say I did not follow Axanar at all. I only first heard about it when it showed up in my related videos circa 2017. I only know what I’ve read about its development period and the controversy surrounding it. From my perspective it appears less to be a con job and more just an ego project that spiraled out of control. I do have a few reasons for this, which I’ll detail below as well as my general thoughts on the show.
Ignoring its background though and judging it purely as its own thing, I have a lot of problems with Axanar. I’m unhappy with the idea of a Federation-Klingon War to begin with, since this was never an explicit part of the franchise. In TOS it was heavily implied that all-out war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire would bring ruin to both of them. Even Enterprise, with its many missteps, resisted the temptation to depict an all-out war with its Klingon plots.
Additionally, I am extremely unhappy with the idea of the D7 participating in this conflict, let along being a decisive factor in it. The D7 is supposed to be the apex Klingon ship of its era, implied to be a match for the Enterprise or at least a substantial threat to it. This is way too early for it to show up, and I think it’s a microcosm of the problems wrong with Axanar. It succumbs too easily to temptation.
They just had to show us a Federation-Klingon War. They just had to involved the D7 rather than come up with their own ship of the era. In general the whole premise of the show is fan wank material in the first place. You have all of these characters sitting around talking about how awesome the events of the story are while cutting away to that story. It reads like what it is, a promo, not like a real war documentary would read.
This is especially notable in the short film Interlude, where the events of the film take place, and then it immediately cuts to an in-universe interview of Garth talking about how emotional the events made him. But there’s a conflict of interest here, since Garth is played by the guy who wrote the damn show, so in his “interview” he’s talking about how emotional
the events he fucking wrote himself are. Its borderline blatant masturbation.
The effects are pretty good, and the actors are pretty good. The returning Trek actors are cool to see and not too forced. The sets look fine. It looks professional, it sounds professional. But the writing is awful. The lines are very melodramatic; characters make dramatic pauses or over-emote when trying to show despondence. And then the interview segments just make it so much worse because the audience is basically being told how to feel about scenes that already had exaggerated emotions involved in the first place. It doesn’t work.
If this production had any real balls there would be no D7, and there would be no space battles. It would just be the people sitting around talking. Rather than show us the events, we could perhaps imagine them based on the testimony of the fictional characters instead. It would be less spectacular, certainly, but it would avoid the masturbatory feel of juxtaposing the events and their interview segments right next to each other like that.
Lastly, I do want to bring up the fact that Axanar and Discovery share remarkable similarities. Its been alleged by Axanar devotees that Discovery outright ripped off Axanar’s premise of showing a Federation-Klingon War. Personally, even though I think Alec Peters is a hack with a bloated ego project under his belt, I do think Paramount or at least Alex Kurtzman ripped him off. The similarities are too obvious for me to ignore, and I wouldn’t put it past Kurtzman especially to try and drink the milkshake of even lowly fan productions because that’s honestly how creatively bankrupt the industry has become.
Its also interesting how Axanar seemed to want to take Star Trek in a more “mature” route, with things like the swearing and the more relaxed (“relaxed” anyway) dialogue. (Including the “Queen-Bitch Whore of the federation” line which is cringe-inducingly ripped off from Kerrigan’s famous “I’m basically Queen Bitch of the universe” line in Starcraft) And its telling to me that Discovery tried to market itself as doing the exact same sort of thing with its writing and dialogue, though of course hundreds of times worse than the already clumsy and glaring way that Axanar did it.
Still I’m willing to recommend Prelude to Axanar at least because its short. There’s really no reason an interested fan should avoid it, but I’m not impressed by it or the project.
PS: I have not watched any of the other projects hosted on Axanar’s channel; the ones set in different eras. I have no idea if they’re any good.
