Quentin Tarantino may just be the future of Star Trek. And although he's a rogue choice, he may be just what the franchise needs, able to make it cooler than J.J. Abrams ever did.Star Trek has always had a coolness problem. Often, The Original Series vacillated between kitschy and brainy. It was a niche within another niche, yet managed to join the mainstream. Popular, yes. But, cool? No. And Star Trek never was quite successful when it tried to be cool. It can't really retain its soul on cool. When J.J. Abrams rebooted the movie franchise, it dripped with cool, but it wasn't exactly Star Trek. Abrams-Trek was more bubblegum, and that worked, at least for a while. However, with the declining box office returns, it is not sustainable. What Star Trek needs to evolve is a pair of willing to tend the garden, not play in the weeds. It needs Quentin Tarantino.The Problem With J.J. Abrams Star TrekAmong Star Trek's longstanding problems is its homogeneity. You could put on an episode of The Original Series and Enterprise - the first and last series that were part of the original Roddenberry vision - and see virtually the same thing. The editing and directing were nearly identical. Establishing shot to captain's log. Virtually every episode had them. Act breaks followed the same formula. Actions scenes were almost always shot the same way. From 1967 to 2005, the only things that changed was the budget.Related: Everything We Know About Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek MoviePart of that was due to Rick Berman, who took over as Trek's gatekeeper upon Gene Roddenberry's passing. Under his auspices, the spin-off series all synced in most ways, right down to the music, which tended to a background nuisance rather than a supplementary method of communication and entertainment. Deep Space Nine was the maverick of the franchise - the most original series since, well, The Original Series. It went against the grain by questioning the Roddenberry utopia; it featured morally complex characters and featured serialized arcs. Yet, aesthetically, it remained obviously Star Trek, and unless you're a die-hard fan, it's doubtful that you've ever heard of it. It was the coolest series, but when was the last time you heard anyone talk about it?When J.J. Abrams boarded the franchise, he added his own visual lexicon, which, like or dislike it, was necessary. To speak to the creative quality of Abrams' work on Star Trek, however, it's certainly not great. His talents as a director do not lie in invention but in reinterpretation. He is at his best when he's echoing the familiar. The Force Awakens is A New Hope. Super 8 is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Abrams' Star Trek was Star Wars, from its directorial flourishes to its creative value system; it is action heavy, it moves quickly, it is not bogged down in the how and why. In stripping away the very thing that made Trek niche, it also robbed it of its uniqueness, becoming cacophonous nonsense closer to Transformers than its own source material. Merely referencing foundational touchstones - tribbles, Khan, common sense - doesn't make Into Darkness into Star Trek.Its success, however, demanded its own homogeneity, and Star Trek: Discovery was produced. If not cut from the same cloth, Discovery comes certainly from the same tailor's shop (though definitely not from Garak's). The series is purported to exist in the original Star Trek universe, though it clearly derives more influence from the Abrams movies visually and creatively. Discovery attempts to marry the brainier aspect of Trek's philosophical core with the action of its modern depiction. It does neither particularly well; instead it reflects Star Trek's social themes at its heavy-handed worst while relying on its pace to blind audiences to its elemental flaws. Like the Abrams films, Discovery is familiar, but will not age gracefully.Related: Star Trek: Discovery Needs to Be Set in The Kelvin TimelineThe œcoolness factor of this new Star Trek is manufactured. It comes from a formula resultant from other space opera shows and lesser comedies. It feels base. While the Trek of yesteryear certainly faltered and talked down to its audience as well, the self-aware coolness and half-hearted references to the old school give these new iterations a cynical, artificial, post-modern feel.Quentin Tarantino and Kirk from Star Trek

How Quentin Tarantino Can Make Star Trek Cool

While Tarantino certainly pays homage, there is an undeniable style that allows an audience to identify his work. œYes, you can say, in a clip from any of his films, œthat's Quentin Tarantino despite his genre-skipping. From dialogue to a disregard for linearity, its rhythmic pacing and camera style, you know his movies when you see them. Whether you believe his movies fall into that same post-modern cynicism is subjective, but even his ardent detractors will admit that the man is always taking risks with well-worn plots, circumstances, and genres. To that end, he's unyielding in his demand to do things his way: it's his vision of the story or the highway.

That's why he's been so hesitant to work inside any shared sandbox. It isn't his; he'd have to play by house rules. Back in the early 2000s, he was interested in writing (and perhaps directing) Casino Royale. His ideas included setting the reboot in the old continuity, taking place directly after On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and having Bond deal with the murder of his wife Tracy, which ended that film and went barely referenced in following entries. The studio was less than thrilled at having so much creative control wrested from them and decided not to go along with Tarantino's drastic changes. In short, he's not a guy who's going to agree to tell a story that doesn't reflect his goals.

Related: 15 Abandoned Quentin Tarantino Projects You'll Never See

The public reaction to Quentin Tarantino's movies are a testament to this. Rarely is one of his movies released where there isn't some outcry from professional finger-waggers upset by the violent content or language - of all things to be upset about in American society! - as it appears in the said film. If you look at his brief filmography, you'll even find that he loves to scuttle from disparate genre to disparate genre. War movies, martial arts movies, crime, and westerns - he tries his hand at everything he loved growing up as a kid. He even attempted to reinvigorate grindhouse movies.

Take Django Unchained for instance. Prior to that, western films felt done and were restricted to limited releases. Once in a while, you'd have a classic like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but that was still a niche affair. Django was audacious and big. It did more business for the genre than any others in the last ten years combined. By the time it was over, those offended were frothing at the mouths while Django Unchained did great business and made it to the Academy Awards.

Star Trek, despite its formula, was never made to be vanilla. The great risk in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movies was the involvement of Abrams himself. He was an outsider who proudly declared having never much cared for Star Trek and wished to imbue the franchise with traits of his preferred sci-fi epic, Star Wars. Many compared the move to Paramount's decision in the early 80s to hire Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Like Abrams, neither man was interested in Star Trek and had been hired to give the ailing franchise a new set of eyes. The difference between then and now is that Bennett and Meyers understood what Star Trek was, where Abrams was more interested in what it wasn't. Abrams leaned too heavily on condescending nostalgia and modern crowd-pleasing window-dressing. In short, it was new for Star Trek, but not for anyone who has ever seen a sequel or reboot before.

Star Trek's great goal is to welcome change, and yet, to its detriment, there have been very few to actually change the franchise in a meaningful way. The Rick Berman era ended when audiences became sick of Trek's complacency and felt they were taken for granted. J.J. Abrams' contributions were successful, but less so with every effort. Star Trek: Beyond's underperformance at the box office mirrors not only Into Darkness' steep financial drop but Star Trek: Discovery as well. For whatever CBS may tout its success, they still have it relegated to a superfluous streaming service, out of sight and out of mind.

Related: All The Retro References In Star Trek Beyond

J.J. Abrams is safe. So safe that Kathleen Kennedy had to get him back for Star Wars Episode IX because Disney's risky directors didn't work out. What Star Trek needs is that big risk. The same risk that put Trek on TV in the first place; the same risk that has seen the franchise through spinoffs and reboots”just on a higher level. They need to attach themselves to someone who consistently tries something new. They need to do this not only for the reinvention of the series, but because it is at the heart of Star Trek's mythology. Welcome, Quentin.

Next: The Star Trek Episodes That Quentin Tarantino May Turn Into a Movie