Mark Wahlberg may have been James T. Kirk’s father. They offered him the role, he didn’t understand the script and he rejected it; He only realized what he had missed when he saw the finished film. The movie, of course, was ‘Star Trek’the reinvention with which JJ Abrams brought afloat in 2009 a franchise that had not raised its head since 2002, and which you can review in Movistar+ and SkyShowtime.
The character was George Kirk, an officer who dies piloting his ship against a Romulan ship to save eight hundred people, including his wife, who gives birth while he says goodbye over the radio. Wahlberg acknowledged it with these words: “I tried to read the script. I didn’t understand the words, or the dialogue, or anything.” The role ended up in the hands of Chris Hemsworth, two years before becoming Thor for Marvel. Paramount trusted the character so much that they even proposed four films focused on him, a spin-off that never caught on.
Abrams solved the reboot with an alternate timeline that allowed him to touch on mythology without upsetting the fandom, and let Leonard Nimoy himself pass the baton to the new actors within the fiction. It worked: good reviews and revenue ($385.7 million with a budget of $150), and two sequels, ‘Into the Dark’ and ‘Beyond’, which completed the trilogy before Paramount shelved the project.
What continues to shine seventeen years later is the rhythm: Abrams rides the space opera like a fast-paced thriller, with a cast that overflows with chemistry. And pay attention to the first ten minutes, where the role of the conflict is: the character that Wahlberg rejected continues to give rise to what is the best start of the entire franchise. Ironies of destiny.
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