This one will be a bit longer than most of my posts on films, especially for a film that is known for being so short. It's also not really that forgotten, but rather, I don't think it is given the recognition for it's huge significance today and at the time.
Basically, during the great drought of Trek shows before the garbage that is Disco, but after the nu-Trek Jar-Jar films released, there was a small number of fan studios putting out some high-quality Trek content. In particular, a new one was just starting and released a preview for what was to be a full length feature in a faux-documentary style. Thankfully the full preview is still available on Youtube:
Why was this such a big deal, you ask? Well, first off, instead of trying to re-imagine the original series era of Trek, this one faithfully recreates it. The Jar-Jar Trek was required to be different and was way too heavy on the gloss and lens flares, making everything seem fake on screen. On the other hand, Axanar tried to feel more grounded in it's sets and effects, giving it a more gritty feel. Unlike Enterprise and the nu-trek shows, it also wasn't trying to re-tread old ground, but was trying to flesh out something that had never been told first-hand in the trek universe before. As well as being faithful to established trek, it was also respectful to it's audience.
Naturally, because of these things, it was getting much higher viewing numbers than the new show that released at the same time, Disco. It was also getting a lot more fan hype and enthusiasm surrounding it, and the entire internet was praising it while using to compare to Disco and how trash that show is.
So, naturally, because the boneheads in charge of CBS hate both Trek and it's fans, and have no business sense whatsoever, the lawyers started seeping out of the woodwork to swarm on Axanar like flies to a carcass. Because Axanar wasn't doing anything conceptually different than has been done with Trek fan-films in the past, CBS came up with new draconian restrictions on fan-films with the threat of legal action if it was breached, and handed cease and desist orders to the studio. That action had the affect of not only killing Axanar, but nearly all other trek fan projects going on at the time.
I look back at this now and realize my worst fears at the time were completely right in that this was the first big blow to the Trek fandom and was the beginning of the end for Trek in general. Now Star Trek is permanently dead, never to be born again.
The only place that Trek lives on is in a small community of the PC gaming sphere, despite the garbage that is Star Trek: Online. With the revival of many Trek PC games on GoG.com, and with the release of one of the greatest trek mods of all time, Armada III for Sins of a Solar Empire, there is a bit of a resurgence of classic trek fandom that lives on. Not only that, but little known to most people, there was to be a major mod project tie-in for Axanar at the time it released.
The same team behind the Armada III mod were asked to help make this tie in, and they started work on it even before the final version of Armada III was finished, calling it Axanar: Strategic Operations. However, because of the CBS actions, this project was quickly cancelled. But the same team still couldn't be kept down and now have a similar project to carry on the original spirit and setting now called: Ages of the Federation: The Four Years War. It is well into an early build release and it is still undergoing development with additional releases expected soon.
At the same time, the same team also announced a sequel to the mod that takes place purely between the Motion Picture and the TNG era, which is what I am most excited about, as it's my favorite era of visual style for Trek, but with not much exploring that time frame. So, all you real Star Trek fans who like stuff that isn't trash, go give 'em a look-see.
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