'Prelude to Axanar': A Sam Trek Review

"For myself, I have but one fear:   Destroying the dream of the Federation.  Compared to such a loss, I do not fear the Klingon Empire!" - Admiral Ramirez

If you follow any of the number of fan-made Star Trek productions that can be found on the Internet these days, you've probably already heard of Star Trek:  Axanar.

The ambitious and highly-anticipated fan film aims to tell the story of a conflict that raged between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the years prior to the beginning of Star Trek: The Original Series.

With its Kickstarter effort, they've raised nearly $200,000.  As a combination "proof of concept" and as a treat for their backers, they released a sort of expanded teaser last week.

In a 21-minute faux documentary, several of the actors give in-character interviews (interspersed with "historic footage" that shows off Axanar's impressive CGI) talking about the pre-TOS conflict with the Klingons, building up to the titular Battle of Axanar.

For those of you that don't recall, the Battle of Axanar is when the legendary Garth of Izar led Starfleet to a major victory against the Klingon fleet.

The short film--called Prelude to Axanar--was released last week to much fanfare by the project's backers and others who have been anticipating the film.

Prelude to Axanar is viewable in many places online, including YouTube videos that I could embed here directly.  However, the "official" and high-definition copy of the film lives on Vimeo and its uploaders have opted to disable embedding.  This is presumably because they want people to come to their Kickstarter page first, so they can watch the film and then consider pledging a few bucks.

So because I want them to raise more money and make the full-length feature film, I'm simply linking the screenshot below to their Kickstarter page.  But if you scroll down on the page a bit, there's an embed of the full 21-minute "prelude" film, which is all 1080p and whatnot and can be expanded to view it full-screen.

(click on the title screen above to visit Axanar's Kickstarter page)

I first watched this last week when it was released, and I've probably watched it a half-dozen time since then.  So to say that I enjoyed it would be an understatement.

Prelude to Axanar has a number of things going for it that really draw me in:

• There are three "conflict" periods in Star Trek lore that I'd love to see, but were never shown on-screen during any of the official series or films:  The Earth-Romulan War, the Four Years War and the Federation-Cardassian War.
  
  Axanar will cover the second of these, the so-called "Four Years War" in which a fledgling Federation fought a grueling war against the Klingon Empire.
  
  As I've mentioned previously, I love the more utopian "Roddenberry" vision for Star Trek, but I do enjoy even more--owing in part, no doubt, to being a military history buff and military trivia enthusiast--the more militarized "Nick Meyer" vision for Star Trek.
  
  Axanar (and hence, Prelude to Axanar) are clearly the latter.  A cool story with lots of starship combat?  SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.
• Although many other fan films have featured one or two professional actors (often Trek veterans), this one features several, including Trek alumni Tony Todd, Gary Graham and J.G. Hertzler and Battlestar Galactica alumni Richard Hatch and Kate Vernon (Michael Hogan has also been cast in Axanar to play Robert April, but he did not appear in Prelude to Axanar).

Having professional actors in all of the key roles has obviously made a huge difference.  With all due respect to other fan films, like Star Trek: New Voyages / Star Trek: Phase II (who have proven that you can achieve near-feature quality production values in a fan film), acting has always been the biggest weak point of any fan production.

Now, in some ways that's not that big a deal--for the most part, Trek has never been about Oscar-caliber performances.  And fan films are just that--tributes made by fans who love the franchise and just want to play in that universe.  I've got no problem overlooking some stiff acting or overacting on the part of an eager fan who's got a good story to tell and is putting themselves out there--it takes guts and a lot of effort to put together a fan film.  And, as we've seen with Phase II, the acting does improve as the amateur fan-actors who are filling most of the roles get some experience under their belts.

But having professional actors in all or most of the key roles--especially fan favorites like J.G. Hertzler or Michael Hogan--definitely increases my enjoyment of the film.  In Prelude to Axanar, all of the actors who are giving in-character "interviews" do a great job with their characters.

Tony Todd is a highlight as Admiral Marcus Ramirez, Starfleet's Commander-in-Chief during the Four Years War.  The relatively unknown Alec Peters, who plays the infamous Garth of Izar (a madman by the time we meet him in TOS, but who served as a heroic fleet captain during the war), does a great job of conveying a quiet brilliance and humility that stands in stark contrast with the unhinged egomaniac that he becomes later.  Peters is also the writer of the film (and I believe its general "showrunner"), so it's nice to see that he's also got some acting chops.

J.G. Hertzler (Admiral Travis), Gary Graham (reprising his role as Ambassador Soval from ENT) and Kate Vernon (Captain Alexander) are all as great in Prelude to Axanar as they have been in other productions on their respective sci-fi resumes (all impressively lengthy).  The decision to not have J.G. Hertzler play a Klingon seems a little unusual at first, but if they'd done so then the character would have been reduced to being "Martok Sr." or something.  Having him play a Starfleet officer is better, I think.

I like Richard Hatch, but his performance as a Klingon warlord named "Kharn"--the architect of the Empire's strategy against the Federation--is one of the few in Prelude to Axanar that I thought fell a little flat.  It's not bad, but it's a little stiff.  I think Hatch is trying to do a stoic, gruff Klingon demeanor...but it just comes across as stilted.  Hopefully when he's playing the more dramatic sequences in the feature film, it will feel a little more natural.  Ultimately though, I think they would've been better served to have him play another character (e.g. a human) and have someone else play the main "villain" (although Kharn isn't presented as a villain at all in this documentary-style prelude--it's very much a "both sides tell their story about the war" kind of thing, as you'd see with a WW2 documentary featuring both American and German soldiers, for example).

Aside from the acting, the production values are the big stand out in Prelude to Axanar.  The costuming and sets (such as they are--it's mostly faux interviews, as I've mentioned) are great.  Hatch's Klingon make-up leaves something to be desired, though.  He's got a lot of pink and redness around the prosthetics, which makes me wonder if he had some allergy problems with either the latex or the glue (this isn't uncommon--famously, Jonathan Rhys-Davies was in allergy hell for most of the time he played Gimli in the Lord of the Rings movies).

The CGI is obviously most of what they wanted to show off with this extended preview:  They want their backers to know where the reported $75,000 they spent on Preluded to Axanar went.  And it is some seriously impressive work.  One of the best things to happen to fan films of any science fiction or fantasy franchise has to have been the development of 3D modeling and video editing software that can run on high-end workstations rather than million-dollar mainframes or clusters of dedicated rendering servers.  This has enabled these productions to either do their effects in-house, or to farm them out to one of the many smaller effects houses that have sprung up to take advantage of the technological revolution that lets them do this at a fraction of what it used to cost (or what it used to cost to produce everything with high-quality motion-controlled models and so forth).

Prelude to Axanar's visual effects are simply the best I've seen of any fan production (and that's saying something, considering how good they've been in productions like the aforementioned Phase II).  Below is a still of the film, showing the war-winning Ares-class starship in dry dock.  The level of detail and photo-realism is astonishing.

The Ares-class in drydock.  Ooh...shiny...

Even moreso than the quality of the effects is the obvious care that they took to bridge starship design aesthetics introduced for the pre-TOS era in the reboot films (Star Trek & Star Trek Into Darkness) and those in TOS itself.  The film features both original starship designs (like the aforementioned Ares class), as well as more "TOS-y"-looking versions of ships featured in the reboot films--like one of my favorites, the "Newton" type.  It's a nice bit of attention to detail.

So that's my take on it:  If you're even remotely interested in Star Trek or even just good militaristic sci-fi in general, check out the 21-minute "documentary" Prelude to Axanar.  If you really like it, like I did, drop a few bucks (or a few more bucks) on their Kickstarter so they can get the feature film made.