Captain's Log: The Next Trek Movie Puts Starfleet Itself on Trial
While promoting their new film "Mayday" this month, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein finally described what their untitled Star Trek movie actually is: a near-real-time institutional thriller in the mold of "Training Day" and "Crimson Tide," built around the question of what happens when Starfleet itself isn't the good guy in the room. No release date, no returning cast — just a genuinely unsettling premise.
Captain's log, stardate 2026.9.13. Every few years Trek tries to answer the same dare: can the franchise tell a story where Starfleet is the thing under suspicion, not the thing that saves the day? DS9 flirted with it. Section 31 built a whole movie around it. This month, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein — currently promoting their new film Mayday — finally put actual language to their long-rumored, still-untitled Star Trek film, and it sounds like the franchise's most direct attempt yet at that dare.
"Two movies we cite as comps for what we're hoping to do are Training Day and Crimson Tide," Goldstein said. Both reference points are worth sitting with. Training Day is a single, corrosive shift spent finding out the senior officer training you is not who the institution says he is. Crimson Tide is a submarine crew fracturing over whether to obey a launch order that might be catastrophically wrong. Neither is about an external villain. Both are about whether the chain of command itself deserves the trust it's been given.
"Our approach is to really look at it from a question of, what is this institution of Starfleet that's at the heart of Star Trek? And what would happen if all is not well in that institution?" Goldstein continued. Daley added the piece that actually reframes the whole pitch: "I would say it's really kind of a look at the institution of Starfleet and any institution as a whole that has existed for a long time and what that does." And structurally, it's a departure from how Trek movies usually move: "It takes place almost in real time, and it just is a whole other look at what a Star Trek movie could be without betraying the fundamentals of what it should be."
Here's why I don't read that as cynicism dressed up in a Starfleet uniform. Real institutional critique has always been load-bearing in this franchise — it's just usually delivered as an episode, not a tentpole. "The Drumhead," TNG Season 4, is Starfleet running an internal witch hunt and a decorated admiral abusing due process in the name of security, and it's remembered as one of the show's best hours specifically because it refuses to let the uniform excuse the abuse of power. DS9's entire back half is built on Section 31 operating as Starfleet's unaccountable shadow, and on Sisko forging a fabricated recording in "In the Pale Moonlight" to trick the Romulans into joining the Dominion War — a captain we're supposed to root for, doing something the Federation would officially condemn. Just this week, this column covered Strange New Worlds putting a young Kirk face-to-face with an admiral willing to invoke General Order 24 — plot armor and planet-scale destruction, no villain species required. The pattern is consistent: Trek's most memorable institutional stories have always been about Starfleet checking itself, not a monster checking Starfleet.
What's new is doing that at the scale of a theatrical film, without a single returning face from the Kelvin timeline, Discovery, or the Prime universe to soften the swing. This isn't a spinoff or a crossover. It's an entirely new cast, an entirely new corner of the timeline, built specifically to ask whether an institution that's existed for centuries can still be trusted to police itself — which, not coincidentally, is close to the exact question the franchise's real-world audience has spent the last several years asking about most of its own institutions. Trek working best when it's actually about the moment it's made in isn't a new observation, but it's a genuinely well-aimed one here.
I'll flag the caution the reporting itself doesn't always include: this is still an untitled project without a locked release date, still being written, described by its own directors mid-interview for a different movie. "Training Day and Crimson Tide in space" is a pitch, not a finished film, and pitches change in the writers' room more often than press tours admit. But as a stated intention, it's the boldest structural swing a mainline Trek movie has attempted since the franchise went to theaters in the first place — closer in spirit to a le Carré thriller than to a phaser fight, and explicitly uninterested in being safe.
If it lands anywhere near what Daley and Goldstein are describing, it'll be the first Trek film built entirely around the premise DS9 spent seven seasons proving: that the Federation's ideals only mean something if they can survive being tested by the people sworn to uphold them. That's not a betrayal of what Star Trek is. That might be the most Star Trek thing a Star Trek movie has tried to do in years.
Live long and prosper — and Admiral, whoever you turn out to be in this one: good luck explaining yourself.
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