By Greta Szabo and Karina Enteri
“History is eating us alive at the moment,” Oscar-winning director Nicholas Meyer addressed the relevance of sci-fi today on the last night of Future Gate Film Festival in Prague.
Fans gathered at Kino Lucerna on Oct. 4 to see “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” on the big screen and take part in a Q&A session afterwards about the movie and its impact.
“My opinion doesn’t count anymore. Only your opinion counts,” Meyer said when asked about the message of the film. He expanded that for him the movie is about “old age,” “friendship,” “implacable hatred” and “death,” but emphasized that what he thinks no longer matters.
The discussion turned towards war and political unrest, prompting Meyer to say, “The worst problem we face when we talk about nuclear war is that nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to think about it. We hope it won’t happen, but hope is not a strategy.”
“I would say even just the idea of Genesis being something that brings life while at the same time having the potential to destroy it – it’s a very complex topic that relates to a lot of things going on nowadays. Think of AI; it has its uses but also it has quite a few downfalls to it as well,” said Carianne Peak, a 3rd year humanities student at AAU. “Think of the scene where Spock mentions “In the wrong hands” but… what are the right hands for it to be in?”
“Today Star Trek is more important than it was then,” said one of the Treckies, a group who arrived in full attire to the screening. “There was cold war and hot war, Vietnam, and now we have the hot, hot war. Russia is threatening again.”
The director of Star Trek is also an award-winning author and screenwriter with his body of work spanning more than five decades.
The festival hosted events in Prague from Sept. 28 until Oct. 4 and now it moves on to Brno, Hodonín and Šumperk. Five more cities are on the roster, including Pilsen where the festival will conclude on Nov. 27.
