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Star Trek’s Simon Pegg Thinks Sci-Fi Is Making Us Childish

Self-confessed geek and sci-fi fanboy Simon Pegg seems to have changed his tune since starring in ‘Star Trek’… and now thinks that the genre he loves is making us all childish.

During an interview with Radio Times, the 45-year-old ‘Star Trek’ actor revealed that he thinks modern cinema is dumbing down… and he seems to blame it all on ‘Star Wars’.

“Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Bonnie And Clyde and The French Connection – gritty, amoral art movies,” he said. “Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle and everything changed … I don’t know if that is a good thing.”

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“Obviously I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science fiction and genre cinema but part of me looks at society as it is now and just thinks we’ve been infantilised by our own taste. Now we’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes. Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously.”

But that’s not all… he also goes on to seemingly slam ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’.

“It is a kind of dumbing down, in a way, because it’s taking our focus away from real-world issues,” he added. “Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about … whatever. Now we’re walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.”

Obviously, his new attitude against the geekier side of cinema raises a lot of questions. I mean, whatever happened to the man who slammed the ‘Star Wars’ prequels? Wasn’t he taking it a bit too seriously back then?

It certainly seems as though he’s started to buy into the notion that genre cinema isn’t lofty enough for a true cinema connoisseur. But you only have to look at… oh, I don’t know, ‘Star Trek’ itself to see that sci-fi and genre film can deal with some pretty heavyweight issues.

Perhaps even more worryingly, he goes on to explain that he was hired to rewrite the upcoming ‘Star Trek 3’ script as the original version was “a little bit too Star Trek-y.”

His solution? To make a more mainstream film – such as a Western or a thriller or a heist movie – and then populate that film with ‘Star Trek’ characters, in an attempt to reach an audience outside of the usual genre crowd.

Does this mean we’ll see a far more mainstream ‘Star Trek 3’? For now, we’ll have to wait and see. But I hope Simon Pegg tries to remember what he used to love about science fiction.

‘Star Trek 3’ heads to cinemas on 8 July 2016.

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Picture Credit: Paramount Pictures