The Gathering Storm

This review has been extended to take in account of the fan film being pulled from YouTube.

The Gathering Storm was released today after many years of development hell from lawsuit to cross country moves to director changes to lawsuits to COVID to more lawsuits.

You can cut this fan film up into three sections, the pitch at the beginning, the fan film that runs for 17 minutes and the long credits sequence at the end, part of that long credit was to include the 2014 unit and the 2019 unit and lots of people worked on those.

The Gathering Storm had star power, this is something that other fan films cannot have but Axanar was allowed to have professionals with the settlement that they had signed with CBS and Paramount but only with who they had on Prelude to Axanar, the stars of Prelude to Axanar mostly returned with some additions to the cast.

The late Richard Hatch appears through the use of previously shot footage and footage shot with Gary Graham was done shortly before his death, he previously dropped out of The Gathering Storm, but he had returned to the production with claims being that he had rejoined because previous director Paul Jenkins got the boot.

Tony Todd before his death did not wish to appear in any further Axanar productions and so his character was written out in the fan film ‘Interlude’ with the character being injured in battle, that fan film also explains where Admiral Slater went.

Tony Amendola, Adrienne Wilkinson, Patricia Tallman and Faran Tahir were the major cast additions for The Gathering Storm, Faran Tahir reprised his Star Trek (2009) role as Captain Robau which was a daring choice considering the problems that Axanar have had with CBS and Paramount.

There was one major cast change, Kate Vernon did not return, and so Patricia Tallman was her replacement in the role, that meant giving her a wig that just did not look right, it gave her the look of somebody from one of those mid to late 1960s girl groups.

Tony Amendola, Patricia Tallman, Faran Tahir and Kevin Porter have all made appearances in a Star Trek production from uncredited appearances to the Star Trek film made in 2009 with Patricia Tallman appearing in 8 episodes as an actress and 14 episodes plus Generations doing stunts.

Unlike most of the documentary fan films going around these days, The Gathering Storm had a galaxy of characters compared to the three or four person efforts that we are used to seeing in these types of fan films.

It can be said that having a dozen talking heads jammed into a running time of 17 minutes can overwhelm a fan film, the saying ‘less is more’ does spring to mind but on the other hand, what is the perfect ratio for characters to minutes to prevent it from becoming fan films version of the music video to Rockstar?

Characters were filmed in a range of styles, you had the extreme closeups, you had a look further back and a side shot that often had the camera moving across, this was similar to what was seen in Prelude to Axanar.

At times there was a strangeness to it, time was spent looking at Andorian cranial antennae and looking at uniforms for some reason, maybe the antennae were shown to show emotion, and the tunic looks was to enforce rank or something.

If you’re waiting for bridge action like you had seen in the Axanar side piece fan film Interlude, you’re going to have to wait a couple of months for Episode V.

The formula for The Gathering Storm was similar to Prelude to Axanar, TGS explains more details about the status of the war and the D7 and the Constitution Class Starship which may give it that feel that TGS was an extended edition of Prelude to Axanar or worse, an inferior retread of the fan film.

The Gathering Storm looked good, it sounded good but perhaps it was spoiled by its use of Prelude to Axanar visuals and certain scenes, we had years of constant trailers and additional sneak peeks and it got to a point that it was like we’ve seen this and we’ve seen that before and then we saw it again when TGS was released.

Only a small portion of fan films release trailers and when you got 15-20 minutes to play with and you show most of the good stuff in the trailers and sneak peeks, there’s not much left to make things really count.

When Prelude to Axanar came out, it was something fresh and then the effect was diluted by other fan films were getting in on the documentary act over the last decade, and so the once fresh style became common that by the time The Gathering Storm pulled into the station, it was just another fan film only it was a lot more expensive.

Sometimes you watch a documentary, and you see it all the way through and you turn it off and go about your day with it not making an impact on you, it was decent, it wasn’t a waste of time, but it wasn’t special and that is what I think The Gathering Storm was, I definitely don’t think that it was better than Picard or Strange New Worlds as some people claim and it definitely is not ‘Real Star Trek’, it is a fan film.

This fan film now lives on outside of YouTube as it was pulled just a few days after its YouTube premiere for copyright reasons.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.