The Gathering Storm

The Gathering Storm was released today after many years of development hell from 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.

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

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.

Unlike most of the documentary fan films going around, 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.

The formula of 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.

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 side piece films Interlude and Icarus, you’re going to have to wait a couple of months for Episode V.

The Gathering Storm looked good, it sounded good but perhaps it was spoiled by its use of Prelude to Axanar visuals and certain scenes, years of constant trailers and additional sneak peeks, it was like we’ve seen this and we’ve seen that before a couple of times, 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, there’s not much left.

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.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.