Star Trek

[Toups]

I've never seen one full episode or previous movies before, but this film looks awesome!

I'm a huge JJ Abrams and Michael Giacchino fan, so I'm really looking foward to this. And I really like the cast too.

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0xaCB2nLS0

Apple.com Trailers: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/startrek/

Official Site: http://www.startrekmovie.com/

[detroitpiston]

This movie better kick ass or I'll forever hate JJ Abrams lol! I was a big fan of Star Trek TNG growing up and got into the original when it came out on DVD.

[quartermainefan]

I am a huge fan but don't have high hopes for this because of the cast. Part of the magic of Star Trek is that collection of B actors who just happened to have great personality and charisma. This guy they have playing Capt Kirk, he is too normal, too everyday. He speaks like you or I, but William Shatner didn't, so right away part of the magic is missing. I can't see the people taking over for DeForest Kelly or James Doohan being sufficient either. Is the doctor going to say "dammit!" and "he's dead, Jim?" All the great FX in the world can't equal the magic of the original series.

I am surprised somebody has not seen even one episode. Of all the TV shows, ST is just about one of the alltime classics that has stood the test of time, spawning movies, books, cartoons, sequel series and now a reboot.

I just don't see the movie delivering anything other than FX.

[Toups]

Nothing ever attracted my to the show. I always found it boring. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be that interested in this movie if JJ Abrams, and his crew, wasn't doing the film. Since I have no knowledge of anything Star Trek, everything will be fresh for me. I'll have no preconceive notions about the movie. I won't be comparing it to anything.

[SnCCorinthos4ever]

Troups it is the same for me, I have maybe seen 1 or 2 eppy's of the orginal Star Trek, but I have watched several of the others.

For me it is Sex in the City, I have only ever saw the 1st eppy and was only half interested in that one.

Trekkies may find this interesting.

[applcin]

It's my favorite tv show of all time and I agree with everything you said in the first paragraph. But I fell in love with the show when I was 6 years old in the mid 70s when all we had were the syndicated reruns. To get introduced to that show as a child was fantastic for the imagination. But, ultimately, it was the chemistry of the cast that captured my heart. Have there been better produced, better written, better acted shows? Sure. But this show was and is still special to me beyond anything else. I've been able to appreciate and enjoy most of the spinoffs (particularly DS9). But I did stop with the TNG movies; they just didn't interest me. I thought that show was intelligently written but the cast was stiff and didn't have much chemistry (not to mention, after the adventurous Captain Kirk, a Captain who needed a shrink on one side and his second to bark orders and go on missions was a little much).

Still, as you said, how many other shows have survived and spawned what Star Trek has for over 40 years? Not to mention the people it inspired to get into the various sciences as professions and the technology ahead of its time (desktop computers, computers that respond to voice commands, some of the medical devices, communicators that, coincidentally, cellphones look like, lol).

I'm not sure if I'll go see the movie or maybe wait til DVD/cable.

[Ann_SS]

Huge Star Trek fan here. I'm excited about the promos, not sure about the movie. LOL! I have an open mind and expect everything to be different.

[Sylph]

JJ Abrams: ‘I never got Star Trek’


He wrote his first block-buster as a student, went on to make the cult TV show Lost — and now the new Star Trek film. How does JJ Abrams do it? Steve Rose finds out

Steve Rose



I was trying to avoid using the G-word, but JJ Abrams brings it up himself, unprompted. We’re talking about his childhood and I begin a question with a slightly meandering: "So were you a ..."

"Geek?" he interjects, pre-empting a question he’s clearly heard many times. Well, now you mention it, were you? "I don’t think it’s much of a question," he laughs.

He’s right — it doesn’t really need asking. Firstly, in an age when the most popular movies and TV series are based on comic books, sci-fi, fantasy and the supernatural, we are all basically geeks now. And secondly, his appearance is all the answer I need: a slight, young-looking, 42-year-old with thick, black-rimmed glasses, wavy vertical quiff and a blue-grey smock shirt that could be part of a uniform on, say, an intergalactic space vessel. And he’s just directed the new Star Trek movie.

Actually, Abrams is personable, attentive, self-effacing and in no way socially maladjusted — but he is also ruler of an ever-expanding universe of geek-friendly viewing, in particular Lost, the cryptic TV series about marooned jet-crash survivors (complete with polar bear and smoke monster) that has viewers eating out of its hand, even as they scratch their heads in confusion. Add in TV shows like Alias and Fringe, and movies like Cloverfield and Mission: Impossible III and he’s one of the most powerful forces in the industry. Now, with the addition of Star Trek’s legions of devotees, he’s a veritable emperor of uber-geekdom.

One thing Abrams has never been, though, is a Trekker. Or a Trekkie. Or even a Trekkist. "Star Trek," he says, referring to the original TV series, "always felt like a silly, campy thing. I remember appreciating it, but feeling like I didn’t get it. I felt it didn’t give me a way in. There was a captain, there was this first officer, they were talking a lot about adventures and not having them as much as I would’ve liked. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough, maybe I wasn’t old enough. But The Twilight Zone I was obsessed with. Loved it."

Any new addition to the Star Trek universe must manoeuvre through a dense asteroid belt of existing Trek lore that has accumulated after 79 episodes of the original series, its TV successors (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise), 10 movies and innumerable other spin-offs. But Abrams’s ignorance was, he says, an asset: "I had no idea there had been 10 movies! I still haven’t seen them all. I didn’t want to become a student of Star Trek. I felt that was actually one of the few advantages I had. I was trying to make a movie, not trying to make a Trek movie."

Sure enough, Abrams’s Star Trek zips along, fuelled by state-of-the-art special effects, agreeable young actors and a generous measure of comedy. By focusing on Spock and Kirk as novices finding their footing, and putting their gut-vs-logic dynamic at the heart of the film, Abrams gives non-followers plenty to hang on to, but also pays homage to familiar Trek tropes: Bones says: "I’m a doctor, not a physicist!"; Scotty says: "I’m giving her all she’s got!"; and Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock, makes a cameo to symbolically pass on the torch.

For advanced-level Trekkers, there are in-jokes and seismic events hardly anyone else will notice. This is the first time, for example, we see how Kirk cheats Starfleet’s notorious Kobayashi Maru test, as mentioned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan — an event, indeed a sentence, that will mean absolutely nothing to the rest of us. And only the faithful will notice how Abrams pulls off a cheat of his own with this movie: the time-travel plot neatly sidesteps all that hazardous Trek lore — and sets up a fresh, blank future in a parallel reality (if you don’t understand how, ask a Trekker). If there is a sequel, and it’s difficult to imagine there won’t be, he’s free to boldly go wherever the hell he likes.

As usual, everything seems to be going Abrams’s way. It’s difficult to shake the impression that he mapped out his entire career in advance and it’s all coming good. If you were to make a biopic of his life, it would be too corny to believe. At a time when most children were being entranced by the magic of moving images, young JJ was already peering behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz-style, figuring out how they worked. He would take apart electrical appliances with his grandfather and learn how they ticked. He learned magic tricks. His father, Gerald W Abrams, is a successful TV producer, so he was no stranger to sets and studios, even if Dad discouraged him from going into the industry. "He thought he’d be paying my bills for the rest of my life," he laughs.

Abrams, who lives in LA with his wife and three children, first picked up a movie camera aged eight."Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever; I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister’s head using alginating plaster. So the answer is: Yes, I was and am a geek."

Abrams was also an obsessive fan. He wrote to his heroes — not just directors but top makeup artists and special-effects legends, industry giants of the pre-computer age such as Douglas Trumbull, John Dykstra or Dick Smith. And he got replies. "Dick Smith sent me a little cardboard box with a tongue inside. It was one of the fake tongue extensions from The Exorcist, with a note saying, ‘Just stick a dab of peanut butter on the end and put it on.’ I was like, ‘Holy [!@#$%^&*]!’" After seeing Jaws, he sent a little finger-puppet contraption to Steven Spielberg, but he didn’t reply. "Not until recently."

By college, Abrams had sold his first screenplay, Taking Care of Business, which starred James Belushi. By his early 30s, he’d written a blockbuster, Armageddon, and was starting to produce TV programmes. One thing led to another, including Alias, a spy series starring Jennifer Garner. Tom Cruise liked Alias and asked Abrams to direct Mission: Impossible III. Paramount liked that and offered him Star Trek.

Like Spielberg, Abrams has been immersed in film-making for so long, he seems to have mastered every aspect of it. He appears to have an innate feel for entertainment that is cult yet mass-market, accessible but not dumb, polished and high-tech yet character-driven, zeitgeisty but infused with good old-fashioned storytelling. Abrams hasn’t revolutionised film-making, though he may be perfecting it. What he has revolutionised, though, is the art of 21st-century entertainment. The movies and TV shows are just one feature in a landscape of viral marketing campaigns, merchandising tie-ins, spoiler alerts, online chat forums, fan blogs, websites that treat fictional worlds as real places, and so on. "People want to find magic," he says. "It’s almost like a Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe thing. You want to find that secret. You want there to be some kind of portal between reality and fiction."

Lost is the perfect illustration. From the basic starting point of plane-crash survivors on a desert island, its plot has thickened and thickened to the point where it is now an inhabitable universe. Fans are happy to spend hours not just scrutinising the show’s every shot, but collectively pondering its mysteries online, quizzing its makers, solving puzzles to gain access to "restricted" areas of the (fake) Hanso corporation website, speculating on Hindu symbolism, nanobot clouds, time travel or whatever, and generally positing theories as to what the hell is going on. It might be the biggest geek-magnet around, but Lost is also as risky and radical a TV programme as there’s ever been: one that provides no answers week after week, has no qualms about killing off major characters, takes huge liberties with narrative convention, and deals with spiritual and even political questions of our age, including fame, leadership and even the Iraq war. It’s as much a religion as a TV series — a bit like Star Trek.

But, while "Losties" have faith that the show’s creators have it all figured out, Abrams says that’s never been the case: "It’s a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling. We had an idea early on, but certain things we thought would work well didn’t. We couldn’t have told you which characters would be in which seasons. We couldn’t tell you who would even survive." That instinctive, improvised, unpredictable element, he says, makes for great entertainment: "You feel that electricity. It’s almost like live TV. We don’t quite know what might happen. I’m sure when Charles Dickens was writing, he had a sense of where he was going — but he would make adjustments as he went along. You jump into it, knowing there’s something great out there to find."

More of a Kirk approach than a Spock approach, you might say, more heart than head. In fact, Captain Kirk could well be Abrams’s alter ego. They’re both child prodigies following in the footsteps of their fathers; they’re both partial to taking a chance; and they both find themselves at the controls of a gigantic and gigantically expensive machine, at an inordinately young age.

And right now all Abrams wants to do is sit at the bridge and shout: "Give her all she’s got!."

• Star Trek is out on Friday 8 May

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/07/jj-abrams-interview-star-trek

[alphanguy74]

I'm not sure if I want to see this new Trek movie. I always "liked" Star Trek TOS, and TNG... but all other incarnations seemed to be a bad soap opera in outer space interspersed with alot of nonensical technobabble, to make the viewer think they are watching something intelligent. I also have a hard time getting past today's stupid CGI effects. I don't care how they ballyhoo the effects, to me, it STILL looks like a drawing, and not a real object. Good model work cannot be substituted. Many of the special effects in my favorite show (Space:1999) still look better than modern movies. Much of the problem comes from the areas of shadow in objects shown in outer space are not dark enough ... some areas need to be completely BLACK, and Brian Johnson's work is one of the few that does that.

[Toups]

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org...million-opening

I haven't seen the movie yet (probably going this week) but I'm so happy for JJ, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof. Not only did the movie have a great first week, but the reviews have been 96% positive according to Rotten Tomatoes - that is outstanding! It even beat The Dark Knight which had 94% and Iron Man which had 93%.

[Dion]

i saw this film today (in IMAX) and I must say I was very impressed. I like the way that the film acts more as a sequel than a prequel to the other films and TV shows but also takes the opportunities to start afresh

. I did have a couple of minor nitpicks but i'll save those for when more people have seen the film.

[Steve]

I have fond memories of watching the original show as a kid and later on I loved Deep Space Nine, so I wasn't sure beforehand if I would like this movie, but I loved every minute of it! It brought back the humor of the show, which imo had been missing from most of the recent films. I hope JJ Abrams makes a few sequels!

[Roman]

Deep Space Nine.

The Dominion War. The greatest storyline in Star Trek history.

I really liked the film, even though there were plot holes you push Earth through. I though it was well done, and the best one since ST IV.

The events were changes right before the birth scene. Everything from that point has been changed.

[Toups]

I really enjoyed the film - there was a lot of good action and character interactions. They did a good job establishing Kirk's relationship with his crew - Spock, Uhura , Scotty, Sulu, McCoy. I liked the humour too which made me like everyone, they all did something funny. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto totally had the chemistry and both of them were pretty awesome in their roles.

I thought the plot reminded me a lot of JJ Abrams' shows (Lost, Fringe) - all that time travel. I don't think there was a dull moment in the movie. I thought for sure there was going to be a romance with JTK/Uhura because of the bar scene, but I loved the unexpected romance between Uhura and Spock - that elevator scene was so good.

It was definitely the characters that made my like this movie. Can't wait for the next one!

If they can make a "cool" Star Trek on TV (similiar to the style of this movie), I think I'll definitely watch.