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Preview of the new Star Trek movie

Zachary Quinto as Mr Spock in the new Star Trek movie
  • Posted at 6:05pm
  • 11 November 2008
  • by WilliamGallagher-RT
  • 4 comments

Yes. It works, it's fantastic and it honestly does go where no Star Trek has gone before because it's exciting. Ferociously, relentlessly, successfully exciting. Radio Times has seen huge chunks of it and the trailer is about to hit UK cinemas.

Director JJ Abrams today screened four long sequences and the trailer for the British press in London. The final film won't be released until 8 May 2009 but he showed extensive excerpts that were said to be "almost complete".

The trailer - to be shown in cinemas from next week - is the least effective part. It's a barrage of moments including space battles, sex and stunts but it begins with a very young boy announcing that his name is James Tiberius Kirk. For all the expense of the rest, that one moment feels cheesily like a 1960s TV show.

But the four extended segments we saw follow Chris Pine as an older Kirk, a rebellious wastrel getting over the loss of his dad until he's told: "Your father commanded a starship for 12 minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's."

Pine looks less like William Shatner and more like Matt Damon but all the actors, in these long bursts at least, successfully tread the line between impersonating the Star Trek characters we know and yet not becoming a pastiche.

"I've seen Galaxy Quest," said Abrams, before saying that what makes it possible to have a new, serious Star Trek is "this cast and the writers, the writers wrote a great screenplay".

"I wasn't a Star Trek fan," he continued. "I respected what it was about, that it had optimism and the promise of adventure - but it always seemed to be the promise. Maybe it was the resources they had then, but it wasn't exciting going to visit Planet Cardboard each week."

You can forget that now. What we saw was expensive, exhilarating and just more and more exciting every moment. Unless the bits between these segments are rubbish, the new Star Trek deserves to be a gigantic hit.

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  • Posted on 26 January 2009
  • at 8:04am
  • by Mark

More than anything I just hope that messrs. Quinto, Pine, and not least Abrams, realise the size of the shoes they have to fill. I've seen almost nothing of the film - about ten seconds or so of a trailer - and although Zachary Quinto looks convincing as a young Spock, looks alone won't cut it. I must say that a director whose soundbite is "I wasn't a Star Trek fan", and who uses phrases like "planet cardboard" is a worrisome thing. As Pester says, some of Star Trek's best moments were on TV, and for my money almost all of them were in the original series. Of course they didn't have the budget or the resources then that they have now, which is why it's folly to analyse such a show in the context of the twenty-first century. With no exceptions that I can think of, anything from the 1960's will inevitably have it's slips showing when viewed more than forty years later. Having said that, at the time it was revolutionary and ground-breaking, and it has stood the test of time more sturdily than any other science fiction show in history with the exception of Doctor Who ( and even that was off the air for several years ). Many of us who will be going to see the new film when it comes out, were there in December 1967 when the first show aired on British Television, and many will remember, as I do, staring almost open-mouthed at the screen as the story unfolded. They will also remember sitting in front of their TVs almost as a religious ritual every week - not to admire the quality of the set-building or the special effects ( and let's not forget that even they were cutting-edge at that time ), but to enjoy the stories that were told and the actors that told them. William Shatner may not have been the greatest actor of his generation ( and let's be honest, even "may not" is being ludicrously generous ) but he was absolutely quintessentially right as Kirk, as was Leonard Nimoy ( in my humble opinion, far and away the better actor of the two ) as Spock. I hope with all my heart that all of the people behind the new movie have realised that, and not tried to "re-make" the characters, which could so easily turn the film from a celebration into a desecration, If it's done well, this could be brilliant: if they screw it up, it could be the last we'll ever see of the most enduring science fiction series in history, and it would be a great shame if it went out on a whimper rather than a bang

  • Posted on 15 November 2008
  • at 10:46pm
  • by alex

I'm just hoping my excitement about it doesn't turn into heightened expectation that just leaves me disappointed. As for the story as far as I gather I think revisits have become necessary. The loop story arc of First Contact leading into Enterprise encountering the escaping Borg that potentially resulted in the attraction of the Borg which in turn sent Picard and crew back to counter them interfering with Cochrane which in turn could be considered the interference that turned humans down the path of Federation rather than Empire (as the mirror universe) has just been too great a set of things to ignore.

Plus some of the other time episodes like the return to the trouble with triblles in DS9 have been some of the finest.

In short as a admirer of JJAbrams work I remain optimistic.

  • Posted on 15 November 2008
  • at 7:41pm
  • by munslowl

I am trying to avoid the hype as I dont want to give the film the "best shot".

Having said that, the stills and promo as inspiring.

In Zachary Quinto you have someone who is, in my mind, potentially the standout actor of his generation.

  • Posted on 13 November 2008
  • at 6:49pm
  • by Pester

Anticipation is certainly present for me. I do like JJ Abrams and I've been a dedicated Trekkie for years. Slight fear on three counts: 1 - some of Trek's best moments were on TV rather than in the cinema, story being center stage rather than SFX (Voyager and DS9 were especially good) 2 - there's already been a flashback series (Enterprise) so a film rebooting the Kirk crew seems wasted, frankly I'd like to see Federation stories from the post Janeway years now 3 - JJ says he wasn't a fan previously, echoing the assertion made by the director of Nemesis (the 10th movie was no highlight for the franchise) something you can't imagine Jonathan Frakes saying, whose two outings behind the camera as well as in front of it (First Contact and Insurrection) were among the finest for both the Picard crew and Star Trek entire (being one of the cast he had a lot riding on getting it right as a director and his involvement and love showed on screen). Fears aside, Zachary Quinto of Heroes fame promises greatness in the role of a younger Spok (apparently Mrs Nimoy was rather shocked to see that her husband had turned back the clock on forty odd years of aging). Abrams has given us the likes of Lost, Alias and a much improved Mission Impossible (III)where the team rather than the one man going solo were important and also seems to favor character driven adventure, the best way to do it if you want to feel it. A question remains: Star Trek served us well for decades, but, in a world where Sci-Fi has responded to the terrifyingly real with the mind-blowing perfection of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, is there room for such a clean vision of the universe and future like Star Trek? Won't it seem fake? After all, we've lost our innocence.

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