A Brief Guide to Star Trek

throughout the 1970s and into the first series of
Star Trek
movies in the early 1980s. He regarded everything else as ‘separate space adventures with the name
Star Trek
’.
    Abrams felt that the later incarnations of
Star Trek
had turned inwards. ‘At a certain point it seems like
Star Trek
stopped trying to reach a bigger audience’, he said to
SFX
magazine. ‘They decided, “let’s just cater to our fans”. This movie is not meant to be a continuum of that way of thinking, this is very much “let’s start over”.’ The director had also admitted to a strong preference for the action-adventure format of the first
Star Wars
trilogy to
Star Trek
’s more cerebral content. Abrams signed on as producer of the Paramount
Star Trek
reboot, turning over the development of the script to his team of
Lost
and
Fringe
writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who’d also scripted
Mission: Impossible III
and
Transformers
(2007)).
    According to Abrams, his interest in
Star Trek
came from the fact that it was ‘about exploration of the stars, not about conquering worlds, but discovering them, exploring them and understanding them’. He told
Empire
magazine, ‘[
The Original Series
’] problem was they had a space adventure, but never had the resources to actually show the adventure. Doing this movie with the resources we had and the technology that exists now gave us the chance to make something fast-paced, full of action and visually stunning, but also tap into what made
Star Trek
great.’
    All concerned felt that the best approach would be a ‘clean’ reboot of
Star Trek
, returning to first principles as outlined by Gene Roddenberry in his creation of
The Original Series
. However, as fans of the original show, Orci and Kurtzman knew how important actors like Shatner, Nimoy and the late DeForest Kelley were to
Star Trek
fans. With that in mind, they set out to develop a reboot of
Star Trek
that would allow for the re -invention of the classic Kirk–Spock–McCoy trio for a new twenty-first-century audience, but would also in some way manage to incorporate all that had gone before. They were not prepared to simply dump over forty years of storytelling.
    For Abrams, the characters were key to his reinvention of the franchise. ‘[There’s a] feeling of broken and interesting characters in Kirk and Spock’, he told
SFX
magazine. ‘[We show them] coming together in a way that is unexpected and ultimately throw them into a massive adventure. The approach was to take inspiration from what was in
The Original Series
and then filter it through what is relevant and vital for now. The goal was not to make it cool or different, but to make it real, with characters that feel true and emotional, like there’s a piece missing from them and they’re up against something significant and the stakes are high. It was fun to figure out a way to make the relationship between Spock, Kirk and Bones [McCoy] come to life.’
    The writers hoped that the possible involvement of someone from
The Original Series
would put the seal of approval on thenew
Star Trek
for many sceptical fans. From the original key trio, due to the death of Kelley in 1999, Orci and Kurtzman were left with Shatner and Nimoy, and they felt that Spock was the more iconic and useful of the two remaining characters. The presence of the character they dubbed ‘old Spock’ or Spock Prime would also tie into Nimoy’s last appearance on
The Next Generation
in the two-part ‘Unification’ story from 1991, although Nimoy himself professed not to recognise the connection. That storyline had also featured the Romulans, now chosen by Abrams as the villains for the new film in preference to the Klingons, whom he considered overused as well as problematic due to their non-villainous status from
The Next Generation
onwards. At that point Abrams was unaware that the Romulans had featured as the major villains in the most recent
Star Trek
movie,
Nemesis
, and that the film had been a huge box office failure. He claimed he’d been ‘disconnected’ from the franchise when that movie was released.
    According to Abrams, the casting of Leonard Nimoy was ‘critical if we’re going to look at reintroducing these characters . . . [this film must] both please the fans and those who have never seen
Star Trek
. Having Leonard in the film shows that this film exists in a continuum of
Trek
history, as opposed to an absolute page one reinvention.’ Nimoy, who had retired from