A Brief Guide to Star Trek (41 page)

Lucas and Spielberg used the term ‘prequel’ to chronologically position the second
Indiana Jones
movie,
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984) before the first movie in the series,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981). It was with the
Star Wars
prequel trilogy, however, that the concept really entered the mainstream of blockbuster filmmaking. The urge to go back and explore the origins of characters or events already seen was the narrative driving force behind many sequels (such as
Red Dragon
(2002) and
Hannibal Rising
(2007), both prequels to 1991’s
The Silence of the Lambs
), while several sequel films since the year 2000 numerically tagged as ‘2’ were looks back at events before those of the first movie (
Vacancy 2
,
The Scorpion King 2
,
Internal Affairs II
. . .). Following
Star Trek: Enterprise
,
Caprica
(setting up the rebooted
Battlestar Galactica
) and
Spartacus: Gods of the Arena
were prequel TV series. Origin stories or major franchise reboots would also provide fertile ground for sequels and re -imagining, especially of comic book characters, as in
Batman Begins
(2005).

For his part, Gene Roddenberry had first mentioned the notion of making a film that took place before his
Star Trek
TV series as early as 1968, at the World Science Fiction Convention.
Star Trek
movie producer Harve Bennett had repeatedly promoted the idea of an origin story for Kirk, Spock and McCoy as part of his Starfleet Academy concept. Although a
Star Trek
prequel idea (with all-new characters) had come to fruition in the
Enterprise
TV series, it had been deemed a failure. The idea of setting up the universe fans were familiar with was still seen as fertile ground, though, with Rick Berman pursuing development of Erik Jendresen’s
Star Trek: The Beginning
script.

Most of these concepts had steered clear of the most obvious
Star Trek
prequel concept of them all, one most likely to have popular appeal to mainstream audiences: the reinvention of Kirk, Spock and McCoy (as boldly suggested in J. Michael Straczynski and Bryce Zabel’s
Star Trek
‘reboot’ concept for television from 2004). It had taken a long time for the executives at Paramount to accept that the time was right for this approach, but with the failure of
Enterprise
they almost immediately embarked upon the search for a new creative team who could reinvent classic
Star Trek
from first principles as a block-buster movie.

By 2006, due to corporate takeovers and restructuring, the rights to make new
Star Trek
were held by two different com -panies. Essentially, Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom) retained the movie option, while CBS now controlled the
Star Trek
television franchise. Paramount chief Gail Berman decided that the right place for a dramatic reinvention of
Star Trek
– despite the failure of
Nemesis
– was on the big screen, not on television, following the declining fortunes of
Voyager
and
Enterprise
. Part of her approach was to remove the control of big screen
Star Trek
from those who’d been making the television version. Her aim was to turn over Paramount’s valuable property to experienced blockbuster moviemakers, rather than exhausted television producers. Berman negotiated with CBS to give Paramount a clear eighteen-month run at developing a new
Star Trek
feature film before the television company could even think about developing a new television series (as part of the deal, CBS retained all
Star Trek
merchandising rights). The
question was, what kind of film would the new
Star Trek
be and who could Berman task with creatively driving the project?

Writer, director and producer J. J. Abrams already had strong connections with Paramount, having directed 2006’s
Mission: Impossible III
to great critical acclaim and box office success. Abrams had a track record creating cult TV series that also had broad mainstream appeal in spy-thriller
Alias
(2001–6) and the mystical island castaway drama
Lost
(2004–10). Abrams had previously written screenplays for the movies
Regarding Henry
(1991),
Forever Young
(1992) and
Armageddon
(1998), as well as an unproduced
Superman
script in 2002. He’d followed
Mission: Impossible III
with the weird science TV series
Fringe
(from 2008). To Gail Berman, Abrams was just the right kind of maverick left-field talent needed to bring new life to the moribund
Star Trek
franchise.

Abrams himself was a casual
Star Trek
fan. He was born in June 1966, just two weeks after the final draft script for Harlan Ellison’s acclaimed episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ had been completed. For Abrams,
Star Trek
was Kirk, Spock and McCoy – the core characters he’d grown up watching during syndication reruns 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 the
new
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 acting in 2000 to pursue photography, claimed he was happy to play Spock once more as he admired the work of Abrams and the film offered an ‘essential and interesting Spock role’. Re-energised by his work on the movie, and continuing to work with Abrams and his team, Nimoy would go on to guest star regularly in the pivotal role of William Bell on Abrams’
Fringe
.

Although it had been much used throughout
Star Trek
, the writers of the new movie decided that time travel would be the best device they could use to begin a new story built around Kirk, Spock and McCoy and yet involve a character from
The Original Series
. Time travel would bring Spock Prime into contact with younger versions of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, allowing the old and new storylines to connect, and could then
be forgotten in any subsequent films which would follow the adventures of the new characters without any overt connections to the past. ‘One of the reasons we wanted to break with the original
Star Trek
timeline was it felt restrictive’, Abrams told MTV.com. ‘The idea, now that we are in an independent time-line, allows us to use any of the ingredients from the past – or come up with brand new ones – to make potential stories.’

Orci and Kurtzman drew inspiration from many elements of past
Star Trek
in working out their new approach, including spin-off novels not always thought of as canon by fans. Knowing that the continuity of
The Original Series
had itself been inconsistent, the writers set out to cherry-pick the elements they felt they needed to launch a new version of classic
Star Trek
without necessarily being slavish to established details. For example, it had long been established that the
Enterprise
had been constructed in Earth orbit, but the movie would instead depict the ship being built on the ground in Kirk’s home state of Iowa.

In order to appeal to a mainstream audience perhaps un -familiar with the detailed universe created over many decades, Abrams and his creative team deliberately set out to simplify
Star Trek
, stripping out the technobabble of
The Next Generation
and replacing it with the action-adventure appeal of the first
Star Wars
movie. Humour and sex appeal were also key to Abrams’ recreation of
Star Trek
, elements that had been missing from some of the spin-off shows. The central characters – Kirk, Spock and McCoy – were reduced to archetypes, almost fulfilling the popular clichés that resided in the mainstream imagination. The characters of these new versions of the core
Star Trek
trio were easily delineated through their chief characteristics, summed up by their well-known catchphrases used in the 1987 novelty song ‘Star Trekkin’’ by The Firm.

The question was, who could play these iconic characters? Which modern film stars or character actors could fill the well-worn roles of Kirk, Spock and McCoy and stand the comparisons with Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley – especially as whomever was playing young Spock would be acting directly
opposite the original. While it wasn’t quite the big show-business event predicted by Straczynski and Zabel’s reboot proposal, there was much media interest in the casting process for the all-new
Star Trek
.

‘It was hard in ways I didn’t anticipate’, said Abrams to
SFX
magazine of casting the movie. ‘I thought [finding the right actor for] Spock would be impossible, yet he was the first person we cast.’ Although the film would feature three versions of Spock (including Jacob Kogan as child Spock and Nimoy as Spock Prime), the focus was heavily on actor Zachary Quinto, who secured the task of reinventing the half-human, half-Vulcan
Enterprise
science officer. Quinto, who’d come to prominence as Sylar in the superpowers TV series
Heroes
, came to Abrams’ attention thanks to an interview in which he expressed interest in the role. Many commentators had pointed out Quinto’s curious physical resemblance to the young Nimoy. Quinto wore a blue shirt (reflecting Spock’s usual outfit on
The Original Series
) and flattened his hair to more resemble Spock for his audition. He was aided in taking on the persona of Spock by make-up and hair tricks that emphasised his Nimoy-lookalike characteristics, although he did claim, ‘There’s no question I was born to play the Spock role’. The only other actor who’d been publicly connected with the part was Oscar winner Adrien Brody.