J.J. Abrams To Direct 'Star Trek XI'

BrynS

Mr Kat says...
Just read this at TrekToday -- the original Variety article is here.

TrekToday said:
Paramount Pictures announced today that Lost creator J.J. Abrams will co-write, produce and direct the eleventh Star Trek film, set for release in 2008.

According to an article in the Daily Variety, the new film will be a prequel to the original Star Trek series, featuring younger versions of characters like James T. Kirk and Spock. The movie will chronicle events such as their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and their first mission into outer space...

[...]
One contributer at another site described this as the "Best. Trek. News. Ever." -- I wouldn't go that far, but it seems a lot more promising than the other prequel script mentioned on AICN a few times, which evidently didn't have the full backing of Paramount executives.

Cheers,


BrynS
 
BrynS said:
"Best. Trek. News. Ever."

So how is Comic Book Guy?:D

There's been a lot of rumors flying about ST XI, ST Prequels, even new ST serieses, and they usually get shot down in "official" press releases a few weeks later.

I think it would be cool if J.J. Abrams did do a new Trek film. After Inssurection I thought it would be really cool if the producers brought in other "Iconic" directors for sequels. It would be cool to see what guys like Christopher Nolan, John Carpenter, John Woo would do with the series. Maybe we would see a Klingonified Chow Yun Fat blasting away with twin disruptors.:p
 
Shaggy said:
After Inssurection I thought it would be really cool if the producers brought in other "Iconic" directors for sequels. It would be cool to see what guys like Christopher Nolan, John Carpenter, John Woo would do with the series. Maybe we would see a Klingonified Chow Yun Fat blasting away with twin disruptors.:p

I'd rather see Nick Meyer return for one more.
 
Originally Posted by TrekToday
......According to an article in the Daily Variety, the new film will be a prequel to the original Star Trek series, featuring younger versions of characters like James T. Kirk and Spock. The movie will chronicle events such as their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and their first mission into outer space...

Please don't :(
 
Poor, poor Star Trek. It's hard not to feel sorry for a franchise so universally hated... by its most hardcore fans. I have no doubt that the idea of bringing back Kirk and Spock but played by different actors will lead the so-called Star Trek fans into a frenzy. Their demented howls of rage will be audible everywhere throughout the net.

Worst of all, though, these exact same people will then moan and whine when the movie they hated crashes and burns because of their stupidity (contrary to popular belief, the hardcore fans *do* matter - they influence everyone else's decision in regards to whether the new movie is worth seeing or not).
 
We've had six TOS movies and four TNG movies, and I think the eras of both series are over. Personally I would like to seen an Enterprise-era movie (although not necessarily with the Enterprise cast).
 
Worst of all, though, these exact same people will then moan and whine when the movie they hated crashes and burns because of their stupidity (contrary to popular belief, the hardcore fans *do* matter - they influence everyone else's decision in regards to whether the new movie is worth seeing or not).

There's no more terrible online community than Star Trek -- more the shame, the offline Star Trek community is as incredible as it has always been... but this is a case of the most visible group running the show (into the ground).

Look at Enterprise -- twice again the viewers of Super Neon Battlestar Galactica... but it wasn't internet approved! It's amazingly horrible that the internet gets to decide these things now... because the internet is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Star Trek fans - and other groups that turn on their own franchises - should enjoy their ability to throw around this power while it lasts... because it's naturally self-defeating in the long run. Once you've enjoyed the power of criticizing everything you love out of existence, spurred on by the rush of the fact that people are actually listening to you, you're left with nothing.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
There's no more terrible online community than Star Trek -- more the shame, the offline Star Trek community is as incredible as it has always been... but this is a case of the most visible group running the show (into the ground).

Look at Enterprise -- twice again the viewers of Super Neon Battlestar Galactica... but it wasn't internet approved! It's amazingly horrible that the internet gets to decide these things now... because the internet is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Star Trek fans - and other groups that turn on their own franchises - should enjoy their ability to throw around this power while it lasts... because it's naturally self-defeating in the long run. Once you've enjoyed the power of criticizing everything you love out of existence, spurred on by the rush of the fact that people are actually listening to you, you're left with nothing.
I cannot and will not subscribe to your interpretation of this event.

Enterprise did have more viewers each episode in the last two seasons than BSG currently gets, but not a lot more, and not nearly twice as many. Enterprise was on a network and cost a lot more to make. It got the axe because not enough people were watching it... not because the "Internet" didn't like it.

I think it a more likely explanation of Enterprise's unfortunate demise that not enough people were watching it because they just didn't like the show. I strongly suspect that people's decisions of whether or not to watch the show was based more on the quality of the show and their own evaluation of it than what angry nerds on the Internet rant about.
 
I don't think I've ever seen any legitimate criticism of Enterprise (or any recent Star Trek decisions) -- it's *all* angry nerds wanting to be accepted by other angry nerds.
 
My mom, who doesn't read the Internet but likes Star Trek, didn't usually watch Enterprise because she thought it was too much 'body swapping, alien entities, and episodes where nothing happens with the characters' (or something like that).

Then again, she doesn't post to the Internet either. A lot of people don't. Usually I don't!

She loved the fourth season, though! I did too. It was a bonding experience.

No 'your mom' jokes, please.
 
Well I've said it once and I'll say it again, I loved Enterprise but couldn't watch it because it was not carried on any networks in my area (except for the very first two seasons). I watched faithfully was WB replayed the episodes on Sunday at 6pm but then after the second season they must have lost their contract to replay the episodes from UPN and we don't have UPN here (in Des Moines, IA) as a free station so the only way to watch it was to get cable (which at the time I didn't have the finances to do). Secondly the time slot seemed to switch around and I lost track of when it would even be on. I think the time slot was a major drawback. Comparing Enterprise to BSG isn't fair because (as far as Startrek is concerned) you should really only compare it to previous startrek ratings AND/OR what else is on network TV in the same timeslot.

As for the next Star trek movie, I'm not a "hardcore" trekkie but I do really enjoy the franchise, I've loved every incarnation of it EXCEPT for Voyager which I found unlikeable mainly due to a disinterest for virtually all of the main characters (I really felt Janeway was a huge disappointment to follow in the vein of captains such as Kirk, Picard and Sisko - Just my personal opinion there). I think making a movie about Kirk, Spock etc but using different actors is a bad idea because the viewers of Star trek have come to an expectation that certain people definitively ARE those characters. For example, when William Shatner was making the T.J Hooker TV show I didn't think "Look, there's William Shatner doing T.J. Hooker" I thought, "Look, Captain Kirk is on T.J Hooker." When I watched "Golda Meyer" and saw Leonard Nimoy I instantly thought, "Spock!" I will forever associate those actors with their roles. Bringing in younger actors to fill (admittably they are playing them in their younger years) their roles will just hammer in the fact that this movie is different, that this isn't the same. Personally, I would love to see an Enterprise or Deep Space 9 movie...heck I think I'd even settle for a Voyager movie over this proposed idea.

That's my two cents.
 
My experience with casual Star Trek fans is just the opposite: the fourth season comes off as blatantly trying to appeal to hardcore groupies. The stories themselves aren't improved... they're just full of "hey, look, we're listening to you!" moments for, you guessed it, the people bitching on the internet. As a Star Trek fan I'm happy as heck to have a Gorn show up for absolutely no reason and to have a three episode story about why Klingons change how they look... but there's no fundamentally positive shift in storytelling.

My brother, who didn't watch the show when it first aired, went back and watched the DVDs this last semester... and when he called me after going through the second season, he was shocked when I told him that A Night in Sickbay was an episode the internet hated more than any other. It was his favorite for a variety of complicated reasons that I don't necessarily understand (he's a film student), but generally boiling down to the idea that it had some really clever mechanism for introducing character development into an episodic show.

The internet experience with Enterprise was just extraordinarily stupid - we literally had people downloading the episodes the night before they aired, making their decision as to whether or not they were good based on whether or not Rick Berman was credited as the writer and then telling the online community what to think... before the general population had even seen the show.
 
Maj.Striker said:
Personally, I would love to see an Enterprise or Deep Space 9 movie...heck I think I'd even settle for a Voyager movie over this proposed idea.

I agree with you on this. To add to that, JJ Abrams isn't exactly the genius that a lot of people paint him out to be. Felicity's ratings botomed when season 2 started, Alias became incredibly awful and convoluted at season 3 and Lost is going to end up like Twin Peaks: No matter what explaination you have for the show, it's going to disappoint and piss people off.

I can't think of another person I'd want to see less at the helm of a Star Trek movie.
 
I disagree in theory, because of two points:

For one thing, I don't think the showrunner really matters beyond being someone to take the blame for a show's problems - *especially* when it's not their own show. Felicity and Lost differ from Star Trek in that he's the series *creator* - he occupies the can-do-no-wrong God position on those shows... for Star Trek, he's just the new Rick Berman -- and if the current crop of super-jerk fans likes him, he's done his job. The actual quality of Star Trek is not *and never has been* dependant on one man.

That said, I think the brightest point about JJ Abrams is that he's one of the few names who continues to work in both TV and movies at the same time. To me, that says good things about the potential for another Star Trek television series being in the works. Now, I think that leaving the TV people in charge of the TNG movies was a mistake way back when... but if giving the franchise to JJ Abrams means he can resurrect both the movies and the television aspect by and by, more power to him.

Mostly, though, he's absolutely inoffensive -- he makes okay movies and he coordinates semi-sweetened television series. Imagine giving the producer slot to someone like JMS...
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The actual quality of Star Trek is not *and never has been* dependant on one man.

Yes and no. I do blame the lack of quality on the screenwriter and director of Nemesis because they were ... at the helm (cough). I won't blame Abrams simply because he's the new guy but I am incredibly skeptical of his creative output. He leaves a lot of things in other people's lap (he left Alias midway to develop Lost and took a lot of the creative force from the former to the later. Alias suffered and has never regained the same level of quality since)

Bandit LOAF said:
That said, I think the brightest point about JJ Abrams is that he's one of the few names who continues to work in both TV and movies at the same time. To me, that says good things about the potential for another Star Trek television series being in the works.

Oh I agree with this completely. When it comes to things like movies, when I say that I fear Abrams is going to do a third-rate job, I want him to prove me wrong. I want to eat crow - I want this to be the best Star Trek movie ever and that it makes Paramount put out another series.

However, I'm skeptical because I've seen what the man does.

Bandit LOAF said:
Now, I think that leaving the TV people in charge of the TNG movies was a mistake way back when...

I'm curious as to what you refer to as a "mistake" exactly. You and I have discussed that the ST movies are nothing like the show - but I also thought as blase as Insurrection was, it was also the closest to the original ST forumla (for TNG, anyway).

Bandit LOAF said:
Imagine giving the producer slot to someone like JMS...

Given the chance to hand the producer's chair to JMS or Abrams, my head would explode. I don't know who I'd have less faith in.
 
I don't think I've ever seen any legitimate criticism of Enterprise (or any recent Star Trek decisions) -- it's *all* angry nerds wanting to be accepted by other angry nerds.
I'm a very casual Star Trek Fan, but i've watched a little of Enterprise, and it was just, well, boring. Captain Archer was the least inspiring captain of any of the series.
There's no more terrible online community than Star Trek...
Now that's an overstatement.
 
Yes and no. I do blame the lack of quality on the screenwriter and director of Nemesis because they were ... at the helm (cough). I won't blame Abrams simply because he's the new guy but I am incredibly skeptical of his creative output. He leaves a lot of things in other people's lap (he left Alias midway to develop Lost and took a lot of the creative force from the former to the later. Alias suffered and has never regained the same level of quality since)

The problem with Nemesis was the screenwriter. The movie's many problems are lodged in its core, not somewhere later on in development - and I certainly wouldn't run the people in charge of the franchise at the time (Rick Berman and Brannon Braga).

As for the director... I don't really think it matters who directs a Star Trek movie. Lets face it: going on to the film you know exactly who will be cast in it (and they've had the character worked out for decades), you know exactly what it's going to look like (no room for unique visual stylings or odd camera angles)... this is why Paramount has been fine with giving the *director* slot to former actors with no previous experience -- Nimoy, Shatner, Frakes... directing a giant movie sounds like a dangerous thing to you and I, but compared to the average movie a Star Trek film is a bike on autopilot with thirty sets of training wheels.

For Nemesis, the director was certainly an idiot... but in all honesty, so was Nick Meyer - and his movies were great. Their commentaries on the DVDs are divorced from reality in exactly the same way -- Meyer rants about how angry he is that the viewscreen wasn't made of glass while Baird rages about how important Tom Hardy is. Neither of them seems to be clear on exactly what a Star Trek movie is or what makes it good.

I'm curious as to what you refer to as a "mistake" exactly. You and I have discussed that the ST movies are nothing like the show - but I also thought as blase as Insurrection was, it was also the closest to the original ST forumla (for TNG, anyway).

It's a simple theory: the TOS movies are completely divorced from their series, the TNG movies are not. The TOS movies had great crossover success... the TNG movies did not. The TNG movies did well with First Contact, which was the least like the show...

All the TNG movies were, basically, continuations of the TV show. The TOS movies are *nothing* like the series and require no grand understanding of continuity or admittance to the sci fi fandom brotherhood... they're darned entertaining films that can stand on their own right. Going to see a TNG movie felt like you were watching TNG Season 8.

They took very few risks with them -- look at the uniforms... when they did change them for the movies, the outfits immediately got shipped off to the ongoing DS9 series. No risk at all, no jump away from TV - you're just paying to watch the TV show you can catch in syndication. Compare that to the original movies, with those crimson uniforms that seemed to have no place anywhere... that was bold. That's all a single example that may seem small, but I think it holds up throughout: the TOS movies changed the characters on a fundamentally appealing level... the TNG movies, when they did anything, just unceremoniously dropped elements from the show which might confuse new viewers.

Now that's an overstatement.

We argue our points here, young man.
 
We argue our points here, young man.
I am of course referring to the Furry community, but I believe that I have made my point already in previous threads, so I won't risk angering any more Furry apologists.
All the TNG movies were, basically, continuations of the TV show. The TOS movies are *nothing* like the series and require no grand understanding of continuity or admittance to the sci fi fandom brotherhood... they're darned entertaining films that can stand on their own right. Going to see a TNG movie felt like you were watching TNG Season 8.
This kind of filmmaking will always rile the hardcore fans (not unlike the Wing Commander Movie) where certain elements from the original are sacrificed to appeal to a wider audience. Personally, i'll go see it when (or if) it somes out.
 
I am of course referring to the Furry community, but I believe that I have made my point already in previous threads, so I won't risk angering any more Furry apologists.

You're through, kid. For good this time.
 
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