Matt Damon as Kirk in Star Trek XI?

GiggidyGiggidy writes "Our friends at IMDB.com are reporting that Matt Damon has been cast to play a young James T. Kirk in the new Star Trek Movie directed by J.J. Abrams. Is this the end of the Star Trek series we fans know and love, or the beginning of something bigger and better for the series?"

Comments

Re:Oh, Yes!

[seminumerical]

Personally I am tired of the ST Universe. I want Science Fiction, emphasis on science. Phasers are just blasters from 40s or 50s pulp fiction, warp speed is a tired imitation of the WW2 Navy movies, where the captain had to think hard about the fuel/delta t trade off where the drag is proportional to velocity cubed. Warp is not Science fiction, it is elves in middle earth fantasy. I am tired of "subspace" communication (someone just heard the word in his linear algebra course before he dropped out and became a screen writer), tired of every planet being "class M", having a gravity of 10 m/s/s and a breathable atmosphere. I am especially tired of low budget aliens. Makeup does not make an alien, any more than assigning them the characteristics of some earth culture makes them alien. We've had Viking/Moslem warrior aliens, Seidenstraße aliens, Greek mythology aliens (and also vomitous magical "Q" aliens that remove the need for any coherent SF) ... Aieee!!! ...

Remember when science fiction was fun and the characters two dimensional? Remember when they travelled at sub light speeds around the solar system where there was no artificial gravity? Clarke's 2001, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, Heinlein's "The Rolling Stones" and many more. We have the technology to make a coherent near future SF TV series, using the actual properties of our planets, with Lagrange colonies, pioneer colonies, mining operations on Mercury, slow freighters and liners using economy orbits and fast (expensively anti-matter powered) "Federation" ships busy about the system.

How many of us learned the basic (incorrect) properties of the planets from those books? Now let's do it again with Mercury's real day, and a non-tropical Venus. Settle the moons and adventure in space.

It is not for us. It is for that Aspergers 14 year old guy who is awkward with girls but knows the ABCs of Relativity; the one in the generation coming up fast behind us. Let us relive SF through his (yes his) eyes.

There can still be a 7 of 9 character so that he will have an imaginative, once removed from reality, sex life.