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First Trek Film Footage Unveiled
Ostracus writes "Lost creator JJ Abrams has unveiled footage from his Star Trek prequel at a press event in London.
The clips featured US actor Chris Pine as the young Captain Kirk, Heroes star Zachary Quinto as Mr Spock and Simon Pegg as Enterprise engineer Scotty.
The audience also saw Leonard Nimoy reprise his role as the older Mr Spock in one of four excerpts from the film.
In his introduction, Abrams said he wanted the film to be released in May 2009, to feel 'legitimate and real.'
Speaking at London's Vue West End cinema on Tuesday morning, the film-maker admitted he had 'never really been a huge Star Trek fan.'" Note that the article doesn't actually contain the footage, just brief descriptions of it. The video clip included is just the old trailer that we saw many moons ago. But that won't stop me from lusting.
The REAL trailer is coming out in another five days. (Per startrekmovie.com where you can watch the previous trailer in HD.) Perhaps it would have been better to wait before proclaiming it? Or at least give useful information on the release date of the footage?
The real news at the moment is that a photo of the new Enterprise was released yesterday. I was expecting changes, but this awkward kitbash makes me very unhappy.
The new bridge was also revealed about a month ago. Many refer to it as the "iBridge" because of its resemblance to Apple hardware. Personally, I'm mostly happy with the bridge design. It appears to be functional and otherwise looks nice.
I just wish they hadn't made a parody out of the old girl. :-(
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Good. The series has become a tired ass glorified fan flick from insiders.
Fresh blood and a new outlook sounds good to me.
make a point of saying "was never really a fan of the original show"? Maybe they really never saw it, but arent' they taking the fans for granted then? They don't know how important it is for us "TO NOT SCREW IT UP"?
I understand a reboot of the series is sometimes necessary to make it fit contemporary audiences. But for every BSG, there are a hundred ruined series that chose to do something so out of character of the canon that it appeals to neither fans nor new audiences.
Zachary Quinto is probably the most perfect person to play Spock in the prequel.
If they do this right, there could be three, four, five, or six more movies to be made.
If they do this right.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Ok, this may sound childish, but I fear I might hate Spock being locked in a planet with polar bears, killing smoke and never-ending nonsense.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
You do know the average age of people in the US military, right?
Our aircraft carriers and subs are all run by kids.
McCoy isn't the original ship's surgeon on the Enterprise. I guess nobody who worked on the film ever saw The Cage.
And as others have mentioned in comments to previous stories here, Chekov wasn't on the Enterprise until later on well after Kirk took command. He really doesn't fit into this movie.
And why have a Korean play a Japanese character (Sulu)? WTF? I guess they are depending on the old cracker saying "what's the difference?"
And the space shuttles?
Not really relevant -- the astronaut system in the US is a very specialized thing these days. There's a minimum of people getting to do it and a huge pool of people wanting to. That'll always skew towards older people.
Starfleet would be much more like the military in that regard. Its reasonable to assume that like any military force, ages will skew downwards.
I liked how the original trailer looked like a Rammstein video, iron workers constructing the ship by hand on a planetbound spacedock.
Strangely enough, our modern warships are essentially built by hand because the volumes aren't large enough to warrant assembly lines with robots. The ships are built in large assemblies that are joined together, huge machines moving the parts but humans inspecting every piece as they go together. But trying to model the construction of a futuristic starship after a modern-day navy vessel is about as silly as modeling space combat tactics after WWII....ok, yeah, they do it but it's still silly! Though I did dearly love the depth-charging scene from the Wing Commander movie, especially the part about the crew having to remain silent so the Kilrathi couldn't hear them, presumably on space sonar. :)
But aside from the issue of how the pieces would be put together on a starship, there's the question of where it would be built. Trek has always had a thing for spacedocks in space. I remember asking my dad questions when we were watching Trek and was amazed when he told me the ship could never land. It blew my mind to think of a ship built in space, always in space, never landing.
Anyway, I wonder just how awful this movie will end up being. Is it considered an even or odd-numbered film?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Sure, and Kirk was also well into his 30s, as was just about everyone else on the ship except maybe Chekov, in the original series.
I think the GP makes a good point in that you would expect a starship to be commanded by people at least in their 30s. Sure, the grunts on board can be kids, but the people on the bridge ought to look as if they've been in Starfleet for more than 5 minutes.
The constant push of limits on the supposed speed of the craft, capabilities of the ships, and expanded population of the available area took away too many plot devices.
In the original series, they were kind of out there on their own without help available. By the time the big war with the Borg came around in TNG, they got to the point where anything that was a threat could wipe them out entirely, and anything else was easily dealt with.
Both DS9 and Voyager were attempts to revive the sense of frontier self reliance. DS9 was more of a city, and a sort of 'futuristic cop show' was the original goal. Voyager was to be an attempt to get back to the spirit of the original series.
Going forward you have a more urban setting with the known region pretty much all settled and all the borders drawn.
Going backward just gives you more room to work in.
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They just want to get it out in time for the Memorial Day holiday in the USA. It's one of the bigger box-office weekends of the year, and perfect for a release like the new Star Trek flick.
:q!
I seem to recall from somewhere that Kirk was the youngest starship (by which I think they meant large capital ship) captain in Starfleet, at 34. I'm not sure this is canon.
At one point on screen, Kirk asked Chekhov's age and was told '22, sir'.
Except that the official line is that they are NOT rebooting the series. Which is rather two-faced when you think about it. On one hand you're telling the fans that you're not rebooting the series (at a time when fans are probably most receptive to a reboot) then you go and reboot it anyway.
With PR management like that, is it any wonder that fans are upset?
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Which is perfectly reasonable for someone with a rank of Ensign in a military structured like the US navy.
You do know the average age of people in the US military, right?
Our aircraft carriers and subs are all run by kids.
The ratings and junior officers may all look like kids but the senior officers, certainly the captain and CAG, they're going to be older.
And as far as setting goes, it all depends on the type of setting they're trying to convey. If the Enterprise is a brand new ship going out into the unknown and is a seriously important mission, they're going to ask for a captain whose been around the block. If they're in the middle of a war and are running short on experienced officers and the enterprise is portrayed as the equivalent of a destroyer, it's believable to have a very junior-grade officer as skipper. And if the Enterprise is a cushy flagship in peacetime, it would be just as believable to have a politically-connected captain in charge, a good old boy who might know very little about spacefaring and is relying heavily on his XO to keep the ship from running into the first asteroid they come across.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"I was expecting changes, but this awkward kitbash makes me very unhappy."
Younger fans that don't give a crap about the franchise will love the new iLook, in all probability. But those of us that have been fans all our lives aren't going to like this very much. Most of us are, frankly, sick of the retconning in the cannon. We fought for years to get Rick Berman kicked out of the franchise for precisely this kind of garbage. "Canon? Fuck that! If we can eke out another Nielson's point or two, lets do yet another time travel story and totally screw the franchise history up! It'll be Die Hard on a Starship!"
You'd expect some minor touchups to take advantage of current technology, but this is a complete retooling of the classic series, a reboot. Real longtime fans would probably be happier with Jim Cawley's New Voyages/Phase II. How ironic that an Elvis impersonator has more love and respect for the series than the current movie's creative team does.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
After his panel at the New York Times' 6th Annual Arts & Leisure Weekend, EW sat down with Mission: Impossible III helmer and Lost creator J.J. Abrams to get an inside look at his new enterprise: a Star Trek movie. While it isn't clear when we can expect to see the film, which will be the 11th in the series, he confirmed a draft of the script is done, and it will be trimmed sometime soon.
So what, exactly, will be the plot? Early reports (like this one in Variety) said that it will focus on the young, post-Starfleet Academy days of James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, but Abrams wouldn't specify. Still, he assured us it's a story that even non-Trekkers can enjoy. ''On the one hand, for people who love Star Trek, the fix that they will get will be really satisfying,'' he says. ''For people who've never seen it or know it vaguely, I think they will enjoy it equally, because the movie does not require you to know anything about Star Trek. I would actually prefer [that] people don't know the series, because I feel like they will come to it with an open mind.''
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