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Simon Pegg On Board To Co-Write Next Star Trek Film
According to a report at The Verge, itself based on another at Deadline.com, Shaun of the Dead creator Simon Pegg is to co-write (along with Doug Jung) the next Star Trek film. Pegg is also signed on to play Scotty, as he did in both the Star Trek reboot and Into Darkness.
Because ... severing yourself from the canon isn't new or original?
Star Trek now has freedom to have any future the writers can come up with ... how is that now awesome for the franchise?
I personally like the idea that it basically gives a preemptive "Shhh" to the nerds who are going to go all Comic Book Guy and say "but clearly this is in contradiction to episode 62 where Kirk says the saliva of Dactarian Moon Bats is the source of his secret powers".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, they're stuck with the universe Abrams left them. A universe which makes no sense, where starships are irrelevant because transporters can move people over interstellar distances (from Earth to the Klingon homeworld), and where a cure for death has been found in Khan's blood. Not to mention the absurd political situation, with a corrupt Starfleet operating accord to some bizarre system of personal prerogative of individual commanders rather than any rational chain of command.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
TOS really didn't push the utopian future as much. Gene really started pushing that with TNG. TOS pushed the envelope with a lot of things, but I never got quite the same utopia vibe from it that I did with TNG. Especially TNG when Gene was still alive and in charge.
As for the boobies, did you not see TOS? They might not have shown as much skin as now, but they were pushing it for the times. Gene Roddenberry was no prude in that sense. Even though the strip down scenes in the new movies feel a lot more gratuitous, that's only because they aren't more carefully worked into the story and look more obviously like fan service. Boobies are a proud Trek tradition.
And explosions. Exploding consoles and the cast running around the set in sync. If they could have done CGI explosions in TOS, they would have. You know it's true.
And for all that, Star Trek was still pretty much "science fiction lite"... it didn't tackle some of the really wild concepts that you see in SF books, where the authors are not limited to practical budget considerations or keeping it simple enough that new viewers can pick up partway through a season. I haven't seen "Interstellar" but from what I've heard it's a great movie that actually holds up as real science fiction. Most so-called SF movies these days are really just action movies or horror movies in a science fiction setting (including JJTrek and JJTrek 2). That's not necessarily a bad thing. I thought "Pacific Rim" was great. But the thing is, audiences are more sophisticated than they were almost 50 years ago when the original series aired. We've seen "Blade Runner", "The Matrix", "Contact", "Fringe" and whole host of other movies and TV shows that expanded the popular consciousness of SF tropes. There's room to tackle all the heady and serious subjects that were tackled in the original series and the newer series, plus there's a whole lot of science fiction concepts that people take for granted today that would have been incomprehensible or at least confusing to most audiences from decades ago.
Sure, you need to have wide appeal, and you can pretty much get that for free with good SFX, but is there no room for something other than fluff? Is Michael Bay the template from which the Star Trek reboot needs to be cut? Is the audience really that dumb? (Note I just described above that the audience isn't. I think there is a wider demographic to which a "real" Star Trek movie could appeal to now than there ever was). Besides, Star Trek II, widely considered the best one (by me as well) wasn't deep or complex, it was just a really good story that utilized the SF setting and Star Trek canon well). "Star Trek IV" had even wider appeal could almost be considered a comedy and yet most people also consider it excellent, and it was still very true to the spirit of the TV series. I know a lot of people liked JJTrek, and there were elements of the production design that I really liked, as well as some of the actors (particularly Karl Urban, Simon Pegg (despite his overuse as comedy relief) and Zoe Seldana, all of whom captured their respective roles with heart), but I thought the movies overall were awful... a Bay-Transformers level of awful.
The problem with the Star Trek movies is that they always lacked the primary advantage of the TV show, the ability to address a topic in detail, to be thoughtful and detailed, and sometimes slow and talky, which is usually the best way to express and explore these ideas. The movies never did could really do this (with the exception of the "The Motion Picture", which I always really liked as well... it was the most true to the original series, whatever its flaws were), even the good ones, because there is a built-in requirement for action and spectacle. What we are seeing now, however, is all action and spectacle and absolutely none of the issues and concepts that are the heart of Trek (and of any good fiction) or even a decent story. The new movies are just mindless eye candy.
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