Engage J.J. Abrams in conversation for even a few minutes and he will gladly confess the role that Star Trek played in his cultural coming of age. “I was not a fan,” he said recently.
Though Abrams would eventually become a creator of the television shows Lost, Alias and Fringe — series that owe their existence to boyhoods fueled by syndicated television and second-run movies — when he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s he had no interest in the hoary voyages of the Starship Enterprise and its crew.
Not that Abrams, now 42, had anything against science fiction; he just preferred The Twilight Zone and its supernatural morality plays. Whereas Star Trek seemed closed off to newcomers — “It always presumed you cared about this group of characters,” he said — The Twilight Zone was inviting, offering a self-contained origin story in each episode.
This would not be an especially remarkable revelation except that Abrams happens to be the director of Star Trek, the coming feature film (opening on Friday) that is Paramount’s US$150 million attempt to rejuvenate the decades-old space adventure franchise, the first movie to provide an official origin story for Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise team.
Abrams’ admission, made offhandedly in the lunchtime company of his Star Trek collaborators, didn’t raise a single eyebrow around the table. From Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who created Fringe with Abrams and wrote the Transformers films) to Damon Lindelof (a creator and producer of Lost and Bryan Burk (Abrams’ producing partner), they’ve all heard his pronouncements on Trek before.
But the remark is emblematic of why this particular team, comprising broad sci-fi fans and a couple of Trek aficionados, has been handed control of a fantasy franchise that is one of the most recognizable in entertainment yet was in serious disrepair, a victim of diminished expectations and waning enthusiasm.
Abrams and his partners are guys with mainstream pop-culture aspirations; their forte is taking on genres with finite but dedicated fan bases — science fiction, fantasy and horror — and making them accessible to wider audiences. And what they had in mind for their Star Trek movie is a film that is consistent with 43 years of series history but not beholden to it.
Despite their collective reverence for Star Trek — and Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, and X-Men, and other cultural artifacts of their awkward adolescence — none of them are total Trek completists (not even Orci, who once owned a telephone shaped like the Enterprise). They say that makes them the ideal candidates to upgrade Gene Roddenberry’s creation for 21st-century audiences.
“There’s just too much stuff out there to be loyal to everything,” Lindelof said. “Someone will find 50 ways to tell us we’re idiots, and it wouldn’t be Trek if they didn’t.” At the same time they appreciate the perils of chiseling away at a cultural touchstone whose influence has remained enormous even as its reputation has varied wildly over the years.
If Star Trek fails, Kurtzman said, “it’ll be the biggest personal failure we’ve ever had, because we will have actually violated something that means a lot to us.”
Their Trek movie puts them simultaneously on a new trajectory and right in the heart of the series’ mythology. It tells the story of a reckless 23rd-century youth named James T. Kirk (played by Chris Pine) who enrolls in the Starfleet Academy, driven in part by the death of his father, a starship officer who sacrificed his life for his crew. He is drawn into a band of talented cadets, clashing with the half-Earthling, half-alien Spock (Zachary Quinto of the television series Heroes).
For the Trek faithful there are plenty of nods to past television episodes and movies, familiar catchphrases and Kirk’s notorious solution to a supposedly unwinnable mission simulation. But there is also a conscious effort to inscribe this Trek in the storytelling traditions popularized by Joseph Campbell, in which heroes must suffer loss and abandonment before they rise to the occasion.
The filmmakers admit that this is a deliberate homage to their favorite films, like Superman, Star Wars and The Godfather Part II: epic movies that, by the way, did pretty well at the box office.
Perhaps more audaciously, this Star Trek also has a time-travel story line that essentially gives those on its creative team license to amend internal Trek history as they need to, and they aren’t timid about exercising it. (For example the villains of the movie are Romulans, even though the Enterprise’s first encounter with this alien race occurs in a well-known original Trek episode.)
Though their revisions may be contentious, the filmmakers said they were necessary; the Star Trek empire entrusted to them has been in dire straits.
Under the stewardship of Roddenberry and his appointed successor, Rick Berman, a creator of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the franchise had yielded four live-action television spinoffs and 10 feature films. But the 2002 movie Star Trek: Nemesis was a box-office disappointment, bringing in just US$43 million (less than every other film in the series), and by 2005 the UPN show Star Trek: Enterprise was about to be canceled. Any heat left in the Trek universe had dissipated, and many of its talented writers (like Ronald D. Moore, who rejuvenated the television series Battlestar Galactica) had moved on.
That year, the corporate behemoth Viacom, which owned Star Trek, was splitting itself in two, divorcing its CBS studio (which made the Trek shows) from its Paramount studio (which made the films). Trek was likely to go to CBS, where another television show might eventually be developed. Gail Berman, then the president of Paramount, convinced Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, to allow her one more chance at a Trek film; he gave her 18 months to get the cameras rolling or lose the property. (Under the arrangement CBS retained the Star Trek merchandising rights.)
Kurtzman and Orci were among the first to learn that Star Trek was seeking new management. Then, they were former Alias producers writing the screenplay for Mission: Impossible III, (which Abrams directed). Paramount executives began quizzing them about Trek.
The studio wanted “a very specific kind of thinking,” Kurtzman said.
“You had to love the genre at your core in every possible way,” he said. “And yet you had to separate it from what Trek had been, to make it feel fresh.”
In postproduction on Mission: Impossible III Abrams was approached by Berman to produce the new Trek. He did not immediately jump at the opportunity, but the more he thought about a project that could involve Orci and Kurtzman, as well as Lindelof and Burk, the more enthusiastic he became.
“Our references were all the same,” Abrams said. He added, “There’s this crazy sense of having all grown up together.”
Outwardly this particular Hollywood entourage is no different from any other group of guys who bust one another’s chops. (When Burk noted that he’d worked as a pool boy at the hotel where this interview was conducted, Abrams replied, “You’ll be pool boy here again.”)
But deep down they are children of the
pre-Internet era, the last generation whose members could not instantaneously connect to like-minded fans and had to seek them out at swap meets and video stores and in the pages of magazines with names like Starlog and Fangoria.
“When we come into contact with each other, there’s an ‘Oh, it’s you’ quality,” Lindelof said. “It’s like bumping into someone at a Dungeons and Dragons convention.” Even though this Star Trek has been reworked to resemble contemporary summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Iron Man (as well as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Terminator Salvation), it is also set apart by a tone that is more hopeful — and even utopian — than its competitors.
What ultimately inspired him about Star Trek, Abrams said, was that in contrast to a science-fiction saga like Star Wars — whose images of youthful swashbucklers traversing the cosmos in beat-up vehicles clearly influenced his movie — Trek was not set a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; it was a hopeful vision of what this planet’s future could be.
“We’ve become so familiar with the idea of space travel because of so many movies and TV shows that it’s lost its adventure and its possibility, its sense of wonder,” Abrams said. “Forty-three years ago it was not a boring idea.”
What remains to be seen is whether the patient, thoughtful and deeply philosophical tradition of Star Trek is compatible with a Star Trek movie that is variously flashy, frenetic, dirty, slapsticky and sufficiently steeped in popular culture to accommodate both the Beastie Boys song Sabotage and a cameo by Tyler Perry.
Abrams said that throughout the production process Orci and Lindelof, both acolytes of Trek history, were there to keep an eye on him. The filmmakers also received the blessing of Leonard Nimoy, who created the role of Spock and agreed to reprise the character in the film as a wizened old man.
“Any fan who would think that it’s not Trek has to say that to Leonard Nimoy’s face,” Orci said. “Don’t talk to me, talk to Spock.”
But Abrams has a mixed history when it comes to reinventing film franchises. Around 2002 he wrote a script for a possible new Superman movie that was criticized for the extensive revisions it made to that comic-book hero’s history. (In Abrams’ story, for example, the villain Lex Luthor turned out to be from Superman’s home planet of Krypton.)
Today, Abrams said, he understands the mistakes he made with his Superman screenplay. “It’s tantamount to doing a story about Santa Claus and saying that he’s from Kansas,” he said.
Nonetheless Abrams said his responsibility was not to the Trek loyalists, but “to create a movie that would be for moviegoers who love an adventure, and movies that are funny and scary and exciting — not Star Trek fans, necessarily, but not to exclude them either.”
But after immersing himself in the rich characters and boundless universe of a once unfamiliar space epic (and having committed himself to producing, with Burk, a Star Trek sequel that Kurtzman, Orci and Lindelof will write), Abrams was ready to make another confession to his team.
“I now consider myself a Trekkie,” he declared, “which I literally could not have ever imagined saying to anyone.”
Burk feigned a cough and, under his breath, said a single word. It sounded like “nerd.”
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