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).
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