We all knew he was producing film number eleven in the famous 40 year Star Trek franchise. But, as to whether or not J.J. Abrams would direct has been up in the air ever since Paramount announced that a new movie was greenlit.
Abrams has been on again and off again about directing Trek and the rumors were so out-of-control that we here at Slice of SciFi had finally decided to not do any more reporting on it until a verifiable source of information about it would come to the fore. Well, that time has finally arrived.
According to The Hollywood Reporter yesterday J.J. Abrams came to a final decision just last night and now he will direct the next installment of the Star Trek feature-film franchise. The source for this comes from very reliable sources that the trade paper have come to trust.
We have already reported that the plot will definitely center on a young Kirk, Spock and Scotty during their first space mission soon out of Starfleet Academy, but beyond that Abrams and the studio remain very tight-lipped, as has been the custom for the last ten films in the series.
they better make a good movie and not crap!!!
A young Kirk? Young Spock? Young Scotty? Why? Why destroy these characters? Paramount should grow a brain and leave that part of “trek history” alone with.
Everyone saw how abysmally ‘Enterprise’ did – people just aren’t interested in pre-Enterprise (Kirk) material.
Furthermore, you DON’T have actors pretending to be other actors, no one takes them seriously, and they’ll never BE Kirk/Spock/Scotty. Leave the legends alone.
Phil, let’s look at the list of JJA’s prior porjects.
Felicity
Alias
Lost
Mission Impossible III.
I am not optimistic. 🙁
If there is one thing Star Trek has lacked, it is realistic character depth. For example, consider Battlestar Galactica’s character development with Star Trek. BG’s characters seem like real people, with real internal motivations. Don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek and always have, but Star Trek characters are a little more superficial.
Lost and Alias are very character driven. And despite the bizarre Tom Cruise, the character Ethan was much better than in the previous MI installments.
Personally, I can’t wait to see what JJ does with our longtime favorite characters…
It should be interesting to see a young Kirk, Spock and Scotty but with great care. The only confirmed glimpses into the early (pre TOS) lives of Kirk and Co. are briefly referenced in “The Menagerie” (with Spock serving under Chris Pike) “Obsession” with Kirk serving on the USS Farragut, “Court Martial” when he served on the USS Republic (NCC-1371) and logged the mistake of Ben Finney and in the book “Enterprise: The First Adventure” written by Vonda N. McIntyre. In addition, will we see Captain Robert April, first captain of the Enterprise as well as Chris Pike? And I am interested to see which version of the Enterprise we will see- that of the Enterprise in “The Cage” or in “Where No Man has Gone Before” or what was used in the series itself? There are a lot of things with this movie in particular that Mr. Abrams will have to deal with and, in the eyes of those of us who grew up watching the original series in syndication and read everything we could get our hands on written by Gene Roddenberry, keep as close to what the Great Bird of the Galaxy gave us as possible. In my opinion, Enterprise wasn’t greatly liked by the fans because in a lot of ways it strayed from the “historical data” as was given in the original series and in some of the early novels that were published after getting approval from Gene Roddenberry. I hope it’s a good film and breaks the “curse” of the odd-numbered movies being dubbed as “what were they thinking?!?!?!”