As Devin illuminated yesterday, JJ Abrams cryptically stated the new Star Trek will be for folks who may not have the Starfleet uniform hanging in their closet (and if they do, hopefully it’s the old ones, because Next Gen’s are stupid). Today we find out, thanks to William Shatner’s quest to remain all things Trek, Abrams really meant “kind of” in relation to that whole “audience doesn’t need to know anything about Star Trek” part.
The new Star Trek, according to the script Shatner was shown, is indeed about the formative Academy years of one Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock. Shatner also revealed Abrams asked him to be a part of the new Trek, despite the fact a role hadn’t been written for him yet. "They need to figure out how to put the dead captain in with the young captain," he said. "It’s a very complex, technical problem of how to write the character in, and I’m not sure how they will solve it." Aside from played out dreams, wormholes and space-time continuums, I don’t know how they’ll do it either.
Like many, I enjoyed Star Trek one (later in life, that is– I fell asleep when my dad took me to see it in its original theatrical run) and have a spot on my shelf for two, three (yes, three) and six. The rest were tired, irrelevant and had no connecting tissue to anything that stoked my enjoyment of the previous, despite attempts at cloning action and characters. Obviously, I don’t have any connectivity to Stark Trek sentimentality and have a tent set up at Camp Reboot.
While
visiting the past of known characters is obviously to keep the factory installed
fanbase (which are currently up in arms over the whole Shatner IS Kirk
argument), I couldn’t give two craps about whether we see Kirk or Spock again. Regardless, it sounds like things aren’t going to be so much a reboot as a visit to the past with a JJ Abrams take… which should have both camps hopeful.