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THE Screened Review by Matt Rorie
Star Trek does an exemplary job of reviving the franchise without being overly reverential. |
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J. J. Abrams Director | previously directed Mission: Impossible III |  |
An arrogant overachiever and a reckless, bar-fighting rebel try to stop a time-travelling Romulan from getting his revenge on the future versions of themselves for the destruction of his planet, in J.J. Abrams' critically acclaimed and very successful reboot of the Star Trek series.
Before Kirk and Bones get into the shuttle to leave for Enterprise, officers are calling out names of cadets and what ships they are shuttling to. One of the recruits called is named 'Vader', a reference to Star Wars' infamous villain Darth Vader.
6 More Movie ReferencesNeroThis is Captain Christopher Pike. To whom am I speaking?
21 More QuotesHi, Christopher. I'm Nero.
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Roberto Orci | written by |
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Alex Kurtzman | written by |
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Gene Roddenberry | television series "Star Trek" |
Star Trek
After a frantic evacuation of the USS Kelvin, James T. Kirk is born, not in Iowa, but in the middle of a battlefield in outer space, creating a brand new timeline for the series.
During this time, a young Spock, still a child, faces discrimination on his home planet for being half-human and half-Vulcan. After he turns down a place in the High Council due to an insulting remark of an elder, he vows to join Starfleet, where equality is better promoted.
However, in the far reaches of space, the alien spaceship, now realizing they are not when they left and still searching for Spock, heads towards Vulcan, and prepares to make sure the future does not happen....
Production
Planning and Development
In 2005, Paramount Pictures secretly contacted Roberto Orci to help revive the Star Trek franchise, which at the time was considered a dead property, after the cancellation of Star Trek Enterprise on UPN. They decided to reboot the series from page one, and asked good friend J.J. Abrams to make it a reality.
J.J. Abrams planned to make the movie revolve around Kirk and Spock during their days at the Starfleet Academy, but after a leak of the plans by the Daily Variety, he had to denounce it to preserve the privacy of the movie. He did not plan to direct the movie, originally planning to have Sam Raimi do the honors, but announced he was going to do it on February 23, 2007.
He created a teaser poster himself showing the Enterprise crew uniform insignia against a half gold, half blue background. The poster got fans excited, as it hinted it being about the original Star Trek TV series. The movie was announced to be released on December 25, 2008 (it was eventually delayed to the summer of the following year).
The studio had high hopes for J.J. Abrams' movie, and gave it the highest budget ever given to any Star Trek movie. Scott Chambliss, the production designer, already started working on planning the film, and the sound stage construction began in September.
The Story
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman took four months to write the script of the movie, ending up with a 128 page manuscript. They designed the story to be enjoyable by those who never saw or knew anything about Star Trek before, which was the whole point of the movie. The title was always intended to simply be Star Trek, without any number or subtitle.
The script, making Star Trek the first Star Trek movie since Generations to feature the original characters, drew inspiration from Wrath of Khan, the novels Prime Directive and Spock's World, and the TV episodes Balance of Terror and Yesteday's Enterprise. J.J. Abrams also made sure to make sure the movie feels more like a Star Wars movie than a Star Trek one, since he was a bigger fan of Star Wars, and those movies are a lot more audience friendly.
The final version of the movie removed a couple of deleted scenes and plot points to make the movie faster paced and less meddling into unnecessary dialog. Roberto Orci has said that he the most difficulty writing Kirk and Nero, and the writers had to resort to using the fan written Star Trek Wiki to make sure they got the characters right. Harlan Ellison, when hearing rumors that the story would have inspirations from his Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, demanded compensation, but it turned out the movie never had those story elements.
During writing the movie, they realized that simply rebooting the whole canon would end up with negative fan reaction from the fanbase, so they decided to come up with a time travel plot device to create an alternative universe, essentially making the movie a sequel instead of a reboot. This allowed the movie to work like a reboot, but while also letting the fans know that 40 years of storylines were not just sent down the drain.
Sets
"There was a strong, sleek, modernist vision at play in the 1960s when the television series began, that was something we wanted to infuse in our look."
- Scott Chambliss, production designer
To make sure the different designs of different species remained different, different art directors were used for each planet. Dennis Bradford designed the sets for the Federation starships, Gary Kosko did the Vulcan sets, and Curt Beech designed the shuttlecrafts.
The insides of the ship, although it's layout is identical to the original, is now a lot busier and sleek, with plenty of shiny transparent surfaces, brighter lights and colors, and more modern computer displays. More railings were also added, to make it feel safer (due to the proud Star Trek tradition of characters dying on the ship due to being tossed around the bridge). The viewscreen was turned into an actual window, and the whole set was constructed on gimbals, to simulate the rocking motions of the ship.
The Narada, by contrast, was designed to be less appealing and more foreboding and dangerous. The machinery of the ship was always exposed to the viewer, and the colors were always dark and green with envy. It was heavily influenced by Antoni Gaudi, an architect that designed buildings as if they were inside out. Taking a page of the book of Robert Rodriguez, the Narada set's background was made of individual pieces that could be moved around to make the set appear bigger.
Props, Makeup, and Costumes
A tribble, a small fuzzy alien creature from the original TV show, made a cameo on Scotty's desk, and the Aptera Typ-1, a real life prototype electric vehicle, also made a cameo on the Starfleet Academy.
Joel Harlow and Barney Burman created the makeup for the humanoid and alien characters, respectively. Instead of using CGI makeup like in the Star Wars films, they opted to use all real life makeup techniques, without the aid of digital effects. Their work caused them to win the Best Makeup award at the Academy Awards.
During production, they were on a rush to design all the alien species, due to J.J. Abrams dropping the bombshell on the amount of aliens in the film so late in production, due to the original plan, having all the aliens appear in a bar, would be too similar to the cantina scene in Star Wars.
To separate Romulans and Vulcans, they decided to have the Romulans completely bald and covered in tattoos. Their designs are less extreme than those on previous Star Trek works, however. It took two and half to four hours to get their makeup done, with Eric Bana's character Nero requiring the most prosthetic work.
"The costumes were a microcosm of the entire project, which was how to take something that's kind of silly and make it feel real. But how do you make legitimate those near-primary color costumes?"
-J.J. Abrams, director and producer
J.J. Abrams hired Michael Kaplan as the costume designer. Kaplan has never seen anything Star Trek before, so Abrams hoped he would approach the costumes from a new angle. Kaplan decided to continue using the color motifs of the original series, but made them more sophisticated and seem less cartoon-like. Similar to Superman's costume in Superman Returns, he had the logo patterned on the costumes to give them texture.
For the villains, Kaplan had them dress in old raggy fabrics he found at a flea market, due to their mining backgrounds. He liked the look so much that he commissioned the makers of those fabrics, who were in Bali, to create more costumes for the villains. As for the Vulcans, he designed an eloquent design for the costumes, to bring the point that the Vulcans were about dignity and appearance.
Casting
This film was Leonard Nimoy's first time playing the role of Spock since 1991, coming out of retirement just to play this role again. He said that the only reasons he decided to come out of retirement was because he thought the role he played in this movie was very important and iconic, as well as being a J.J. Abrams fanboy. J.J. Abrams loved that he was able to cast Nimoy in the film, and managed to keep him as a guest star on his TV show, Fringe.
"To make this a great film, it must both please the fans and those who have never seen Star Trek... having Leonard in the film shows that this film exists in a continuum of Trek history, as opposed to an absolute, page 1 reinvention. "
-J.J. Abrams, director and producer
The first actor to be announced on the movie was Zachary Quinto, who became famous for his role as Sylar on the TV show Heroes, as young Spock. He will also be portraying Spock in any future Star Trek movies. Matt Damon wanted to be cast as Kirk, going as far as asking William Shatner to hook him up, but the filmmakers wanted a younger actor to play him. Instead, they chose Chris Pine to play Kirk. The rehearsals for the roles were held on the week of October 19, 2007.
Eight days before she passed away, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry reprised her role as the voice of the Enterprise computer. On the open casting call for extras on November 10, hundreds of people came in asking to be in the movie, the highest since the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Wil Wheaton provided the voices for the non-Nero Romulans on the movie. His voice was digitally altered each line to make it sound like individual actors.
Although Abrams approached both Shatner and Nimoy to play a part on the movie, Shatner didn't learn he was not going to be in the movie until he was talking over a phone call with Nimoy discussing the script. After the media reported that Shatner was 'furious' (he claims this was not true), the writers desperately tried to find a place to put him in, and wrote a scene in which he would have appeared as a hologram near the end of the movie.
But J.J. Abrams felt the scene 'didn't feel right', and decided to scrap it. Although Shatner was reported as being 'furious', in reality, it was most of the fans on message boards doing the complaining.
Special Effects
The movie spent almost nine months in post production, the second longest in the franchise. Ben Burtt, famous for his work on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Wall-E, created the special effects for the movie, using new sound effects specifically for the film.
Music
"I grew up listening to all of that great [Trek] music, and that's part of what inspired me to do what I'm doing... You just go in scared. You just hope you do your best. It's one of those things where the film will tell me what to do."
-Michael Giacchino, composer
Giacchino liked the music for the original Star Trek to be like classical music, while Star Wars' music was rock and roll. He consciously made the decision to fit the score for the movie to be more rock and roll. Enterprising Young Men is a more intense and musical version of the broader and simpler original Star Trek theme.
The score was performed by a 107-piece orchestra and a 40 person choir. An ehru was used to perform the musical theme for Spock, and was digitally distorted to perform the theme for Nero and the Romulans. The soundtrack is the most popular Star Trek soundtrack ever made, debuting at the Billboard 200 chart at #58, and rising to #49 the following week.
Release
The writers were going to have a special showing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan along with a ten minute preview of the new movie, but to the surprise of the audience, Leonard Nimoy appeared on stage asking them if they would like to see the new movie instead.
The movie came out on theaters on May 8, 2009, quickly becoming the most successful movie in the series, as well as becoming the 4th highest grossing film of the year. The movie also got extreme critical acclaim, achieving a rare 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and getting a perfect score from Screened.
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Box Office
Domestic $257,730,019 Foreign +$127,764,536 - = total worldwide gross $385,494,555
- - a reported budget of $150,000,000
- = a 157.0% net profit of $235,494,555
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In today's dollars
Domestic $257,730,019 Foreign +127,764,536 - = total worldwide gross $385,494,555
- - a reported budget of $150,000,000
- = a 157.0% net profit of $235,494,555
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