Boldly going round again

06/05/2009

Star Trek director JJ Abrahams and Simon 'Scotty' Pegg talk about relaunching the Enterprise

Miles Fielder

Given Hollywood’s habitual reinventing and rebooting of once-popular franchises, it was only a matter of time before the film factory set its sights on the four-decade old classic space opera Star Trek. It’s been seven years since the 10th and final film, Nemesis, and four since the cancellation of the fifth and most recent television series, Enterprise (if you don’t count the six-episode fan-created New Voyages).

The creative force behind the new film, titled simply Star Trek, is JJ Abrams, the American wonderboy from New York who conceived the TV fantasy puzzler Lost and the post-9/11 monster movie Cloverfield. Given carte blanche by franchise owners Paramount Pictures, Abrams opted to revive the original crew of the USS Enterprise and recast Kirk, Spock, Bones and the others with fresh-faced young actors to tell the story of their very first mission together.

The results could have been dire, and a major disappointment to the legions of loyal fans known as Trekkers. Happily, Abrams’s instincts were good and his execution, of what’s in effect a prequel, inspired.

The new old Star Trek is an extremely faithful, although often highly irreverent, take on the original that’s also a spectacular and thrilling science fiction adventure in its own right.

“Our goal was to take something that has existed for decades and make it feel legitimate, vital and relevant today,” says Abrams, a brainy-looking “kid” with a stack of tightly-curled dark hair and black-rimmed glasses who was, coincidentally, born in 1966, the year Star Trek made its debut.

“We’re dealing with a lot of over-the-top science fiction stuff, so the only way we could achieve that goal was though the characters. So I got together with the writers, one a big fan, the other had never seen the show, and we talked over all the different story options and decided to do the Kirk and Spock story. The thing about Kirk and Spock is they are each separately full of great potential, but it’s not until they come together as a team that they can accomplish almost anything.

“To me, the key to the movie is that friendship. And, in fact, the original show was about the family of friends aboard the Enterprise. So that was our way in.”

Kirk, Spock and the rest of the familiar crew are assembled aboard the Enterprise through a cleverly-contrived plot revolving around the mysterious appearance of a gigantic and seemingly-unstoppable alien spacecraft that threatens Earth and Spock’s home-world Vulcan with annihilation.

While close-quarters combat with the vessel and its aliens provides the film with dazzling action sequences, the way in which the Enterprise crew go about finding a solution to this apparently no-win situation defines the various relationships between the characters, most notably impetuous Kirk and rational Spock, who begin not as friends but as rivals.

All of this unspools with the same verve, optimism and humour of the original show, which is itself referenced throughout the film in all kinds of smartly-reverential and ironic ways. “You don’t have to be a fan of Star Trek to enjoy the film,” says Simon Pegg, the UK comedy actor who plays a young version of the Enterprise’s engineer Scotty, and who is a self-confessed Trekkie.

Pegg is also a huge fan of Scotland. His wife Maureen is, after all, a Glaswegian. When it came to playing Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, the actor said he based his accent on his father-in-law, “a working-class Glaswegian boy”.

“What JJ has miraculously managed to do is appeal to both an existing fan base and a new viewership, which is a very hard balance to strike and which is something lots of people have tried and failed to do in the past,” says Pegg.

“This film nails it completely. You can watch this Star Trek not knowing anything about the pre-existing history and love it for the shear adventure, the human story and the ideas. Or, like me, you can marvel at the way in which the landscape of the planet Vulcan looks suspiciously like… Okay, I’ll just stop there,” Pegg finishes with a self-depreciating laugh.

“In contrast, I wasn’t a huge Star Trek fan when I started working on this,” Abrams says. “So I didn’t have that feeling that it was a sacred text. I was happy to make creative decisions about what was best for the movie and not for the preservation of what had come before.

“I didn’t want to alienate the fans, but I thought that if we did our job and made a really entertaining movie we would be catering for the fans in that way. That said, one of the writers, Roberto Orci, is a huge Star Trek fan and he made sure we weren’t slapping the fans in the face with anything. After all, we wouldn’t be making a Star Trek movie if those fans hadn’t kept it alive for some many years.”

There’s plenty for the fans to appreciate in the film, from phasers set to stun and dilithium crystals unable to power the Enterprise up to top warp factor, through communications officer Uhura’s teasingly-short uniform and those red V-neck sweaters worn by the disposable security team, to famous lines of dialogue such as “Live long and prosper” and “You green-blooded Vulcan!”

Those quotes bring us to the strongest connection the new film has to the old TV series, and to Abrams’ greatest coup: a cameo by Leonard Nimoy, reprising the role – albeit as an elderly counterpart to Lost star Zachary Quinto’s youngster – that made him famous but he hasn’t played in almost 20 years after saying he’d never don the pointy ears again.

“We decided to use Spock as the catalyst for the story,” says Abrams, “which was a bit of a gamble. We gave Leonard the script and he said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’, which was amazing because he’s said no so many times in the last two decades.”

“I’ve watched the show as a kid,” Pegg chimes in. “I remember it being on at six o’clock, teatime on BBC Two. So to become part of it as an actor and as a nerd, which is what I am – I’m sorry, but it’s true – is extraordinary. And then when I was doing a scene with Leonard Nimoy it was just really kind of weird, because he was talking to me as the man, Vulcan, I’ve known since I was nine years old.

“It was hard to deliver my lines and not go, ‘Ha, ha, ha. Ahhh. Hurrr. I want to go to the toilet’. But jokes aside, that was just one reason why it was a joy to be part of this project.”

What the fans make of the rebooted and suited 11th Star Trek film remains to be seen, but Pegg believes it’s a winner. “We now see Trek in the way fans have always wanted to see Trek,” he intones solemnly, “which is huge and with every possibility realised with cutting-edge special effects.

“There’s a line my nerdy alter-ego says in Spaced, which is, ‘There are some things that are sure in life and one of them is that every odd-numbered Star Trek film is shit’. That’s something many fans believe and something that did seem to hold true for a while. But that’s certainly not the case anymore.”

A sequel has already been greenlit. Will it reintroduce the dreaded Klingons? “It’s insanely presumptuous to talk about another film at this point,” Abrams says. “We don’t have a script, a story, an outline, even a thought. The good news is I’ve become a Star Trek fan through making this film and if there’s a demand for another one, the actors, writers and myself will be back.”

To explore more strange new worlds, to seek out other new life and new civilisations. To boldly go…