A new interview with the writers of the upcoming Star Trek sequel offers fresh titbits on the film. Plus, it appears JJ Abrams still hasn’t signed on the dotted line to direct…
Over at the Los Angeles Times, screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have been chatting about penning the upcoming, and eagerly awaited, Star Trek sequel. And it turns out that they may have turned a corner on the project.
Shrouded in secrecy to this point (and it still is, really, to be fair), the writing team of the new film had been keeping mum on their plans, arguing that they had to find the story that they wanted to tell. That didn't stop the Internet filling in some of the gaps (Khan, anyone?), but official word has rarely been forthcoming on the project.
However, Orci has now revealed that, contrary to some speculation, the new Star Trek film isn't being treated as the middle part of a trilogy of stories. "I don't know that we've ever thought of it in terms of a trilogy," he confirmed. "We thought of the first one as, ‘How do we tell how this happened the first time and how do we free it so that it can go on forever without stepping on what came before.' So, if you were thinking of this movie as a second act, yeah, you would think of it as a The Empire Strikes Back sort of story, but I'm not sure we're thinking of it as a second act."
He went on to say that "One of the big challenges is all of the characters are together now." He continued with, "We don't [have] that luxury of not having the entire family there together at the start of the story. So now you want the character stories to be good for everybody but also not just be there to be stories, but also fit into the plot and be organic. We're looking at a lot of the old episodes for inspiration, still. Whereas the last movie was all about breaking free from Star Trek and its canon, now that we can do whatever we want, we still want it to feel like good ol' Star Trek, even though it's a new story."
Writing partner Alex Kurtzman then confirmed that they've worked out what they wanted to do with the next film. "We have broken the story," he confirmed, "which is very exciting."
Meanwhile, contrary to some reports, TrekMovie has confirmed that JJ Abrams still hasn't signed on to direct the new film. He's widely expected to make it his next project, once his next movie, Super 8, is locked. But as of yet, he's the expected director of Star Trek 2, not the confirmed one.
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