J.J. Abrams, who was attached to Star Trek XI as a producer, has officially agreed to direct the film.

Since the film is in the earliest stages of production, plot details haven’t been hammered out yet, but it’s widely believed that ST:XI will focus on James T. Kirk’s early days at Starfleet Academy.� The folks at Viacom and Paramount believe that going into Trek’s past instead of continuing into the future will revitalize the franchise… after all, the formula worked so well for Enterprise, didn’t it?

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3 Comments »

1. 
   Devin de Gruyl
   December 11, 2006 at 3:21 pm

   I just hope that somebody decides to give Harve Bennett at least an acknowledgement in the credits - he did, after all, develop a Kirk-in-the-Academy story over fifteen years ago for what eventually became ST6.

   I don’t know if Abrams can repair the damage that’s been done to this franchise, but I will say this - as long as R*ck B*rm*n isn’t allowed within an AU of this project, I’ll be cautiously optimistic.

   [Reply]
2. 
   Shawn M.
   December 11, 2006 at 8:30 pm

   I have to give He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named credit for Deep Space Nine — that was an excellent series. But then again, Michael Pillar and Ira Steven Behr probably had more to do with the quality of that show than the other guy.

   According to Wikipedia, Berman is finished with Star Trek and looking for other franchises to eventually run into the ground. Hmm… maybe Stargate is hiring?

   [Reply]
3. 
   Devin de Gruyl
   December 12, 2006 at 12:44 pm

   DS9 was mostly Pillar and Behr’s baby, yeah - and you also can’t discount the contributions made by Ron Moore, either. (He may not have been as involved in the creative end as the other two, but he wrote some of DS9’s best scripts IMO. RDM’s Klingons are the best treatment they ever got in the franchise.)

   Voyager frustrates the hell out of me, because it could have been great; I certainly liked the premise, and there were some pretty good episodes here and there. But B*rm*n insisted on turning it into “TNG Lite” with gratuitous T&A (you cannot tell me Seven of Nine existed for any reason other than to pitch tents in the pants of male veiwers) and overuse of the Reset Button. And when they finally established regular contact with the Alpha Quadrant I threw my hands in the air and just gave up. That little plot point had removed from Voyager the one thing that set it apart from the rest of the franchise - it was now truly TNG with a female captain. And I never really liked TNG all that much to begin with.

   Enterprise, I must admit, did start getting better towards the end. I’d probably go so far as to say its last two seasons could hold their own with any DS9 episodes pre-Klingon War. (Yeah, I confess, I got all fanboyish over “In a Mirror, Darkly” and the impressive recreation of the TOS-era sets. But then, I’ve always been a TOS fanboy, and never ashamed to admit to it.) Of course, this being B*rm*n-era Trek, they had to go and destroy it all with that series finale, just so He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named could stick freaking Riker (hands-down, my least favorite Trek character of all time) on the screen one last time. There is no point to that entire episode except to try and give the outgoing series a “rub” by including TNG characters in an extraneous plot thread. All it needed was LeVar Burton waking up on the set of Reading Rainbow after a book about outer space klonked him on the head!

   …Wow, this turned into quite the rant, didn’t it? Anyway, summary: Berman bad, Abrams not so much. Hopefully.

   [Reply]

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