Star Trekking: Part 2 of 3
While promoting Star Trek into Darkness during a 2013 interview with Stewart joked that Abrams’s lost him following his initial admission (he didn’t like Star Trek). Abrams responded: ‘You … and your kind … were much smarter than I was. I couldn’t get it. So we tried to make it work for people like me … and people like you. The goal [with Star Trek into Darkness] was to make a movie for moviegoers, not just for Star Trek fans. So if you’ve never seen Star Trek before, you can still see it.’ Some of this response I will return to later, but for now I want to focus on…
Star Trekking: Part 1 of 3
I’m a Trekker. Reruns of Star Trek: The Original Series captured my imagination when I was just a kid in the 1970s. Space, aliens, adventure – what isn’t there to love? The effects are obviously dated now, but the storytelling was paramount. I had an argument with somebody once about Star Trek: The Original Series versus JJ Abrams’s reboot; what the other person highlighted – as an intended detractor from TOS – was the terrible special effects TOS incorporated. But the storytelling itself holds up. While there’s some stories typical of that era, overall the storytelling is logical, causal, and makes sense within its own universe. Even at its worst,…