We’ve enjoyed stripped-back and sombre star trek With tWo instalments, but as the franchise reaches its 50th birthday, neWWriter simon pegg, director justin lin, and big bad idris elba are hoping to shake things up. total film meets the team trying to lighten up the enterprise Words Josh Winning
The year is 1979. An eight-year-old boy sits in front of a TV set, enthralled as Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise touch down on a strange new world. He has no idea the show’s a re-run of an episode originally broadcast over a decade ago, nor that the show was cancelled in ’69, killed by an uninterested network. He also has no clue that, 50 years after Kirk and Spock first boldly set out, his own bold new vision will be responsible for ensuring their story endures.
“We had just immigrated from Taiwan,” recalls Justin Lin, talking to Total Film three decades after he perched with his parents in front of that TV set, “so I went from a place with uncles and aunts and cousins to a whole new world where I didn’t know how to speak the language, and it was just my parents and my two brothers. Watching Star Trek, that became my extended family.”
It’s a story that echoes the one told by J.J. Abrams when he signed on to reboot Star Trek in 2009, revealing that his father took him to the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a kid. But while Abrams readily admits to being a “Star Wars guy” at heart, Lin grew up loving Kirk and co, having devoured numerous Trek incarnations, from the pilot of The Original Series to Voyager and beyond. These weren’t just characters to him. “Sometimes the most powerful thing about the medium of film and TV is not what you see on screen, it’s the emotional connection,” he says. “It’s right outside the screen.”
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