Bob Orci is talking about Star Trek 2 and suggesting that the next movie will deal with real world problems. Kirk’s acne? Spock having trouble getting a date to the prom? Scotty trying ecstasy for the first time? Perish the thought, this isn’t the WB. There is no WB. This is smart adult entertainment aimed at 13 year olds with toys sold at Burger King, and written by middle aged Hollywood types. So naturally it’s going to be something about the big WOT, or War on Terror. And the jokes are already flying fast about Kirk and Spock escaping from Botany Bay or torturing Klingons. But let’s tackle the whole analogy business for a moment. Yes Star Trek had more than its fair share of real world analogies, and many of them (half-black and half-white man fight to show destructiveness of racism) weren’t very good. But a major reason Star Trek had those analogies in the first place is because network executives made it difficult to talk directly about certain topics. That was the reason Rod Serling gave and it held true then. It doesn’t hold much water now. J.J. Abrams and Robert Orci are successful enough to write their own ticket. If they want to do The Valley of Elah II: Hell on Ellah, no one’s stopping them. But they’ve committed to doing a dumbed down Star Trek, and injecting the same “ideas” that Hollywood has been chewing over for eight years will just make it more dumbed down, not less.

Sometimes it’s the little things, a guy walking down the street wearing a Star Trek t-shirt, articles popping up about Star Trek in mainstream outlets and Star Trek novels suddenly moving up to the front of the aisle. Like the first buds of spring, they’re all signs that suddenly Star Trek is popular again. With a movie that passed 210 million dollars, and will likely pass the 250 million mark domestically, the ballgame has changed again. Suddenly Star Trek is capable of bringing in serious Star Wars sized numbers. And that makes it relevant to people who never cared much before, and to some of the old fans too. JJ Abrams’ Star Trek may have been a good character piece with an idiotic plot, but it has helped revive the brand. Where the brand goes now, depends on Paramount. The odds are that Paramount will strategically avoid overdrawing a suddenly valuable property, which means fans hoping for a TV series are probably out of luck. Though one scenario might well involve the Fringe team producing and launching a series. And while Orci, Kurtzman and Abrams are certainly not the best people for the job, money talks. And that has made Star Trek popular again.

In two weeks JJ Abrams’ Star Trek prequel has pulled in close to a 150 million dollars domestic. Of course before you get too excited, that’s pretty much the movie’s budget. And that’s not counting the costs of the publicity machine that helped move into nearly 4000 theaters and on the top of a lot of people’s to do lists.

So is it just a matter of the money? Paramount had taken Star Trek movies for granted. JJ Abrams showed what could happen if you put some real money and publicity muscle behind one, but of course that’s not just it. The money did help buy special effects that actually made you want to go see the movies, as opposed to the slightly goosed TV effects the TNG movies had boasted for some time now. But that’s not all of it. No one invested 150 million+ to get a two week 150 million dollar run. That’s profitable but not nearly profitable enough. 150 million dollars was the money spent to reboot the image of an entire franchise. And from here on in, is where it gets interesting.

I suppose the car scene was inevitable in front of a James Bond movie, though it looks silly as hell. I’m hoping it’s a holodeck, but even so it smacks too much of Tom Parising around. But well like most action movie trailers, and really Star Trek movie trailers with the TNG movie era, lots of stuff blows up too. I can see the Star Wars thing that JJ Abrams is going for, and while the whole thing does not feel a whole lot like Star Trek, if it puts the franchise on a strong footing at the box office, I’m generally okay with it. Kirk seems to work marginally better than Quinto’s Spock, who has the face but not the delivery or the mysterious inscrutable attitude. Then there’s Uhura stripping down, telling us subtlety will be pretty much out the window here. And I now here the Apple store look of the Enterprise more than ever. Space should be dangerous, as one of the lines in the trailer tell us. The Apple store look doesn’t scream danger, it screams luxurious sponsorship opportunity.

Or maybe it’s the old Enterprise rebooted, whatever the case may be, Entertainment Weekly features the first real shot of the NCC-1701 via JJ Abrams flavor. Naturally the photo is followed by lots of bum snogging from EW to JJ. There’s a lot of talk about fusion and things being fused, but basically it’s the film Enterprise with somewhat more stylized nacelles and a wackier sensor array and the whole thing is colored to fit the ultrablue Apple Store look of the new Enterprise bridge. I won’t complain about it, though I think a much better job could have been done of translating the look of the TV series NCC-1701 (No bloody A, B, C, D, E or JJ) to a starship that modern day moviegoers could be comfortable with and impressed by. At least it’s a better design than the Enterprise of Star Trek Enterprise, though that may be damning it with faint praise. More than anything else the whole thing has a kitbashed flavor to it, which I suppose is what they were going for.

I suppose the big EW reveal for JJ Abrams’ Star Trek movie should be producing confidence, well it’s certainly shiny, vaguely speaking the characters look right but JJ Abrams himself isn’t doing too much to push up the confidence meter. First there are quotes like this,

Plus, at heart, Abrams is still more of a Star Wars guy. ‘’All my smart friends liked Star Trek,'’ he says. ‘’I preferred a more visceral experience.'’ Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount’s offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘’that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.'’ That meant a bigger budget and better special effects than any previous Trek film, plus freedom to reinvent the mythos as needed. ‘’We have worldwide aspirations and we need to broaden [Trek’s] appeal,'’ says Weston. ‘’Doing the half-assed version of this thing wasn’t going to work.'’

Now how many ways can you spell wrong?

JJ Abrams has every right to prefer Star Wars to Star Trek, but trying to turn Star Trek into Star Wars is a huge mistake and one more desecration and act of vandalism to pile on top of the rest, one that might bury Star Trek for good. A 150 million dollar special effects movie is not what Star Trek is about. For that matter it’s not even what Star Wars is about, as George Lucas has managed to show us by wrecking his own franchise.

Not only do we have the repetition of the “Reinvent the Mythos” crap that everyone from Ron Moore to Berman and Braga used to produce three increasingly unpopular spin offs that were not true to what Star Trek was, but turning Kirk into Luke is a bad idea not least because it shortchanges Star Trek’s strengths.

Abrams says he was also drawn to the project because he believed in — and wanted to evangelize — Trek’s unabashed idealism. ‘’I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,'’ says Abrams,

While that’s not a bad message, it does miss the larger more thoughtful qualities of drama and storytelling and the often more complicated ideas Star Trek episodes played with. Diversity is not all that impressive, it’s actually commonplace in movies and TV shows today. So that’s not much of a card to play.

Abrams made his perspective clear: ‘’We weren’t making a movie for fans of Star Trek,'’ he said. ‘’We were making a movie for fans of movies.'’

Fantastic. Why exactly can’t it be both? Why can’t it be a movie for both fans of Star Trek and fans of good movies in general.

I get that a mainstream article on a Star Trek movie has to follow a mainstream line of trashing Star Trek and its fans, so JJ Abrams can be credited as the genius who reinvented the whole thing. But kicking the core audience in the face, the audience whose departure helped kill the movies in the first place, is a really dumb way to start things off.

The opening sequence, for example, is an emotionally wrenching passage that culminates with a mythic climax sure to leave zealots howling ‘’Heresy!'’ But revisionism anxiety is the point. ‘’The movie,'’ Lindelof says, ‘’is about the act of changing what you know.'’

Changing, trashing, etc. That sort of thing. And who better than the guys behind Lost to the job. After all I’m sure that because Lost has marginally high ratings now, it’s the sort of product that will be around decades later the way Star Trek is… not.

And this whole approach worked so brilliantly with Enterprise, which is why Abrams and his puppets are parroting the same spin Braga and Berman were putting out there for Enterprise. Change the mythos. Reimagine it for a mainstream audience. We’re going to change how you look at things. Time travel!

It still has the oval shape, the captain’s chair, the giant view screen — but it’s now blazingly white and glistening with light and glass. Apple Store, anyone? ‘’People would joke, ‘Where’s the Genius Bar?”’ says Abrams, somewhat defensively. ‘’To me, the bridge is so cool, it makes the Apple Store look uncool.'’

Yes Abrams obviously hasn’t learned anything from his attempt to turn the Alias set into the Genius Bar.

‘’But I knew this would work, because the script Alex and Bob wrote was so emotional and so relatable. I didn’t love Kirk and Spock when I began this journey — but I love them now.'’

Which makes me ask, why Abrams bothered with this in the first place except as a career move? He clearly doesn’t have much use for Star Trek, or is spinning it that way for a mainstream outlet.

Yes it’s true boys and girls, England is under siege. By the Klingons. Or their Bathlets anyway.

Lethal Star Trek blade seized in knives amnesty. Force for evil: inspector Mac McGarry with the blade, believed to be a lethal Star Trek replica

This horrifying five-foot weapon has been recovered by police during a knife amnesty.

The three-handled sword with a blade at either end, designed to be swung like a paddle, shocked officers who took custody of it.

They are using it to publicise a five-week amnesty during which they hope around 30,000 weapons will be handed in, mainly from youngsters.

A spokesman for police in Gloucester, where it was surrendered, said: “It is a particularly nasty weapon that can, literally, take someone’s head off. We are very glad it is off the streets and we want more weapons handed in.”

The blade is believed to be a stainless-steel copy of a Klingon weapon used in the science fiction series Star Trek. “It’s an extremely dangerous weapon,” said a martial arts expert last night.

First of all based on the “force” pun, I think the Daily Mail has confused Star Trek and Star Wars. But that overlooks the bigger problem of the Klingon menace. It’s only natural that Klingons would turn on the English sooner or later. Having given up their weapons, the English have made themselves ripe for conquest and sooner or later the Klingons being the ruthless conquerors that they are were bound to turn on them.

I think it’s only a matter of time until Klingons are rampaging across the English countrywide, naming themselves Barons and eating shepherd’s pie. The English asked for it themselves, giving up their arms, cultivating a disgusting cuisine that only a Klingon or a Welshman could like and continuing their fraudulent claim that Shakespeare was an Englishman rather than a Klingon. Sooner or later the Klingons were bound to strike and when the Klingon Houses begin parceling up parts of England, I’m sure they’ll restore the rightful history of William Shakespeare, the long lost Klingon writer who crashed to Earth many centuries ago and did his best to fit in and comb his hair over his forehead.

The question is, is there anything the London police can do to combat the coming Klingon invasion? The answer is probably no. Their misguided knife amnesty only further disarms the London citizenry leaving them naked and helpless before the Klingon menace. What’s next a stick and stone amnesty? Confiscate a Klingon’s bathleth and he can still rip out your beating heart with his bare hands and take a big juicy bite out of it. Unarmed British PC’s confronted by raging Klingon warriors have no chance.

Though it’s not that hard for the even the most casual Star Trek fan to nail the basic ambiance, the Final Frontier voiceover, the space scenes and the occasional Federation Starship in 24th century dove gray trim, still Cryptic is giving the impression that it gets it, but the real test will be gameplay. With City of Heroes and City of Villains, Cryptic has shown that it can take a property and bring it to MMO with integrity to the source material and value gameplay.

The trailer is still fairly general but we can see an all out battle with the Borg and the Federation, individual teams of Starfleet officers exploring planetary surfaces, a battle with Klingons for control of a Starship Bridge and so on. If looks count then yes Star Trek Online seems pretty good, some of the planetary surface graphics are a bit uneven, but this is a large scale MMO after all and so some realistic allowances have to be made. We do seem to have a jungle type planet, lava surface and a more rocky world. And overall there’s a good Star Trek 25th Anniversary vibe to this project, despite the emphasis on battles.

Still the battles are going to be a problem, they’re obviously the easiest selling point for an MMO, but a fragfest in Star Trek uniforms is going to achieve only limited interest and relevance. Activision and later Bethesda have done the Star Trek shooter bit to generally disappointing results and when it comes to offering online fragfests, there will be plenty of games that can easily beat Star Trek Online. So it’s really the exploration aspect of Star Trek Online’s gameplay that will matter and on which it will stand or fall.

1. Transitioning a Burned Out TV Series to the Big Screen - Star Trek TOS came to the movie theater after a prolonged absence. Star Trek TNG came too quickly after the end of Star Trek The Next Generation after seven years and a 7th season that most viewers agreed was significantly diminished in quality, and utilized the same writers and directors from the series.

2. Failure to use professional writers and directors - Where the Star Trek TOS movies launched with a good number of professional directors and writers in the mix, Star Trek TNG simply tried to transition the TV writers and directors to the big screen. It obviously didn’t work and what they produced was actually below even TV quality. This kind of incestuous arrangement doomed the TNG movies to be seen as nothing more than expensive TV movies.

3. Overdose - Anticipation is the key to making your movie appealing. Few people were anticipating even the first TNG movie. Where the TOS films were a rebirth, the TNG movies were rolled out on a schedule that seemed mechanical and artificial.

4. The Song remained the same - Where the TOS movies launched by reimagining the story and changing the narrative from one of pure exploration by a brash young Captain, to the story of his aging self trying to recapture that sense of adventure, the TNG movies never reimagined the story. They just gave us the same characters on the big screen with no sense of time having passed.

5. Lack of innovation - See 4, the TNG movies were little more than 2 part episodes on a much bigger budget. When screenwriters beyond the dreaded Ron Moore and Brannon Braga duo got to tackle the material, namely Piller and John Logan, their original ideas got castrated and drained of energy. See 2.

6. Alienating TOS fans - When the decision was made for the TOS movies to give way to the TNG movies, graciousness was the right way to do it. Instead Generations cut out most of the TOS cast and killed of Captain Kirk, unnecessarily and ridiculously. Add to that reports of on set tensions between Shatner and Stewart and the damage was done.

7. Treating Star Trek as an action tentpole - Star Trek movies were meant to be Science Fiction epics, not James Bond in space, but between Patrick Stewart’s desire to be involved in action sequences and Paramount executives, the TNG movies seemed to involve a villain trying to destroy Earth, over and over again. The action movie crowd remained underwhelmed and Star Trek fans remained bored.

8. Attempts to imitate the style but not substance of TOS movies - From killing off Picard’s family to an action oriented second film, to killing off Data, TNG movies attempted to imitate TOS movies in a formal way without ever doing the hard work of finding their own identity.

9. Failure to respect TV series canon - TOS movies often upstaged series canon, but they usually had a good reason for doing so. By contrast when TNG movies tampered with their own canon, they usually did it senselessly and for the worse. From watering down the Borg by giving them an evil hypersexual queen to introducing a new enemy we don’t care about in the Sona to putting the Romulans aside in favor of a whole new second Romulan race we never met before, TNG’s movies contributed nothing with these additions except to alienate fans who wanted to see the actual Romulans and Borg on screen.

10. Failure to compete- TNG movies were being made in a more competitive marketplace, yet no real acknowledgment was being made of that. Paramount and Rick Berman continued to take audiences for granted, until it was too late, and even when they knew the situation was bad, they chose to release the final film a week before the release of Lord of the Rings The Two Towers. No one could be surprised by the results. The death of the TNG film franchise.

Does a direct to DVD movies model make sense for Star Trek? Today a lot of SF series that haven’t been able to stay on TV but do have their own fanbase have gone the Direct to DVD movie route. Babylon 5 has done it, though hardly anyone has noticed. Stargate has been doing it with movies like Ark of Truth and Continuum, both of which I have written on. So has Futurama with two DVD movies so far and more coming along. Taking all that into account, it’s pretty obvious that the money is there. Continuum cost 7 million to make and featured some pretty decent special effects and location shooting. Odds are Star Trek could do better. Part of the success of New Voyages and similar fan projects can be put down to the lack of new Star Trek content. While there is a Star Trek capital M movie on the way, with an inflated budget and expectations, I have my doubts it can fill the gap. And in any case capital M movies take too long. Direct to DVD releases can be done faster and serve as a nice chunk of change for Paramount and keep fan interest in the franchise going. With a slightly larger budget but not too large, it might even be possible to experiment a little.

Jerry Sohl is better known to Star Trek fans as the writer of such original series episodes as The Corbomite Maneuver, Whom the Gods Destroy and This Side of Paradise, but in 1957 he also wrote an SF novel titled The Time Dissolver. Avon Books clearly aimed The Time Dissolver at a genre heavy SF market with its tech heavy title and its cover illustration of a fembot’s internal wiring, a picture that is typically late 50’s to 60’s, early 70’s and has nothing whatsoever to do with the novel itself, to the book’s tagline about a machine that can remove memories, that gives away the novel’s plot.

Despite all this The Time Dissolver was light SF at best if it was even that, a mainstream mystery of the kind that could just as easily have been written in the 30’s, made somewhat more bearable because Jerry Sohl is a decent writer, even if he was a good deal weaker on the actual plot twists.

The Time Dissolver begins with Sherwood, the main character, waking up in bed next to a strange woman in a motel room, and heading off to try and recover his memories. It’s a great premise that becomes steadily turgid as it turns out that Sherwood lived a conventional life as a med school student and eventually researcher working for a research institute having to do with neurology. By the time you discover that the strange woman is his wife and suffering from the same condition and that he has a shady boss, all the pieces quickly come together.

The Time Dissolver is by no means much of an SF novel or even that much of a novel, but it’s still a reminder that Jerry Sohl did more than write overrated Star Trek episodes.

Simon Pegg seems to have confirmed that J.J. Abrams Star Trek prequel slash reboot will consist of multiple films, three may be the plan. Since trilogies are popular these days and Paramount didn’t invest all that money in the project just to get a one shot movie and make J.J. Abrams feel good, it’s pretty much inevitable. I’m not too sure how I feel about a prequel involving the same characters with a new cast. It doesn’t really work for me since again I don’t think Shatner, Nimoy and Doohan can be replaced with these particular roles and developing a new starship crew might have been a better way to go. Too many franchises are milking their own backstory until there’s nothing else left, something both Star Wars and Star Trek are guilty of. But considering ST XI’s huge budget, forget the odd numbered curse, this movie will have an uphill battle even breaking even.

Perhaps due to the WGA strike or because JJ Abrams is having trouble with the whole directing a movie thing, Star Trek XI’s release date has moved from December 2008 to May 2009, that’s a pretty huge jump right there, but still into a ridiculously competitive season, still if you’ve blown 150 million on a movie, it damn well better perform so JJ Abrams got himself into this hole and he’ll have to dig himself out.

With an almost 6 month postponement, we’re talking about a serious change in scheduling, which makes that teaser trailer before Cloverfield look like a bit of a waste. And in its new spot, Star Trek XI will be going up against Angels and Demons, which I predict will be a bust, but also up against Wolverine Origins, which is not going to be a pushover. You would think that Paramount would have learned its damn lesson from Nemesis and not scheduled it against another Scifi movie that appeals to the same damn demographic.

Granted Wolverine Origins isn’t quite as bad as scheduling Nemesis against Lord of the Rings The Two Towers, now that was hubris, ignorance and madness all piled into one. And by now people are fairly tired of X-Men, Wolverine doesn’t look nearly as cool as he did and the final Brett Ratner movie pissed off a lot of the fanbase. Origin movies for characters like Hannibal have bombed badly so maybe Wolverine will be a weak competitor, but on the other hand Wolverine is still the breakout X-Men character so I feel a strange disturbance.

Hopefully Star Trek XI under JJ Abrams won’t turn into TNG’s Rascals, but now CA is reporting that there will be 11 year old version of Kirk and apparently a younger version of Spock, according to Cinematical. I guess if the City on the Edge of Forever rumor turned out to be true, well more actually a remake of the animated series Sehlat episode, that would make sense. I guess we could be seeing a Diane Carey’s Best Destiny (novel) style scene similar to the Enterprise pilot Broken Bow of Kirk as a boy before moving on to young Kirk, but at some point the whole thing would just become ridiculous, since we’ve got a present day Spock, an early days flashback and now little kids too? What’s next.

The Man From Earth

Three men and two women gather to bid farewell to a man who is leaving them without telling them where he is going or why. Dr. John Oldman is departing the college where he has taught for ten years and only reluctantly does he agree to stay and attend a farewell party with his colleagues. Over the next few hours a story unfolds that stretches from the ancient world to the new, covers religion, politics, violence, death and all of human history leading up to an unbelievable ending.

The Man From Earth is the work of Jerome Bixby (Mirror Mirror, Day of the Dove) and almost half a century after he began work on it, his screenplay The Man From Earth has been resurrected posthumously as a movie. Produced by his son, acted out by a cast tied to Star Trek and even referencing Star Trek, it is an appropriate enough tribute to Bixby whose most enduring work may have been Star Trek’s evil alternate universe in Mirror, Mirror;

The Man From Earth is a Science Fiction movie but one made on a budget and accordingly takes place entirely inside a cabin’s two rooms and the land around it. It sounds claustrophobic but it proves that you can duplicate the impact of the Twilight Zone’s stilted bottle episodes even today. The Man From Earth is certainly stagey, not only because of the confined quarters but because the dialogue and the action is very much a product of the theater, the key sources of action involve revelations about the characters and members of the cast entering and exiting the room. At one point a gun is waved around but proving Chekhov’s truism wrong (no not that Chekhov) no one gets shot with it.

Despite its confined space, The Man From Earth is a quiet intelligent piece of storytelling that is well worth seeing. In part that is because of the cast, Star Trek Enterprise’s Dr. Phlox, John Billingsley appear as a jokester biology professor not too far afield from the actor himself, Tony Todd (Captain Kurn) plays a soulful anthropologist and Richard Riehle (The Inner Light, Fair Haven, Cold Station 12) plays Dr. Will Gruber, a volatile psychiatrist with a bitter secret. David Lee Smith plays Dr. John Oldman as part philosopher, part savior and part innocent. The rest of the cast is filled out by Annika Peterson as Oldman’s colleague and girlfriend, Ellen Crawford as a rather cliched biblical literalist, William Katt as an equally cliched evocation of a mid-life crisis in progress and Alexis Thorpe as his student slash girlfriend.

If none of this sounds like Science Fiction yet, that’s because The Man From Earth is not your conventional Science Fiction movie. There are no special effects or beam outs or technological weapons of mass destruction or aliens. There is only the incredible story of a single man and the question, how prepared are you to believe in the seemingly unbelievable? That over the course of the movie is the question that the characters must face and the question that the audience faces as well. In Hollywood Science Fiction tends to mean creature features but The Man From Earth is a reminder that a Science Fiction story is primarily about the sense of awe at the vast possibilities of the universe. Stripped of special effects and a large budget, the cast of The Man From Earth are forced to maintain the suspense and the believability of the story on their own. In feebler hands, The Man From Earth might have easily become a horror story, instead it’s a testament to the potential of humanity and the human spirit.

The Man From Earth dates back to the sixties and the screenplay is dated by its fascination with a species of popularized anthropology and the Buddhist origins of Christianity but the brilliantly simple concept of the story still holds its sway until the closing revelation and the closing minute. This is not a movie recommended for those who want their Science Fiction only when it’s flavored with cyborgs and spaceships, but those who have stayed up late watching Twilight Zone marathons and reading a more thoughtful brand of Science Fiction, this is a movie well worth watching and well worth supporting.

Also up at Trekweb.com

Okay so I will grant you Stargate is not the most original series in the world but watching Stargate The Ark of Truth it was a little hard to miss the Star Trek Deep Space Nine parallels. I mean come on, the Stargate folks now have a unique starship that can cloak and beam them down. It travels through a Supergate to another galaxy, that’s basically a giant Wormhole. It goes on a quest there to prevent a war by the followers of the dead fake gods who were killed by humans using a special weapon. These are all DS9 plot elements for crying out loud. Major chunks of this are lifted from DS9’s The Search. Star Trek DS9’s main story hinged on the Defiant, a prototype starship traveling to the Gamma Quadrant through the wormhole equipped with a cloaking device to find the Founders and head off a war. The Founders were worshiped as gods and one of the crew was even related to the Founders. Hell the final villains on DS9 were even higher beings who appeared as flame or in flames. To make it worse the Priors have a suspicious resemblance to the evil religion Peter David invented for his series of New Frontier novels. Can Stargate do nothing original?

We’ve basically got foot soldiers ala the Jem’Haddar, the Priors playing a Vorta role and the Ori who are basically the Founders slash Pah Raihs. We have a giant wormhole into another galaxy rather than another part of the galaxy. We’ve got attackers who worship aliens as gods and you basically have a much less interesting version of DS9 with everyone played by humans and all the sets looking like they involve the same village. To make matters worse the Odyssey even looks like the Defiant, it’s described as a Daedalus class, which was the first class designation starship in the Federation.

The WGA was well into the day’s special spirit too, of course, providing early picketers with buttons that read “AMPTP: Highly Illogical,” commenting on the studio/producers group with which the WGA is negotiating. Strikers could also don a special T-shirt for the day bearing an apropos quote from Spock, as any fan of Star Trek II can quote: “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” It was all the more apropos because the author of those words, writer/director Nicholas Meyer, was right there on Monday’s picket line as well.

Very cute. The problem of course is by what byzantine math exactly are “the needs of the writers” the ones that are many? As has been amply demonstrated by now, it’s the writers needs that have put ten times the number of people out of work from assistants to actors to crew. So if we were to take that slogan about “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” seriously, the writers who are part of the WGA strike should accede to the needs of the many and end this charade and take a deal already.

Ironically it’s the returning talk show hosts like Jay Leno and Conan who have ultimately cited “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” type logic by pointing out that the strike is putting far more people out of work than just the writers, as an argument for bringing those shows back. And of course they were right. While “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is actually often misinterpreted and should not be used to justify injustice against the few, there is an unquestionable arrogance about the attitudes of the WGA writers when it comes to non-writers who are suffering because of them. The writers have displayed a mix of resentment and bootlicking toward actors and directors who are above them on the food chain and contempt and disdain for the crew and assistants below them on the food chain.

IESB has details of the Star Trek XI plot and some photos of Quinto as Spock. All told Quinto doesn’t look bad, certainly better than the anorexic and weird looking New Voyages version of Spock. The plot I have to say sounds somewhat intriguing. I’m not going to post spoilers here, but the concept is far from original but it’s not bad. Most of it has been done in the Pocket Books novelizations in one form or another, certainly Imzadi is the obvious reference here, but the concept seems like a nice idea and Spock would blend well into the concept of the plot. And the plot concept also explains why Shatner won’t be in this movie, besides the fact that he’s well Shatner and would likely wind up holding the movie hostage while shouting DENNY CRANE.

Basically take Spock’s animated series episode involving his pet Sehlat, written by D.C. Fontana and considered the best episode of the series and add a little bit of Imzadi on it and do a little twist and you can probably figure out half the rest. Certainly dedicated Star Trek fans will know what key plot device the new movie will involve and what short tempered mentally unstable has been midget Science Fiction writer with a penchant for assaulting women (and men) will be raving mad when he learns what that will involve.

Like I said, it’s not an original concept, but at the same time it’s packed full of the kind of nostalgia inducing moments that should make it very hard to botch. With an extensive cast and a lot of canonic or semi-canonic references, I’m actually liking this. I’m not optimistic about the box office, but so far I am liking this.

That’s not really a very big surprise, if there’s one thing that J.J. Abrams is riding these days it’s the viral marketing pony and I expect that some time after the teaser trailer comes out, we’ll be getting a mysterious website and some sort of online game too.

Even though the movie would have just gotten started shooting, if at all, Variety is reporting that a teaser trailer is in the works. I’m not sure what the teaser trailer will contain, probably nothing. Probably just the continuation of the original logo for Star Trek XI and a deep voice, perhaps Leonard Nimoy’s reading to us about the amazing journey of space in 15 seconds or less. Well it’s okay, I’ll still watch it.

If you recall there was a Star Trek XI logo out very early in the game and it’s safe to assume that this will be a pattern. So far every casting announcement has been dragged out and telegraphed, the hype has been played on and played up and every element of the movie will be slowly dragged out for the public’s attention. On the bright side, maybe that will give Star Trek XI a shot at the box office.

Moviehole has received reliable word from inside the cream buildings on Melrose that “Star Trek” is going to have a bigger budget than any of the previous films in the series. According to our contact, the film initially had a budget of $130 million but now J.J has been handed a few extra biccies – he’ll shoot the thing with a fat allocation in the environs of $150-160 million!

Even before Star Trek Nemesis opened on the weekend before Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, I pointed out that Star Trek Nemesis was finished. There was simply no way it would make enough money before the juggernaut of the second movie in the LOTR trilogy came down on it like all of Mordor. I mean it’s basic economics. Star Trek The Motion Picture may have done great numbers but that was coming off a long dry spell with a passionate fanbase. Nemesis was obviously toast. I encouraged people to go see it as fans, even knowing it would do no good. And it didn’t. Nemesis bombed and the era of the ST:TNG movie was over.

As bad as Paramount’s insane hubris was in opening Star Trek X on the week before the most anticipated Fantasy movie of the year, this is even worse. A 150 million dollar budget is unprecedented and baffling in the face of a new mainly unknown cast that can’t be running them more than 20-25 million. Where exactly is the rest going?It should be perfectly possible to do a spectacular Star Trek movie for 90 million. 150 million is Transformer’s budget. It’s insane and there is simply no way Star Trek XI will recoup it. That means it’s doomed. That’s right before any of it has been shot, the movie is doomed to bomb.

Take a look at the facts. A 150 million dollar movie is not going to be opening on a safe weekend. Like Nemesis, Paramount is going to throw it out there where the competition is fierce. To recoup a 150 million dollar budget, Star Trek XI is going to need to open with 40-50 million, anything under 30 million is already a bomb. It’s going to have to hold on to the number 1 spot for 3 weeks or so. If it can’t, then it has to keep earning heavily in the number 2 spot. The studio’s share of the box office outside New York and L.A. keeps dropping every week of release. If Star Trek XI hasn’t earned a 100 million dollars three weeks in, it’s a bomb. Because remember we haven’t even touched the promotional budget yet.

Even if J.J. Abrams maximizes the hype and a lot of Star Trek fans and even non-Trekkies show up, I don’t see Star Trek XI meeting these numbers. I just don’t. Which is why I hope Moviehole’s budget estimate is widely exaggerated. Yes there will be merchandising and DVD sales. And the merchandising may cover the promotional budget, because let’s face reality, Star Trek is not exactly going to get tie ins with Burger King and there’s only so many shuttlecraft models people are willing to buy. As for DVD sales, by the time they’re in decisions have already been made. I’m sure Star Trek XI will have great DVD sales. Even Star Trek X did. It won’t be enough though.