Thought the final nail in Star Trek franchise’s coffin was finally banged into place? Guess again.
After the Enterprise TV show tanking (I never saw it, but the general consensus seems to be that it sucked) and the final Star Trek movie’s box office bombing (which I think was undeserved), Paramount is falling back on a now trendy formula for squeezing a few extra drops from an aging cash cow’s teats — the character history prequel.
The Enterprise TV show already tried the prequel concept, set prior to the original show’s timeline, but the next Star Trek movie is taking a different approach. It will focus on the early years of established characters from the first series, including Spock and Captain Kirk.
Don’t miss the hilarious freshman hazing scene that brings these two unlikely Starfleet cadets together! They’re the original Odd Couple!
Although this seems like an obviously groan-inducing bad idea, there’s a glimmer of hope for this film. J.J. Abrams, the big brain behind Lost is working on the script and slated to direct.
He definitely has the creative chops to turn things around. But whether he succeeds or this project crashes and burns as badly as its potential, it should be interesting to see how this plays out.
One of the big challenges he faces is the one that George Lucas failed so miserably at in his Star Wars prequels. We already know the characters will survive.
It’s very difficult to create cinematic tension when you know that the characters CAN NOT die. Granted, the Star Wars prequels had the additional problem of everyone know where the plot was going. No matter how pretty and “real” everything looked in Lucas’s Green Screen Folly, I never really felt excited during Obi-Wan, Annakin, or Yoda’s conflicts because their survival was a foregone conclusion. I’ve seen Ben Kenobi – and he was really old!
The same could probably be said about any other character-dependent franchises, like the James Bond, Indiana Jones or Mission Impossible ones. However, even though the chance of those character’s dying is slim, when you’re watching something that’s allegedly happening as you’re watching, that slim chance is enough to build dramatic tension.
And after all, Spock and Kirk did both buy the farm eventually.