The sci-fi community was a-buzzing this week after Paramount finally lifted the veil of secrecy on what JJ Abrams’ take on “Star Trek” will look like with the release of several stills from the upcoming movie. And while there were some real surprises in the mix, what I ended up finding more interesting was what this sudden reveal tells us about Abrams’ film and Paramount’s apparent new viewpoint on their prized Trek franchise.
For those of you who have already seen the pictures, I’m sure you’ve had your share of other peoples’ descriptions of what minutiae can be dissected from these images, so don’t worry this won’t be more of that. Besides, in all honesty, I don’t spend my time over-analyzing stills looking for some hidden secret just as how I don’t look for images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in oil stains. In other words, I do have a life, thank you very much. All I will say is that looking at this shot featured above of the new Enterprise bridge, I can’t help but wonder if the production designer got some sort of discount deal with a light bulb manufacturer as there are a LOT of lights in that layout, some of which make no sense at all – those halogen-spotlight circle lights running along the top of the stations are a good example. Oh, I’m sure this design has got the geek “SO Cool!!!!” vote sewn up, but from my viewpoint, it just seems a tad too cluttered. Put it to you this way, would you buy an iPhone or other electronic device if it had that many bells and whistles decorating its housing? It’s clear as technology gets more advanced, we’re moving toward not only smaller devices, but also simpler interfaces, something this image doesn’t quite bring to mind. In any case, now that I got that out of the way, let me get to the point that is surprisingly being overlooked surrounding the release of these various images. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry
October 18, 2008 at 11:05 am
Lovely overview of the film’s marketing effort.
I think the detail-heavy look of the Bridge strongly suggests that this movie will indeed be aimed at millennials with shorter attention spans. The carefully-worded public statements by Abrams and his crew about the story’s details are treading softly around the calcified expectations of people my age.
October 19, 2008 at 11:48 am
Thanks. Some quotes brought to my attention from a recent interview in Entertainment Weekly solidify this notion that this next film will not be for that subset of Trek viewers obsessed with minutiae they love to define as “canon” – that would be those personality-types who claim that Star Trek is all about the characters and the story and yet they obsess over details that are nothing more than eye candy and go into an uproar whenever something challenges their own internal notions of what Star Trek is. So I think Abrams’ disregarding these types as his target audience will be a good thing both for this film and for Paramount to maintain the property as a lucrative one.
It’s obvious that the visual elements are going to be constructed from the perspective of attracting the average movie goer, but that shouldn’t deter most people who’ve enjoyed “Star Trek” if Abrams does put together a compelling story with believable characters as opposed to caricatures. All that stuff is just eye candy anyways, though I hope that it won’t be as distracting as it appears to be in that bridge shot carried by MTV.
Guess we’ll see.