The latest Star Trek installment has been taken in an entirely new direction by unapologetic action director JJ Abrams. Abrams has made it clear that he’s never been a real Star Trek fan, and is less concerned about getting the technical details of the film correct than exploring the emotional, some say also inaccurate, lives of the characters.

The next Star Trek movie is a prequel set before after the last television series Enterprise and before the 60s television show. (This last sentence is an update, thanks Chamalla and everyone who pointed this out.) It features younger actors and a lot more action and sex. Fans are worried that Abrams is running roughshod over the tried and true franchise in his quest to put out a palatable action movie with mass appeal:

Mild spoilers toward the end of this quote

“My goal was to make a movie about the emotional lives of these characters,” Abrams explained, according to the Associated Press. “We’ve seen a million ships fly by the camera, but nobody is going to care about the ship if they don’t care about the people inside.”

Not so fast, Abrams. Since 1966, Earth has been simply bombarded by the emotional lives of the seminal Enterprise crew, first on television and then in six, count ’em six, feature films. And that’s just the central narratives: Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang have been peripherally explored in everything from the clunky ’70s animated series to pretty much every Trek iteration after that.

And then there is the lamentable “nobody” — a term Hollywood should really stop using. It’s simply not true that nobody cares about the ship if they don’t care about the crew: I know a series of gearheads who care more for the ship than they do for who’s inside.

Throw in a few revelations gleaned from a series of Star Trek screenings in Rome and elsewhere in Europe, and it’s time to move to yellow alert.

For one, Zachary Quinto’s Spock is described by AP as appearing “edgy and hostile” in the preview scenes, two words one would rarely associate with a Vulcan, much less one that has spent the last several decades as a model of cool, calm intelligence.

Less but still moderately confusing is the description of Chris Pine’s James T. Kirk, who spends the early scenes of the film as a biker who can’t stop getting into fights in 23rd-century Iowa. Not a problem, except that Kirk was a nut for horses more than he was for horsepower in earlier iterations of the Trek franchise. Trekkies might want to check my math here, but I believe he was riding one alongside Jean-Luc Picard when he met his doom in the film Star Trek: Generations.

A new Trek is needed to resuscitate interest in the canon — I understand that. And the changes make sense coming from a director who has banished Lost into what seems like an insurmountable disorientation, and who claimed in Rome that Star Trek “was never my thing.”

So will it work? Maybe. According to AP, the preview screenings featured several exciting action sequences and even a return of Leonard Nimoy as Spock from the future. But couple these revelations with Entertainment Weekly’s recent cover shots of Quinto and Pine looking like they just walked off the set of The Hills, and there’s reason to be nervous.

[From Blog.Wired.com]

It looks fun enough, but it definitely doesn’t look like any Star Trek I’ve known, and I’ve watched enough episodes and seen enough sequels thanks to my brother and the various geeks I’ve dated. It won’t matter if the film is technically accurate if it cleans up at the box office. Honoring a 40 year old classic is less important than making bank. You just wish they could have picked a director who actually cared enough to honor the foundation of the series while trying to update it. It’s like Abrams ripped the historic mansion off the lot and built a bunch of condos in their place. We’ll have to wait and see, though, and it does look entertaining and updated for a new generation of fans.

Star Trek is due out in May of next year.

Photos thanks to TrekMovie.com