A Brief Guide to Star Trek

a major showbusiness story in itself, while the prospect of an all-new five-year mission for those classic characters would generate broad audience re-engagement with the legend of
Star Trek
.
    ‘No one can ever compete with Gene Roddenberry’s original series’, the writers concluded. ‘We can, however, stand on his shoulders and see things from a different perspective.’
    While developed with good creative intentions, the
Star Trek
reboot proposed by J. Michael Straczynski and Bryce Zabel went nowhere. ‘We held back from putting everything we were thinking into [the document] because, if we did, what would be the point of hiring us? So we suggested and prodded and explained and held some of the point-by-point work back for a meeting or an opportunity that never came’, Zabel wrote.
    When the team of writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and director J. J. Abrams were faced with the same challenge of reinventing
Star Trek
in 2007, their lengthy considerations led them to very similar story solutions to those proposed by Straczynski and Zabel almost three years earlier.

    The challenge after
Enterprise
was how to return
Star Trek
to big screen popularity without either the cast of
The Original Series
or that of
The Next Generation
. There was no appetite (even among fans) for
Deep Space Nine
,
Voyager
or
Enterprise
to become movies, but studio executives at CBS Paramount believed there was still life in
Star Trek
, despite the relative failures of
Voyager
and
Enterprise
on television. Indeed, there was still much fondness among the wider general cinema-going public for
Star Trek
, especially the simpler, less complicateddays of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. It was also true that those original
Star Trek
characters continued to be the most impactful, with the widest recognition factor globally, even after the success of
The Next Generation
.
    The
Star Trek
movie franchise appeared to have died with the amazingly poor box office performance of
Nemesis
, while on television the franchise had also ground to an ignominious halt. Was
Star Trek
over by 2005? Rick Berman didn’t believe so, and in the wake of the failure of
Enterprise
he began exploring new possibilities for a
Star Trek
movie unconnected to either
The Original Series
or
The Next Generation
.
    With the support of CBS Paramount’s new studio executives, Berman developed a movie to take place in the one unexplored area of the
Star Trek
timeline, between the end of
Enterprise
and the period of
The Original Series
. He saw the film as both a sequel to the most recent TV series and a prequel to everything else that would come after.
    Writer Erik Jendresen, riding high on the success of the Steven Spielberg-produced
Band of Brothers
TV mini-series, was brought in to write the new
Star Trek
screenplay. The result was a 121-page script delivered with the working title
Star Trek: The Beginning
, echoing the successful 2005 Christopher Nolan-directed blockbuster reboot
Batman Begins
.
    Jendresen set his story in 2159, chronicling the origins of Starfleet and the launching of the first warp-eight-capable star-ship, the
NX-Omega
(the previous
Enterprise
managed just warp five). Essentially a space war movie, the story sees an antagonistic Romulan fleet heading for Earth with only rookie pilot Tiberius Chase and his untested crew standing in their way. An added twist sees Chase come from a long-standing Earth isolationist family, fearful of alien contamination. Extending this theme, the Romulans are demanding that the Earth give up its population of Vulcans, who they regard as an illegitimate offshoot of the Romulan race. Chase steals a ship – the USS
Spartan
– and he and his space cadet friends confront the approaching threat.
    ‘The notion was to do a prequel to
The Original Series
’, explained Jendresen. ‘[We would] fill that void with a trilogy which would all deal with Kirk’s progenitor. We wanted to reveal the actual cause of the [Earth–Romulan war], which was sur -prising to all involved at the time. We simply wanted to reveal the truth behind that startling incident.’
    The inspiration for the tone and approach of this new
Star Trek
were the movies
Top Gun
and
Starship Troopers
, making it more of a military adventure in space than ever before, something Gene Roddenberry had never been keen on. While the screenplay hit many of the
Star Trek
touchstones (the name Tiberius, the Romulans, Vulcans, Andorian Commander Shran from
Enterprise
and so on),