Abrams On Star Trek Trailer

The first theatrical trailer for Star Trek is out and director JJ Abrams provided Empire Magazine with a commentary of sorts. The full article is here and below are some highlights.

- Young Kirk driving the Corvette was a way to "...begin the movie in a way that felt unexpected and sort of grounded."
- "The scenes on Earth were important to feel a sense of future but also a real sense of now as well. Star Wars is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away but Star Trek is our future, so it's important that we not feel disconnected from that."
- "Kirk, [staring at the under construction Enterprise], is all potential and he's rather aimless. He's a good guy but he does some foolish things, mostly because he doesn't quite know how to use his power and what to do."
- "I think you are Kirk in the movie. Spock is massively important in but in this film the audience is Kirk."
- This is the Enterprise, having been ambushed upon arrival at Vulcan, engaging Nero's ship in battle. "Trek is something that some people might expect to be a kind of low energy experience. I'm hoping people who see the action here, who maybe have pre judged what Trek is, will open their eyes a little wider and say 'oh, that's not what I thought it was going to be.'"
- "Anton is fantastic as Chekov. He's from Russia originally and one of our early discussions was that they don't transpose 'w' and 'v'; that's not a Russian thing. In fact it's more a Polish thing. But I was like 'I think we have to do it anyway'. It's so what you know with Chekov so we kept what had come before."
- Part of the plot: "Spock aids in the evacuation of Vulcan after Nero drops a "red matter" bomb into the planet's core, which builds a "singularity" (a black hole) inside the planet"
- "The fact that they hadn't seen them for so many years, that it so immediately breaks - for anyone who knows - the rules of Trek. We start the movie with Romulans crossing paths with Starfleet and jump right in breaking the rules, which I think is kind of fun." (The "rule" he is referring to is that Romulans where a faceless enemy of the Federation, their identity and relationship to Vulcans unknown until years after Kirk gained command of the Enterprise.)
- "The TV series always presumed this friendship between Kirk and Spock. What I love about what this movie does is that it shows they didn't start out fast friends; they actually had a very rocky beginning and a lot of conflict. How they come to be the Kirk and Spock that we know is very dramatic and rife with tension."
- The shot with Uhura undressing, "This is a very funny scene where Kirk is in Uhura's room, watching her undress, and she very quickly realises he's there."
- Yep, those are Klingons in the mask pushing Nero around. "Part of Nero's back story is that he was being held in a Klingon prison, so that's what you're seeing here."
- Neville Pages, who also designed the Cloverfield monster, did the creature designs for Star Trek.
- The strange tentacle ship is Nero's.
- "The USS Kelvin, the ship upon which Kirk's parents serve. It (and they) meet a sticky end at the beginning of the film at the hands of Nero."