Geek Monthly Covers Trek

The magazines are loving Star Trek as yet another one devotes its issue to Star Trek and JJ Abrams. Below are excerpts that TrekMovie took from the issue that is on newsstands now.

Geek: The plot of this movie really spins off the idea of Kirk having a different background than what we know from the series, something that changes his character, and Chris Pine plays him quite differently than Shatner did. But at the same time you have Karl Urban seeming to get very close to what DeForest Kelley did in the original show. So was there something about Kirk that you felt needed to be changed for him to appeal to a contemporary audience?
Abrams: It’s a critical part of the story, but I guess from the outside looking in what you’ll see is a character that I think is a much more relatable character in the beginning, someone with a more obvious piece missing—he’s aimless, he’s a punk and he starts fights and picks up girls in bars and he’s got nothing to lose. He has potential but without the direction and sense of purpose, and the interesting thing to me is to use the common knowledge that everyone has and that even non-fans know—‘oh yeah, Kirk, Captain Kirk!’ Well when you meet him he’s hardly a captain so we’re playing on the baggage that we inherit which is how does this guy go from here to there? It gives you an in that I never felt I had with the original series which was a way to go ‘Oooh, I’m him! I know what it’s like to be that guy.’ I was never as cocky or action-oriented as that side of Kirk, and I was never as philosophical as the other side of him, so I always felt like he was interesting to watch
but it was hard to relate to him because he was never me. I think the Kirk that we meet is unformed, and the Kirk that we meet becomes the Kirk that we all know. But by the time that happens a massive adventure has transpired and many familiar characters are met and relationships are formed. The Kirk adjustment was made not to say that he doesn’t become that character but to say how he becomes that character.

Geek: The fact that you are using an altered timeline has some fans wondering if this is still our crew, or is this some alternative crew?
Alex Kurtzman: The characters have not changed as characters. They still have all the personality traits that we know of the original bridge crew. I think the gravest mistake would have been to try and reinvent the characters. That would have made everybody, including ourselves, very unhappy. It would have felt like violating sacred ground. This was a way to stay true to canon, and to take the stories in a new direction
Roberto Orci: Their souls are intact. And we would argue that we would have settled on some of the same character introductions, with or without the incursion from the future. In our minds some of the events overlap completely in both timelines.

Geek: Even though things are different in this timeline, like Kirk coming aboard the Enterprise first as a cadet, by the end of the movie every one of the original bridge crew end up where they are supposed to be. Is there some kind of notion that it is their destiny to be on that bridge, regardless of what timeline you are on?
Kurtzman: Yes. In fact there was one version of the script where Kirk points out that it is incredibly odd that they all sort of turned as they would have. Nimoy Spock tells Kirk ‘I knew this character as this person and that character as that person’ and Kirk says ‘wow, those characters are exactly the same ones that I know’ and Spock says something like ‘Fascinating, that must be the timestream’s way of trying to mend itself.’
Orci: It is a nod to destiny. And there is still something like that in the film.