Star Trek Into Darkness Featurette Round-up + Motion still!

Paramount has released a featurette of J.J. Abrams Star Trek Into Darkness starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto. To my knowledge it doesn’t contain any new footage but it does re-organize what we have seen in the trailers so far and it clarifies the plot of the movie a bit. As such; SPOILER ALERT! No seriously, this is the featurette that is going to be played and re-played for the coming three months until the release of the movie itself

Here is the dialogue from the voice over provided by the cast and crew.

J.J. Abrams, “The goal for this movie was definitely to up the ante as much as we could. There were a lot of characters that people were anticipating on seeing. Kirk and Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov and Sulu”, “I am more excited than I can tell you. The action of the movie, the scale of the movie, is light-years beyond what we did in the first movie”

Zachary Quinto, “It was pretty magical to see what they were able to create this time. I think it is stunningly beautiful”.

Chris Pine, “The word I keep getting back to is ‘relentless’. There is one thing after another, after another, after another…”.

Zoe Saldana, “This is the kind of film that 3D is made for”.

J.J. Abrams, “Without question the IMAX and the 3D of it will give viewers yet another level of excitement. This movie is the most fun and challenging experience that I have had. This is like everything I have ever done backed into one movie…”.

These 5 second sound bites at first sound a bit goofy, but if you read them over you get a sense of the stress involved in making Star Trek Into Darkness. From that perspective it is hardly going to turn out to be another Iron Man 2 or Spiderman 3.

Strangely enough, all the trailers and pictures released so far make the 2009 Star Trek movie look dull and irrelevant. Even with Vulcan being destroyed. During the sequence in which we see Benedict Cumberbatch’s character John Harrison leap though a window it was kind off confirmed that he was a genetically altered human from the past. From that point of view it is strange they did not opt for the return of Khan, but I guess people have expectations with such a return that could raise difficulties creatively.

Another observation I made was that Uhura (Zoe Saldana) really stands out in what appears to be a male dominated world. The movie does have a Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) but I doubt she will be performing serious action scenes. The Star Trek franchise originated from the early 60’s and as such despite the best efforts of Gene Roddenberry and others it has a problem with women, gays and transsexuals. The 2002-2005 series Enterprise starring Scott Bakula and Jolene Blalock was the high-point in that regards so it is odd that J.J. Abrams should be so conservative. I know that viewer sensitivities are an important consideration for box-office receipts. However, a movie should not just have a challenging plot, but an also a challenging context. We shall see in May whether this concept that is very Roddenberry-ish is understood.

Other Star Trek Into Darkness new…

As you may know by now Star Trek Into Darkness has its own app on which small (no iOS pun intended) snippets are spoilered. Yesterday saw the release of a motion posters. Which you can see below. It’s neat but also superfluous as we have seen the Cumberbatch’ poster for months now.

***UPDATE*** I have deleted the motion poster because of the noise pollution, you can still find it below…

To find the motion poster click http://www.startrek.com/article/check-out-star-trek-into-darkness-motion-poster

Star Trek Into Darkness is scheduled for a May 17th release in the UK and USA.

Message to J.J Abrams. When are you going to release the 10-minute preview that was seen with The Hobbit movie? The version I saw has a woman laugh like a hyena and the visuals are just terrible.

Source; www.moviesblog.mtv.com