With news of the new Star Trek film coming thick and fast, expectations are high for JJ Abrams take on the 23rd Century. But as word spreads that the film will feature a young Captain Kirk, will it be Jim's life, but not as we know it? Words: Owen Morris

On Christmas Day 2008, the first Star Trek movie for six years is set to hit cinema screens. There’s a lot riding on it: the last two Trek films fared badly at the box office and the most recent TV series didn’t exactly set the world on fire. To all intents and purposes, Trek seemed dead in the water until JJ Abrams decided that he wanted to tackle it, after successfully resuscitating the Mission: Impossible franchise last year.

If the rumours are true, Star Trek XI (or more probably, just 'Star Trek') will focus on the adventures of James Tiberius Kirk before he took command of the USS Enterprise. But that likelihood raises more questions than it answers.

Will it be a ‘prequel’ to the stories that formed the 1960s TV series? Or will it be an ‘origin’ story, which sets off a whole new sequence of adventures, set at the same time as the original show, but not entirely consistent with it? Could it even be a ‘reimagining’ of the entire Star Trek concept? Each route has been tried with different franchises in recent years, and the results have been mixed.

Yesterday's Enterprise

We’ve had a prequel to the original classic Star Trek series already. Much as many Trek fans might like to expunge it from their memories, Star Trek: Enterprise was on air for four years from 2001-2005. Set 100 years before Jim Kirk gallivanted across the galaxy, it saw Scott Bakula’s Captain Jonathan Archer taking humanity’s first steps into the universe, and ended with the foundation of the Federation.

At its best (usually when the name Manny Coto featured somewhere in the credits), Enterprise took classic Trek concepts and showed where they came from. At its worst (usually whenever the name Brannon Braga featured prominently), it cocked-up continuity with a vengeance, supposedly in the name of telling a good story. Fans hoping to see the former turned off in droves when they got the latter, only to miss some of the best shows in the fourth season.

And that’s the biggest problem with prequels. Created from franchises that have a devoted following, new versions are almost guaranteed to infuriate large parts of their target audience, as producers tinker with the elements that gave a film or show its lasting appeal in the first place.

George Lucas got a lot of stick for apparent errors in the Star Wars prequels, and his subsequent fiddling with the original films in order to rectify them means that it’s now virtually impossible to say exactly what did happen in episodes IV to VI.

Risky undertaking

Setting a story immediately prior to the 79 Star Trek episodes that are seared into the minds of many fans is a risky undertaking for Abrams. Every single reference to Jim Kirk’s past that has been revealed on screen has been examined in great detail, and 500-page books have been written around single lines of dialogue from one episode!

Unconfirmed reports indicate that the new movie will be set on the USS Farragut, established as Kirk’s first ship in the episode Obsession, with a major guest star being sought to play Kirk’s role model, Captain Garrovick.

That's all well and good, but the script is also said to include interaction between Kirk and Spock in this era, which, in the eyes of a lot of fans, is a real no-no. Spock was serving with Christopher Pike on the Enterprise at this time, far away from a young midshipman named Kirk...

Back to basics

But maybe Abrams won’t tie his movie to established continuity at all, and will instead create an ‘origin’ story for Jim Kirk, explaining how he came to be the man we know from the TV series. This approach has recently worked wonders for the James Bond franchise, which came in for a lot of criticism after the over-the-top adventures of Die Another Day in 2002.

Casino Royale jettisoned everything that the audience ‘knew’ about 007, up to and including Monty Norman’s famous theme, to show the making of a man. Audiences turned off by pussy-stroking villains trying to control the world from inside a volcano were drawn into this much more realistic tale of revenge and betrayal.

The origin approach also reinvigorated the Batman franchise in 2005. Christian Bale’s Caped Crusader may link to the tortured crimefighter seen in Tim Burton’s two movies, but by setting the film at the start of the 21st Century, it cleared the deck of everything that had gone before. This approach is fraught with pitfalls, however, as anyone who sat through the dire Saint and Avengers movies from the late 1990s can attest.

Part of the problem with those films was that they spectacularly failed to capture the appeal of the central characters as they were originally played. And if Jim Kirk isn’t the same dashing and rugged hero that audiences followed on screen from 1966 to 1994, the new-look Star Trek could sink without trace.

Radical reimagining

But that's assuming, of course, that any new incarnation of Kirk is even meant to resemble the old one. A reimagining of the whole Star Trek concept as radical as that of Battlestar Galactica could see Kirk more inclined to wrestle with his conscience than any passing Gorn.

For the 21st Century take on Battlestar, Ronald D Moore and David Eick have taken Glen A Larson’s set up from the 1978 TV series and turned it inside out. In the process, they've created one of the most hard-hitting pieces of science fiction ever seen on television.

Kara Thrace may have the call sign Starbuck, but the character played by Katee Sackhoff is a million miles away from the wisecracking fun-lover portrayed by Dirk Benedict in the original series. By painting each character in shades of grey, rather than the simplistic black and white of the first show, the producers have created must-see TV.

Doing the same thing with Star Trek would be daring, but potentially disastrous. Portraying Kirk's world in a less brightly-lit, Utopian way might seem like a good idea, but the comparatively limited success of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which tried just that, suggests that it is the optimism that draws casual viewers into the Star Trek universe.

Parallel worlds

If Abrams wants to revitalise Star Trek for a new audience without abandoning the continuity to which fans will expect him to adhere, its the second of these three routes, the origin story, that will serve him best.

We’ll meet a slightly different Jim Kirk from the one we known for the last 40 years. At heart he’ll be the same man, but he will undergo new trials that will inform his outlook in different ways. We’ve seen parallel worlds in lots of different Star Trek episodes over the years. This would simply be the biggest.

However, if rumours of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy making cameos as the old Kirk and Spock are true, somehow this story will have to fit into the 780-plus hours of Star Trek already committed to film. Your mission, Mr Abrams, should you choose to accept it...

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