CraveOnline: Between the events of your Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, it’s beginning to feel like this new franchise is sort of a fatalistic universe, where no matter how the timeline alters certain events, they seem destined to occur in one form or another. For example, the Khan story has a lot of parallels to the previous film. Is this an official stance on how Star Trek chronology works now, where we have to go through certain plotlines to show this parallel?
Alex Kurtzman: You mean in a similar order?
Obviously the order is off, but I’m just wondering…. Spock has a line, at the end of Star Trek, where he says something like, “Certain things seem meant to be.” I’m paraphrasing.
Mm-hmm.
Do you feel like this is a direction you’re going to go with the franchise as a whole? Is this the general idea or is it a coincidence that the second ended up being a parallel to a very specific Star Trek story?
Going back to why we ended up creating an alternate timeline in Star Trek 1, I think, we’ve talked about this many times, it was very… Part of what we couldn’t get our heads around, when conceiving of whether or not we were going to step into the world of Star Trek was, “Will you know how it ended?” You know what happened to our characters. You know what happened to Kirk and you know how he died so instantaneously, there was no jeopardy whatsoever to anybody and that led us to, “Well, if we create an alternate timeline, then their futures are unwritten and anything could happen.” And that’s great but I think what we felt strongly about as fans was that we had to make sure that, you know we always talked about playing in harmony with canon, that creating this alternate timeline was really, hopefully going to be seen as a sign of respect to everything that had come before it. We’re not trying to negate anything that came before it. Quite the opposite, we’re trying to pay homage to it because we love it.
And so yes, you will find characters and you will find situations which seem very familiar and yet, sort of different, you know? We knew we did not want to redo The Wrath of Khan. That’s an untouchable movie to us. That being said, we did not want to reinvent Khan completely, either. And Khan was a character who is defined by his love for his crew and his love for his family and that, in turn really echoed what Kirk was going through. So, we kind of said, “You know what? Yes, a lot of the details can change and yes, he was woken up on a different timeline and yes, all those things are different. However, he’s in many ways still the Khan we knew from before and how would things have changed, given the new circumstances in his life? And that’s where those things came from so look, I think that part of what’s implicit in your question is, “Are we shifting the tone of Star Trek away from Roddenberry’s vision of it?” And the truth is, I would say, “No.” I would say that vision is something we consider every second we’re even touching Star Trek. His vision was of an optimistic future, where all species could work together in a federation, and ultimately explore space, and I think part of what Into Darkness is about is what happens when that philosophy and that utopia and idea is corrupted from within. And how do you restore it, once it’s been corrupted?
Both your Star Trek movies incorporated new technology into the Star Trek universe. In the first one, the Trans-Warp has the ability to affect interstellar travel, and now we have McCoy synthesizing Khan’s blood that resurrects the dead. I’m wondering, is that going to be standard issue on all starships now?
[Laughs] The ability to raise from the dead?
Yeah. It seems like that would be a pretty useful thing to have around.
No. If we had that, then there would be no jeopardy, ever. [Laughs] But then again, I guess Roddenberry’s utopian ideal would be achieved so maybe the answer’s “Yes.”
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
