Never Insult a Trekkie: A Lesson for J J Abrams

Bearing in mind I’m not a Trekkie, per se, but I am and always have been a Sci-Fi fan, and I totally understand the sentiment here….

I also love Sci-Fantasy, and am partial to a bit of High Fantasy as well.

When a movie is made of a beloved book/comic/TV show, there will always be those who rail against ANY changes.
I usually ignore them.

There will be those fans who complain bitterly that the filmmaker did not crawl into their head and produce a film based precisely on the way they imagined things, because their way would have been better…
I usually ignore them too.

There will be those who dislike the necessary plot and story changes that must take place in creating a film, due to the simple fact that what makes a great movie great is very different from that which makes a good book/comic/TV show, and you cannot slavishly reproduce something from one format in another successfully.
I take those complaints with a pinch of salt, but i watch the creative process carefully in these cases.
A good deal of craftsmanship and sensitive is required of a director and producers to do this well, and it is my opinion that it not only requires a great filmmaker to make a great film, it takes a true fan to pull off a great conversion, someone with as much affection for the source material as the people who will flock to see it. For someone to do it well, and produce a fantastic movie while remaining true to the SPIRITof the book/comic/TV show is challenging and risky, and when they manage it they should be applauded.
But…. it baffles me when someone is handed that responsibility, the midwifery of a beloved piece of our culture, and that someone does not even pretend to understand what made it beloved in the first place….
Ok, so yes, I saw Star Trek, Into Darkness, and it was a pretty good film, but to be honest I didn’t see the previous movie, nor half of the more recent tv shows, so I had no particular expectations.
But I understand that a lot of people did, and to have J.J.Abrams essentially slap them in the face by saying that he really didn’t care about them or what it meant to them is a wee bit disingenuous. You would think that since fans who buy tickets to his films are directly responsible for his success and his position of power and privilege in the film and TV industry, that he might have had at least a little empathy for the people who put him there.

So. Completely agree with the last statement of this post: “……I wish he had respected that, if only on TV. I wish he had invested a little more effort in keeping the magic alive.”

Because thats what we do in this business… we make magic.  And without fostering and supporting that magic, whats the point?