Speaking with
SFX, director J.J. Abrams talks about his highly anticipated sequel
Star Trek Into Darkness. He says that the film wasn't made for everybody, but he believes that both
Trek fans and non-fans will find it satisfying.
"Of course you can’t make this for everyone. There are going to be detractors. But I think that the important thing is this movie, at least the ambition behind it, is… if you’re a Star Trek fan, you’re going to be very happy. Because the movie acknowledges, in a big way, what has come before. If you’re not a lifelong Star Trek fan, like myself, what I think and hope is that you’ll have a great time and you’ll be gasping and shrieking and laughing and crying and all that stuff in a way you would not expect to in a Star Trek movie." He discusses the franchise's decades-long comparisons to
Star Wars, which he will be tackling in Disney's
Episode VII for 2015, and whether or not
Into Darkness will borrow more from that series than the 2009
Trek film.
"I wouldn’t say that the first movie is an absolute Star Wars derivation. The irony of course being that Star Trek came out before Star Wars. We’re inheriting Star Trek, so we’re allowed to do space stuff. Of course when Star Wars came out, people referred to Star Trek, because it was spaceships. Everything is sort of a derivation of everything else. Just the way Star Wars was of Flash Gordon and of dogfight war films in the TIE Fighter sequences. Everything has something it borrows from.
"Where this story goes, if you’re going to go to a place that’s as intense as some of the stuff is in this movie, I think you need balance. And so while there are moments that are pretty dark and crazy, those scenes just won’t matter to you – you won’t care about them – if you haven’t been laughing along the way and rooting for these characters you have to feel for. The idea is to try and balance it, not to have it be one thing or the other." For more from Abrams and on
Star Trek Into Darkness, be sure to pick up the latest issue of SFX.
Star Trek Into Darkness stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Alice Eve and Anton Yelchin. The film is set to hit theaters May 17th.