Star Trek is looking good!

We catch an exclusive preview of JJ Abram's new vision for Kirk and the gang... WARNING: Spoilers ahoy!

No, seriously... Spoilers ahoy!

Taking a leaf from Zack Snyder's Watchmen playbook, JJ Abrams has been taking 20 minutes of footage of his upcoming Star Trek re-imagining on the road to show to the press. He's busy cutting the film together, so he's not personally presenting the footage, but he opens with a canned introdcution to each scene, and an embarrased admission that he's not actually a Trek fan.

Having now seen that footage, at a screening today in Sydney, his distance from the considerable legacy that sits behind the Trek franchise can only be a good thing. The four scenes we were treated to were tight, respectful of the original material, and yet wholly and totally modern.

The first scene we saw was an introduction to James Kirk as a young man, before he joins up with Starfleet. It's set in Iowa, of course ("actually, I'm from Iowa - I only work in outer space."), and it presents Kirk as an aimless young man. He's obviously brilliant, and not afraid to show it or defend his ego with his fists. He's also recovering from the loss of his father (did we mention spoilers?); this scene also introduces us to what will become his surrogate father - Captain Pike.

One of the ongoing criticisms of Abram's new vision is that it presents an Enterprise crew that seems to have known each other from the very early years of their careers. trek purists argue against the possibility of this, but Abrams gets away with it somehow. Since he has taken some liberties with established canon - and with good supporting plot reasons) we can grant him that degree of creative license. This is a crew that is simply destined to be together, that much is plain.

The second scene follows on three years after Kirk joins the Fleet. He’s not exactly a golden child of a junior officer, and when the Enterprise leaves on a rescue mission to Vulcan, he has to be smuggled on board. The set up is that he and Bones McCoy are good friends, and it’s Bones that fakes a disease of some kind to get Kirk into his sickbay. It’s played for laughs, but the scene develops further and displays some lovely tensions between Kirk and the younger Spock. “They may be friends later in their careers”, as Abrams points out in one of his interstitial commentaries, “but they certainly don’t start off that way.”

Next up we got to see the aftermath of that frosty relationship, as Kirk finds himself marooned on a barren planet. Spock’s apparently taken the opportunity to ditch the troublesome stowaway, but it also leads us to a thrilling reveal – LEONARD NIMOY!