J.J. Abrams Compared His Star Trek Into Darkness To Star Wars
When we were only one month away from the release of Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel to J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot film was one of the most anticipated of the year. Whether you were a fan of Star Trek or not, Star Trek Into Darkness was definitely a must-see summer movie.
In an interview at the time with SFX, J.J. Abrams talked briefly about how Star Trek Into Darkness is different from every other Star Trek film.
Much like the first film, you don’t have to be a fan of Star Trek to fully enjoy the new movie. It seems like J.J. Abrams and his team constructed the movie to be just as thrilling for the non-initiated as it is for longtime fans.
J.J. Abrams explained, “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.”
J.J. Abrams also talked about the then-upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII, which would be the next project he took after Star Trek Into Darkness wrapped. Abrams opened up about the decades-long comparisons of Star Trek and Star Wars.
It was here that J.J. Abrams revealed, “I wouldn’t say that the first movie (Star Trek) 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.”
As the title suggests, Star Trek Into Darkness would be a darker film than the Star Trek reboot movie in 2009. In some ways, the new film would be like The Empire Strikes Back of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film series.
J.J. Abrams continued to talk about the balance he needed to strike to make Star Trek Into Darkness light-hearted and yet serious. Abrams proceeded, “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.”
Of course, Star Trek Into Darkness was set to be a big summer movie this summer, but it also served as a preface for the next chapter in J.J. Abrams career and the Star Wars franchise.
