Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek (2009) Content

2010-04-03T22:51:00.000-07:00

Star Trek (2009): Enterprising Young Men - Michael Giachinno

2009-09-08T02:01:00.001-07:00

Michael Giacchino's Soundtrack to the latest Star Trek contains some great scores. This is one of the most popular, Track 5 - Enterprising Young Men.

"Star Trek" Weekend box office nudged higher (Reuters)

2009-05-12T04:43:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Star Trek" keeps getting hotter at the North American box office.

The eleventh movie in Paramount Pictures' reenergized sci-fi franchise earned $75.2 million during the three days beginning Friday, according to final data issued on Monday.

A day earlier, the Viacom Inc-owned studio had issued a preliminary estimate of $72.5 million. Including early sales from Thursday night, the tally now stands at $79.2 million, said Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com Box Office.

The acclaimed film, which follows the origins of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest of the crew of the Starship Enterprise, was easily the top film at the box office.

The previous weekend's champ, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," slipped to No. 2 with $26.4 million, off a little from its $27 million Sunday estimate.

Star-crossed lovers: `Trek' ship mates lock lips (AP)

2009-05-11T01:18:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES - William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared TV's first interracial kiss on "Star Trek" in the 1960s.

If you haven't yet seen the new big-screen "Trek" and don't want to know who actually kissed Nyota Uhura before James T. Kirk, read no further: Zoe Saldana's update of the comely communications officer has a boyfriend, and it's not the dashing captain.

It's Kirk's future best friend forever, the coldly logical Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto), a member of a race whose males supposedly get the itch to mate only once every seven years.

But in J.J. Abrams' relaunch of "Trek," Spock and Uhura definitely have a thing going.
"This is one of those changes that obviously we knew was going to incite a lot of potential rioting in the theaters," said Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Roberto Orci.

There's a hint early on that Spock and Uhura are more than just Starfleet colleagues. Then midway through the film, after Spock has suffered horrible personal loss, Uhura gets him alone and plants consoling kisses and caresses on the pointy-eared Vulcan.

Later, they go public with their romance in front of the abashed Kirk (Chris Pine), who had been pursuing Uhura for himself through the whole movie.

"It provides a tremendous sense of levity between Kirk and Spock and between Kirk and Uhura. But I think between Spock and Uhura, it offers a kind of depth and a complexity to those characters that maybe we didn't get a chance to see in the same way before," Quinto said. "I feel like Uhura ultimately represents a kind of canvas onto which Spock is able to project a lot of the emotions that he's unable to express in a more conventional way."

There is also a certain logic to Spock falling for a human: Spock is only half-Vulcan, his father having married a human himself. Co-writer Orci, a lifelong "Trek" fan, always felt there was an undercurrent of attraction between Nimoy's Spock and Nichols' Uhura.

"There's some hints in the original series of some flirtations between them," Orci said.

And Saldana herself figures that for serious, career-minded Uhura, Spock is more her type than an on-the-prowl guy like Kirk.
"I'm pretty sure that Uhura would choose a night in and studying 10 times over going out and partying it up and hooking up with a boy," Saldana said. "Who other than Spock to come in and sort of possess all the qualities that she sees in herself, that she would like to continue to obtain, and that she would want to see in a man? I almost feel like Kirk would be the opposite and be someone she just wouldn't go for."

The filmmakers thought it also might humanize Kirk a bit. Shatner's Kirk bedded human and alien beauties week after week on the TV show, but Pine's Kirk winds up humbled when he sees Spock and Uhura lock lips, particularly since he and the Vulcan have gotten off to a contentious start.

"It makes Kirk a little more accessible," Pine said. "He's the guy we've all been. He wants the chick who doesn't want you. He's trying really hard. She just kind of laughs in his face and goes off with the other guy. I relate to that. I'm sure everyone does."

The original Spock found the romance between Quinto and Saldana's characters deeply moving.
"Beautiful, beautiful. Wonderful," said Leonard Nimoy, who reprises his role as the older Spock in the movie. "Both of them played it so well. They were both so available to each other. Very touching, really."

Star Trek's Big Box-Office Bang

2009-05-11T01:14:00.000-07:00

J.J. Abrams' retooled, timeline-tweaking Star Trek scored an estimated $72.5 million Friday-Sunday opening weekend, Exhibitor Relations reported today, coming in on the high side of projections and blowing past previous franchise hits—and misses.
Since bowing Thursday night, Star Trek has grossed $76.5 million overall.

"An opening like this definitely indicates that moviegoers outside the core base of Trekkies showed up," Exhibitor Relations box-office analyst Jeff Bock said in an email.

Drilling down, Romulan-style, into the numbers:
• According to Paramount's calendar, the weekend started Thursday. The studio was reporting the $76.5 million figure as Trek's opening-weekend gross. It confirmed that count included Thursday business.

• Star Trek made more on Friday ($26.8 million, per Exhibitor Relations) than nine of the 10 previous Trek movies made in their respective opening weekends. If estimates hold, it'll have made more in 72 hours than the 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, the last pre-Abrams film, made in 91 days of release ($43.3 million).

• Paramount was reporting Star Trek made $30.8 million on Friday. That figure, too, included Thursday business. By Exhibitor Relations' count, the movie's biggest single day so far was Saturday, with $27.4 million.

• Among franchise restarts, Star Trek outdid 2005's Batman Begins ($48.7 million debut) and 2006's Superman Returns ($52.5 million). It did not, however, outgross last weekend's X-Men pivot, Wolverine ($85.1 million), which remains the year's biggest opener.

• Adjusted for inflation, the first Trek movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, is the highest-grossing Trek, with an $82.3 million 1979-1980 haul that would translate into $235 million today, per Box Office Mojo's Brandon Gray, who thinks Abrams' movie could unseat Robert Wise's opus as the undisputed Trek champion. "If it has longevity," Gray says, "…it has a chance."

• So, will Abrams' Trek have space legs? "The sci-fi genre is notorious for its precipitous drops," Bock said, "so Paramount is no doubt hoping all the positive word-of-mouth spreads, and the younger demographics show up."

• Next weekend, Trek's main opponent will be Tom Hanks' Angels & Demons. Opposite that film, Kirk's crew might be able to maintain warp speed as the Hanks movie, a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, will play to a target audience that "is obviously much older," as Bock put it, than the Chris Pine Appreciation Society.

• Just so you know, by next weekend, Star Trek should become the highest-grossing Tyler Perry movie of all-time.

Synopsis

2009-05-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

The fate of the galaxy rests in the hands of bitter rivals. One, James Kirk, is a delinquent, thrill-seeking Iowa farm boy. The other, Spock, was raised in a logic-based society that rejects all emotion. As fiery instinct clashes with calm reason, their unlikely but powerful partnership is the only thing capable of leading their crew through unimaginable danger, boldly going where no one has gone before.

Widget

2009-05-02T11:54:00.001-07:00