The Genius of JJ Abrams

To take on the task of re-launching a franchise over 40 years old with one of the most loyal and devoted fan bases on the planet, you would have to be a lunatic or a genius. Luckily for movie fans everywhere, and every Trekkie on the planet, JJ Abrams is a genius.

This summer’s smash-hit, “Star Trek”, which was released to DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, was a movie you didn’t have to be a Trekkie to appreciate. Though I have seen episodes of various incarnations of “Trek,” I am far from considering myself a Trekkie. But I cannot get over the genius of what Abrams did in this film.

First of all, he made a film that even someone who knew absolutely nothing about the Star Trek universe could appreciate. The movie starts from as close to the beginning as one can get (the birth of James Kirk) and just builds from there, introducing you to each character as if you are meeting them for the first time and taking nothing for granted.

But the true genius of JJ Abrams comes in the story he chose for the movie itself. “Whatever our lives might have been, if the timeline was disrupted, our destinies have changed,” Spock says about halfway through the movie. JJ Abrams and his writing team cancelled out 40 years of Star Trek storylines, allowing themselves a completely blank slate with which to re-launch the franchise. What better way to rejuvenate something than to make it completely new again?
The other part of this movie that makes it the best movie of 2009’s Summer Movie Season was the casting. There was not a single actor in this film that gave a poor performance, something I have come to expect in JJ Abrams work. Chris Pine’s Kirk was spectacular, Zachary Quinto’s Spock was impeccable and Eric Bana is completely unrecognizable as Nero. The rest of the cast is equally flawless. Here, JJ Abrams did not forget the “Trek” fanbase, giving a relatively large cameo to the series’ original Spock, Leonard Nemoy.

Abrams’ triumph in this film is a genius he has shown in many other projects of his career. I mean, we are talking about the man behind the hit TV dramas “Alias,” “Lost,” “Felicity,” and “Fringe,” as well as movies like “Mission Impossible III,” “Armageddon” and the movie that was a viral craze before it was even released, “Cloverfield.” At present, Abrams is working on “Mission Impossible IV” and a sequel to “Star Trek” is slated to hit theatres in 2011. Only then will we know just how far his genius can boldly go. (Okay...I have a Trekkie in my somewhere)