As 2012 comes to an end and we gear up for 2013, one of our most anticipated films coming up is J.J. Abrams' sequel Star Trek Into Darkness. Collider had the opportunity to sit down with producer and co-writer Damon Lindelof and talk about the film at a recent press event, and you should definitely check out the whole interview for some great Trek talk about what we can expect from the film. But we wanted to pull out a few highlights and share them in case you don't have time to delve into the whole extensive interview.
On Easter eggs:
Lindelof: The majority of the Easter eggs are already embedded before we go into production. I think that there are a couple things that along the way where you find an opportunity. But I think the fans want to feel that that stuff had a lot of thought behind it and that we’re not being casual about referencing the original series or the Trek-verse. And you have to do your homework especially because we started a new timeline. You have to be very responsible about the sequencing of things because it’s not we can do whatever we want now.
On how dark the film will be:
Lindelof: We’ve been talking about this a lot...I think that one of the things that the best iterations of Trek, whether it was episodes show or the movies that were highly successful, is that they were able to find a blend of those two things where the stakes were monumentally life or death but there were still moments of great humor. Did we want to do The Voyage Home? That is largely a comedic, fish out of water movie. No pun intended, a whale out of water movie. With strong comedy elements, but the stakes were saving the future, but the mechanics of the movies was that there was a lot of funny. No, we wanted to do a very serious movie. But when you look at the first movie you go, O.K. the opening of the movie is that Kirk’s father dies and then the next sequence of events is basically a run up to Vulcan being destroyed and the fundamental aftermath of Vulcan being destroyed. All of that stuff seems pretty dark to me and so I don’t feel like the first movie was necessarily light and frothy and I don’t feel that this movie abberates significantly from the first movie in terms of its own level of self-importance. It’s still Trek. I think that the ways that the characters relate to each other, even in times of immense stress can be humorous because several of them, particularly Bones, use humor as a coping mechanism for dealing with those immense stresses...I don’t think anybody wants to see a dour Star Trek movie.
That last part is particularly interesting, because as you've seen in the trailers and all of the marketing so far, they're definitely selling this movie as the darker, more brooding Star Trek sequel. Part of the reason the first one was so great was because it was so quick in its pacing and filled with light moments amid high stakes, so I'm glad to hear Lindelof directly address this concern. While a lot of people give him crap for Prometheus and the ending of LOST, I'm still a huge fan of his and want to see him do well; hopefully that means that Star Trek Into Darkness will be as satisfying as we all hope.
Again, make sure you check out the full interview at Collider for much more from the writer/producer, and we'll keep our phasers set to "excited" (sorry) for Star Trek Into Darkness, which hits theaters on May 17th, 2013.