Justin Lin Reacts To Fan Criticisms of STAR TREK BEYOND Trailer, Wants to "Deconstruct" Trek

I enjoyed the first trailer for Star Trek Beyond, but I guess it angered some Star Trek fans who maybe thought it seemed more action-heavy than they'd like. Maybe they thought that because J.J. Abrams didn't direct this one, it would look and feel like a different movie than the previous two? I don't know. But from everything I've read about the making of the movie, including interviews with co-writer and star Simon Pegg, I feel like this is going to be the most traditional Trek film of the new reboot movies. They're dedicated to exploring strange new worlds and showing the Enterprise crew in action in the midst of their five year mission, and I think the action in the trailer may have just been to get people amped up for the new movie and try to pull in people who like the modern, action-heavy films in the series.

Peter Sciretta from /Film was among a group of journalists who spoke with Star Trek Beyond director Justin Lin on the Paramount lot yesterday, and while the roundtable interview was pretty wide-ranging and worth a read for diehard fans, I'll pull out some of the most interesting quotes below. (Note: all grammatical errors come from /Film's transcription.)

Lin's feelings on the first teaser trailer:

“Well, its a minute and a half, you know… And again, there were other versions that were much more traditional and I can see where maybe the hardcore fans could probably see that as “Oh.” But with trailers you’re putting a two hour movie into a minute and a half, and the one thing I wanted to make sure is that it hopefully represents that we are trying to be bold and take risks, wether we are successful or not, I don’t know. That was something I was excited to do and with collaborators like Simon and Doug, passion for the franchise will be there regardless.  So however its presented, yeah its a minute and a half, and my challenge to everyone making the trailer is about saying “lets not go off course, I’m not afraid to share — share it, I feel like we have the goods in a two hour run and you really do get to know the characters and hopefully the journey is great. I love it and the cast did an amazing job and the crew… and the inside baseball version of the creation of this Trek was pretty condensed in how you usually make a movie of this size. And I wanted us to be bold, I wanted us to take chances and hopefully in a minute and a half we are able to convey that.

I saw a few people in our comments section complaining about the music choice of playing the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" in the teaser, but that's an in-canon reference to Abrams' 2009 movie and that song will also appear in this film:

Its in the DNA of this canon. It was in the ’09 Trek, and we went through different iterations of the teaser and I wanted to make sure whatever here is using all the elements from the film. Its been a part of this Kirk’s journey and so I felt it was very organic, and it will ultimately be in the finished film.

Here's a cool piece of trivia: Simon Pegg came up with the movie's title:

[Abrams] kind of tracked me down and we’re talking and I didn’t know what to expect.  I thought maybe he was offering to go shoot a script that existed or and he said, no, it’s yours.  Go and be bold.  And just take it.  Be bold and make it what you think you would do to Star Trek.  And the more we talked about it, the more we kept saying well let’s keep pushing.  Let’s keep pushing.  And that’s when Simon kind of said, well it should be Star Trek Beyond.  And it was his idea.  And it was kind of came from all our conversations.  And we looked at each other and like oh, that sounds like the title of this film.

Lin's mission was to "deconstruct" the series:

Its fifty years… It was around before I was born so for me at its core I felt like on this chapter if we can kind of deconstruct Trek on different levels and hopefully reconfirm that its great we can send it off and it can have a long run after this. And for me that was on a more cerebral level, that was the mission here on this one.
But its also about going on that journey that JJ did with putting all these people together, but I wanted to hopefully create an opportunity or a situation where we can really see how they react to things and to each other. Those are things in all the years of watching Trek, we had hundreds of hours with the movies and stuff, in this timeline, I wanted to hopefully create something where we can be on the five year mission, we can hopefully explore and introduce new species and put them in situations where it hopefully then mirrors back on the exploration of humanity — I think thats important.

If you saw the teaser and were worried, it's probably not worth getting upset about until you see a full trailer or more materials that would exacerbate your worry. Even then, I'm not sure we can really know what this movie is going to be like until we're sitting in the theater. Despite not a lot of fans liking it, Star Trek Into Darkness ended up making over $450 million worldwide at the box office, so Paramount is probably going to try to make this film look as much like that one as possible in the hopes of pulling in similar numbers. I have faith in Pegg's writing, Lin's directing, and this great cast, and I hope years from now fans look back and say, "Hey, remember when we were worried about whether or not Star Trek Beyond would be any good? I'm glad we ended up not having anything to worry about."

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