Behind-the-scenes of "Star Trek"

J.J. Abrams (TV's "Alias", "Lost", & "Fringe", 2006 film "Mission: Impossible-III") is hoping to breathe new life into an old franchise in May 2009. After a long four year break- drawn out by the failure of television series "Star Trek: Enterprise" (2001-05) and the tenth feature film "Star Trek: Nemesis" (2002)- the saga will return to the big-screen for an astounding eleventh time. But this time, while things will remain familiar, some other things will be different...

Check out Entertainment Weekly Magazine's full article by Jeff Jensen online, and on-the-shelves October 24th.

An excerpt from the online article:

"...

'I don't think people even understand what Star Trek means anymore,' [Abrams] says, sitting outside his editing suites at Paramount, sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon question mark. Abrams saw [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] in 1979 with his father, veteran TV-movie producer Gerald Abrams, at a theater on the Paramount lot. But he feels no warm-fuzzy nostalgia about it. In fact, Abrams can sum up his regard for Trek in two words: Galaxy Quest, the 1999 hit starring Tim Allen that satirized Trek with painful precision. 'It's so ridiculous, so accurate, so sophisticated, it spoils the Star Trek universe,'' he says.

Plus, at heart, Abrams is still more of a Star Wars guy. 'All my smart friends liked Star Trek,' he says. 'I preferred a more visceral experience.' Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount's offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie 'that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.' That meant a bigger budget and better special effects than any previous Trek film, plus freedom to reinvent the mythos as needed. 'We have worldwide aspirations and we need to broaden [Trek's] appeal,' says [Brad Weston, Paramount's president of production]. 'Doing the half-assed version of this thing wasn't going to work.'

..."

Additionally, Entertainment News International posted never-before-seen widescreen pictures from the film on their own site; though unrelated to EW's article.

(left-to-right: Anton Yelchin, Chris Pine, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho, and Zoe Saldana)

(Most of ENI's images I have saved to the gallery for this article on CDX.)

(Official teaser trailer debuted in the Abrams-directed film "Cloverfield" on December, 2007)

"Star Trek" will debut in theaters on May 8th, 2009, and is being released in a joint ventue between Paramount Pictures, and Abrams' own Bad Robot Productions.