"Star Trek Into Darkness" review
When director J.J. Abrams and his collaborators Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, and Roberto Orci decided to set 2009's Star Trek in an alternate timeline apart from The Original Series and its spinoffs, they did it to achieve creative freedom. Abrams and his creative team knew that simply inserting a young cast into the established Trek universe would not work. Star Trek's lore is nearly a half-century old, and the franchise's loyal fans wouldn't have accepted a reboot that attempted to inject the new cast into the 1966-69 William Shatner-Leonard Nimoy-DeForest Kelley troika's adventures. The effect, I think, would have been too jarring. Star Trek 's time travel-created alternate timeline thus gave Abrams & Co. the necessary flexibility to reinvigorate Gene Roddenberry's old series. As Abrams pointed out in an interview: "The idea, now that we are in an independent timeline, allows us to use any of the ingredients from the past -...