Star Trek

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is one of the most highly anticipated movies of the coming summer season, and theater owners got a special preview of the May 17 release as CinemaCon kicked off in Las Vegas on Monday. The convention is heavy on big summer tent poles. “Man of Steel” and “Pacific Rim” were set to be previewed, along with “The Lone Ranger.” The 18 minutes of “Star Trek Into Darkness” footage included some of the 9-minute preview that screened before IMAX showings of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” late last year, as well as a scene in which the Enterprise beams out Mr. Spock from a volcano, inspiring the worship of the local Nibiru villagers, and another in which Chris Pine’s James T. Kirk strikes an uneasy alliance with villain John Harrison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. “I think in […]

Scott Bakula was already familiar to television audiences as Dr. Sam Beckett, the time-traveling do-gooder he played for five seasons on the NBC series “Quantum Leap,” when he won the role of Capt. Jonathan Archer, commander of the first Warp 5 starship, in 2001 for the new show “Star Trek: Enterprise.” It was a role he played for four seasons until the series was canceled in 2005, and it placed him in the fairly elite ranks of actors to wear a captain’s uniform on a “Star Trek” television series, though he hasn’t become as indelibly identified with Archer as, say, William Shatner has with James. T. Kirk (apologies to Chris Pine). As the first season of “Enterprise” comes to Blu-ray, Bakula spoke to Hero Complex about the character, his memories of the series and what, if anything, might prompt an […]

Want to hear what Marvel Studios guru Kevin Feige has to say about “Iron Man 3″? Or Damon Lindelof’s take on why he’s like a covert agent in Hollywood, guarding some of the most exciting “Star Trek Into Darkness” secrets? Or how about director Joseph Kosinski talking about the aesthetics of spaceship design for his upcoming Tom Cruise-starrer “Oblivion”? Then check out the spring issue of the Hero Complex magazine, available for free at Meltdown Comics in L.A. or any of the three Midtown Comics locations in New York. In addition to stories about highly anticipated films, you’ll also find details on “The Walking Dead”; a preview of the game that hopes to bring new dimension to the survival horror genre, “The Last of Us”; and a thoughtful examination of the legacy of “X-Men” writing talent Chris Claremont. The cover […]

Got plans this weekend? You do now. Beginning Friday and running through March 31, the video streaming service Hulu is making every episode of the original “Star Trek” television series and all its offshoots — including “The Next Generation,” “Deep Space 9,” “Voyager” and “Enterprise” — available free for online viewing to celebrate William Shatner’s birthday. The actor who played Captain Kirk in the original series and in several subsequent movies turned 82 Friday. Fans have their work cut out for them: There are 693 episodes in all and just nine days to watch them. TV’s top 50 sci-fi characters: Mr. Spock, Starbuck and…TOBOR? For anyone interested in help navigating the “Star Trek” universe, Hulu has created a mini-playlist of episodes grouped together thematically. Kirk Outsmarts Computers is a six-episode set that shows Shatner’s tough-guy facing off against technology (and […]

The Starship Enterprise is in shambles. Flames erupt from the front of the ship as enemy spacecraft latch onto it with tentacle-like cords.  For a brief moment, the embattled Enterprise appears unrecognizable to even “Star Trek’s” most famous characters. “What the hell is that?” asks James T. Kirk. “It appears the Enterprise has been compromised,” responds Spock.  Against the latter’s better judgment, they both don space suits and embark on a galactic free-fall, dodging debris and enemy ships as they aim to board the Enterprise and retake the beloved starship. This is not a scene from the upcoming  May 17 J.J. Abrams film “Star Trek Into Darkness,” but is instead a pivotal moment in “Star Trek the Video Game,” which we sampled earlier this month. It’s Paramount’s three-years-in-the-making attempt to turn its famed space exploration brand into a rebooted franchise that’s respected by […]

An international trailer for “Star Trek Into Darkness” has been released, whetting appetites with juicy plot points from the film, in theaters May 17. There’s been a crime committed in London by a top Starfleet agent. We hear “Into Darkness” villain Benedict Cumberbatch saying nobody is safe — he’s apparently out for blood after “your commanders have done something I can’t forgive.”  Next thing we know, Kirk is seeking vengeance. The squeeze-a-ship-through-a-crack scene is featured in this trailer, too, but perhaps most fun is the James T. Kirk angst.  It’s positively Shatnerian.:   “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do, I only know what I can do,” says Chris Pine’s Kirk. In another scene: “Starfleet is not about vendetta, Kirk.” “Maybe it should be, sir.” But Cumberbatch’s (as-yet-unnamed) villain also reveals that he has a Kirk-size ego, foreshadowing a […]

Two new Vulcan characters will make their debut in “Star Trek: The Video Game,” and both of them have connections to Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared half-Vulcan made famous by Leonard Nimoy. Paramount on Tuesday released images of the new Star Trek characters — a beautiful scientist named T’Mar, who was a childhood friend of Spock and “plays a prominent role” in the game, and her father Surock, a Vulcan leader and one of Spock’s mentors. Though the highly anticipated game — Paramount’s first foray into big-budget video games — comes out less than a month before J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek Into Darkness,” the story in the game stands alone. And unlike the movie sequel, in which the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain remains mysterious, the game’s nemesis is known: Kirk and Spock will face off against the Gorn, a ruthless […]

Late last year, at a promotional event at the Santa Monica headquarters of J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot, the trio of screenwriters who penned “Star Trek Into Darkness” gathered around a cocktail table to talk about the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the project nearly since its inception. Later that week, the opening nine minutes of the film were set to unspool ahead of Imax 3-D screenings of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” but Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof still weren’t willing to reveal the film’s biggest secret: the identity of the villain played in the Abrams-directed sequel by English actor Benedict Cumberbatch. “Benedict doesn’t even know who he’s playing,” Lindelof joked. Even as the latest trailer for the film makes it debut, Lindelof continued to remain mum about the details of “Star Trek Into Darkness,” […]

If the latest trailer for J.J. Abrams’ highly anticipated “Star Trek Into Darkness” is any indication, the film looks to be long on action and wit — and quite likely to please the crowds for whom theorizing about the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch’s bad guy has become a key pastime. Some of the scenes in this new teaser trailer we’ve seen before — our heroes running through a crimson forest while being pursued by attackers, the Enterprise emerging dramatically from the ocean surface, a volcano erupting. And some images will seem quite familiar to fans who turned up to see the opening nine minutes of the movie when it screened before certain IMAX presentations of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” last December. But there’s plenty of new material too, including a sequence in which Kirk and Spock navigate a speeding […]

James Marsters — the actor behind the peroxide-haired punk rock vampire Spike in Joss Whedon’s long-running series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — found inspiration for his character from an unusual source: Mr. Spock. Marsters said he looked to his favorite character from “Star Trek” — Leonard Nimoy’s starship Enterprise science officer Spock — when he was first cast on “Buffy” for what was initially supposed to be a brief role. Marsters ended up acting in 97 episodes of the series, not to mention another 24 episodes in the spinoff “Angel.” “Spock was that side character that nobody thought would be that much, and he ended up kind of turning the theme on its head,” Marsters told Entertainment Tonight, in the video above. “‘Cause ‘Star Trek’ really was about human beings perfecting a worldview and then sharing it with the galaxy, […]