Orci On Dark Trek
2 min readAccording to Star Trek XI Co-writer Roberto Orci, some fans didn’t find Star Trek XI dark enough.
Now that Star Trek XI and its necessary opening story has been completed, does Star Trek XII go where Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan went?
Often, a second movie in a series is darker than the opening movie, but Star Trek XI was pretty grim when it came to the Vulcan race as well as parental loss. “Well, it’s weird,” said Orci. We got kind of a mixed review in terms of the darkness or not of the first one. There was a genocide of an entire planet, Spock’s freaking mother died, Kirk’s dad died… but it’s like, ‘Well, it wasn’t very dark!'”
The writers will have to decide where Star Trek XII goes from there, and now that necessary business is out of the way, they’re free to explore different ideas. “So I think maybe thematically, because we don’t have the burden of an origin story, we can play a little bit more with the theme and it can be a little bit more complicated,” said Orci. “But I still think we like fun. Star Trek has always been funny. Even Wrath of Khan has got some great, great, great fun in it. I think it will be equally confusing for some, but I do think we get to jump right into it now.”
The next Star Trek movie is due out in 2012, and Orci explained how the process of creating it would begin. “We’ll work backwards from 2012,” he said. “So you know, you can do the math. We’ve got to probably turn it in by Christmas and get a pretty good draft by then. And then kind of get it up and running.”
Orci welcomes good suggestions from Star Trek fans. “Any cool suggestion I read from the fans I’ll bring up in our meetings. And I’ll say, ‘One of the fans suggested this.’ So this has always been an experiment in fan consultation for us. They really are consultants on the movie.”