Star Trek 2 is still very much in pre-production mode, with writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who wrote the first film, along with Transformers and next summer’s Cowboys and Aliens) working hard on putting together a script that will do justice to critic and fanboy expectations, a job made all the more difficult by the great success in all respects of the first film.

In a lengthy interview with the LA Times, the writing pair shared a lot about the challenges the new script presents, in that they want to build on the first film, keep it feeling like “proper” Star Trek, give each character their individual moments, challenge/shake up the characters, develop their chemistry and yet still retain the vibe of the first film. Not too much of a challenge then….

The good news is that they have at least broken the back of the story and decided on the tale they will tell with this next installment:-

Well, we have broken the story, which is very exciting. I think one of the weird challenges that we’re facing on this one is that in many ways, with the first movie, I don’t think people knew what to expect, so when we were in the writing process, Bob and I really spent our time going to things that we loved about “Trek” and it was a very unfiltered process. It felt intimate and small. There weren’t a lot of voices other than [producer] Damon [Lindelof], J.J. and [executive producer] Bryan Burke.

Now, that first movie has come up and did well and everyone wants to know what happens next. We didn’t have that pressure, exactly, on the first one.  That said, part of what we have to do is listen to it all, ask a lot of questions about what people’s expectations are — and then let all of that go when we sit down to write. We need to find our way back to the same kind of vibe that we had when we wrote the first one: What do we want to see here? What moved us about “Trek”? Where can we go from where we left off?

There has been a lot of speculation about where this next Star Trek film will take the crew of the Enterprise in terms of plot, villains and so forth. You can see all of the news that has broken so far here. At least now we know that the writers know where they are going, although obviously they are not going to tell us yet. We’ll keep you posted.

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Dave has been writing for HeyUGuys since mid-2010 and has found them to be the most intelligent, friendly, erudite and insightful bunch of film fans you could hope to work with. He's gone from ham-fisted attempts at writing the news to interviewing Lawrence Bender, Renny Harlin and Julian Glover, to writing articles about things he loves that people have actually read. He has fairly broad tastes as far as films are concerned, though given the choice he's likely to go for Con Air over Battleship Potemkin most days. He's pretty sure that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most overrated mess in cinematic history.