I’m excited about the prospect of a new Star Trek TV/web series but I fundamentally don’t trust producer Alex Kurtzman who’s in charge of the new series and seems to be in charge of the Star Trek franchise as a whole. Both of the Star Trek movies he was involved in were stinkers and the TV series he’s produced recently from Hawaii Five-0 to Sleepy Hollow to Scorpion to Limitless are middle of the road fare at best.
Has Kurtzman ever produced anything that great? Looking at his IMDB page is like a walk down mediocre lane. The Island (2005), Transformers (2007), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)… are all “blargh.” In fact, the closest he’s come to anything interesting was producing the Ender’s Game (2013) film. Which wasn’t entirely horrible but was still a flop at the box office.
(I remember listening to a podcast with Kurtzman and his writing partner at the time Roberto Orci who talked about their approach to writing scripts where they seemed to be more interested in how their pages were formatted rather than what was actually on them — which explains a lot.)
And now he’ll be in charge of producing and picking the people who’ll create the first Star Trek series since Enterprise went off the air a decade ago. To me there are a lot of people out there who could really do something cool with Star Trek. Just look at how Steven Moffat took old properties like Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes and updated them for a new generation but still kept the spark of what made the originals great intact.
But with Kurtzman at the helm I think that the new Star Trek will be more Hawaii Five-0 in tone than Sherlock.
Now I’d never say that this new Star Trek will stink before I’ve seen it, but let’s just say that as the Magic 8 Ball says, “Signs point to ‘yes’.”
