Star Trek 3 Production About to Begin

By Reggie's Take on June 22, 2015

The rebooted Star Trek film franchise has stirred plenty of emotions good and bad with “Trekkie’s” and with the 50th anniversary just over a year away, filming on the third movie is about to get underway.

Filming on the next Star Trek film is set to begin in Vancouver later this week and with a June 25th start date quickly approaching the people of Vancouver are beginning to see the cast of the Enterprise beam into town.

Simon Pegg, John Cho and Anton Yelchin were recently spotted together at a local movie theater attending a screening of Jurassic World. Karl Urban was also scene arriving at a local hotel, bags in hand.

Karl Urban arriving in Vancouver for start of Star Trek 3 filming.

Zachary Quinto is also gearing up with the return of a familiar bowl cut that he posted to Instagram with the message, “someone is preparing to emerge” to go along with the picture.

Zachary Quinto on Instagram

There has been no word yet if Chris Pine or Zoe Saldana have arrived in Vancouver, but they still have a couple days.

Corridors supposedly that of the Enterprise have also been seen being built in a Vancouver soundstage in preparation for filming. These are thought to be new sets being constructed as those for “Into Darkness” were built as one large, interconnected set rather than the separate corridor pieces seen in the image below.

Enterprise corridors being rebuilt on Vancouver soundstage.

It also seems we won’t have to wait for filming to be completed in order to find out what Paramount intends to title the film either. Michael Chang Gummelt’s fan site “Star Trek Beyond” has been re-titled to “Star Trek Uncharted” and the website’s URL has also been changed from StarTrekBeyond.com to StarTrekMovie.com. This just makes it seem more likely that Paramount plans on naming the third movie “Star Trek: Beyond” as earlier rumored.

Justin Lin will be taking over the directors chair for J.J. Abrams when filing does get underway. Abrams, although busy with Star Wars: The Force Awakens is still a producer for the film. The script was co-written by Simon Pegg.

Reggie’s Take:
The previous two Star Trek films have stirred up a lot of emotions between the hard-core Trek fans. Some say that Abrams and Paramount have ruined what Gene Roddenberry originally created while others haven’t had an issue with the films.

Simon Pegg has said in previous interviews as well as Lin that this new film will be more like an original type of Trek series story with new aliens and villains set in the middle of the Enterprises five-year mission.

Regardless of story this third film will most likely be the film that determines if this version of Star Trek and its crew will continue to make more movies or Paramount goes the route that Hollywood seems to like best and reboot the franchise yet again.

For me personally I feel Paramount is stuck with what they and Abrams created when re-launching Star Trek in 2009. This current version of the original crew and the alternate time-line they’re set in has done two things for the franchise.

First it has haters and lovers of the previous two films both wagging their tongues in and endless debate. Second, Paramount has also made this newer film version of Star Trek more accessible to the more casual fan of Star Trek in that they didn’t need to know or understand about anything previously done with in the franchise in order to enjoy the movies.

The two previous movies have also been the two highest grossing Star Trek movies ever and if this third film does anything close to what “Into Darkness” pulled in we can expect Paramount to continue with more films with the current cast.

I’m sure some fans of the original crew would love to see this movie fail, but even if it would happen I don’t see how Paramount could try and reboot Trek a second time. There is no pleasing of everyone with this current cast and time line, but the worst thing for Trek fans who still want to see new adventures on the big screen for the foreseeable future is failure of the third movie in 2016.

This newest film must succeed in my opinion in order to keep Star Trek from taking a possible long hiatus from theaters.