The space age gadgets from Star Trek

It’s been 15 years since we last hitched a ride onboard the USS Enterprise under the stewardship of Captain James T. Kirk and a lot has changed since then. The world of Star Trek (sorry, make that universe) has seen whippersnappers The Next Generation assume cinematic duties, while on the small screen we’ve had Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise all come and go. And it’s not just the Star Trek landscape that has shifted and evolved, so too has the science fiction genre with revolutionary efforts such as The Matrix trilogy, Twelve Monkeys and Donnie Darko boldly going where no films have gone before. And matching these developments step for step has been the advancements in technology.

These new frontiers in wizardry presented director/ producer J.J. Abrams and his team behind the reboot of the Star Trek film franchise with many challenging head-scratchers. How to make the techie trinkets appear cutting-edge and exciting to today’s audiences when limited by the 1960s roots of the original TV series? How to maintain continuity with the existing Star Trek culture while adding something new and novel to this 23rd Century world? And how to present these gadgets in a way that is fun for the long-time fan and someone entirely new to the Enterprise? It’s a conundrum that could test even Mr Spock.

There were to be no easy answers for all involved in making these decisions from Abrams through to his long-time collaborator, production designer Scott Chambliss (the pair worked together on Mission: Impossible III, Felicity and Alias) and property master Russell Bobbitt (Iron Man). Chambliss decided that the best approach was for the technology on display to be quite subtle as he explains.

“It’s virtually impossible for a movie to present technology that’s way ahead of its time, because everything we’re referring to right now as new, by the time the move comes out it’s all going to be out there. We didn’t want to find ourselves in the trap of making such a big fuss about the technology, that it was super cool and super new, when we would find ourselves down the road saying, “We’ve seen that at Sharper Image and it’s really fun to play with.”