Entertainment Weekly has provided the first extensive look at J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek film, which Paramount hopes will reboot the nearly moribund franchise.  Abrams is planning to accomplish this feat with an energetic young cast and a full on embrace of the Star Trek franchise’s inherent optimism.  Abrams told EW: ''I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now.''  Abrams noted that in the face of the brooding cynical blockbuster of 2008, The Dark Knight, what he wanted to accomplish with Star Trek in the summer of 2009 was “to make optimism cool again.” 

EW points out that Abrams gave Randy Pausch, the recently deceased author of the inspirational tome, The Last Lecture and an avowed Star Trek fan, a cameo in the new film.

The new Star Trek film was supposed to open this holiday season, but a lack of summer blockbusters in 2009, due to the protracted writers’ strike, presented an opportunity for the new Star Trek movie that Paramount could simply not pass up.  With the dearth of big budget competition in 2009, the new Trek film has a chance to attain true blockbuster status and rescue the Star Trek movie franchise that has been going downhill since The Wrath of Khan.

But to effect that sort of a rescue audiences will have to accept the youthful cast that Abrams has chosen starting with fresh faced Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock, and also embrace Abrams’ sophisticated time-traveling plot.  But the film has a fighting chance, not the least because of the approach that Abrams is taking: ''We weren't making a movie for fans of Star Trek,'' Abrams told EW. ''We were making a movie for fans of movies.''