Out of focus in the background we see a familiar face.

Star Trek Movie Trailer

Heh.

I once decided upon what I thought was a decent opening for a Next Generation film.

Up on a market -- think Life of Brian or Mos Eisley if you must. It's dusty, dirty and there's nothing any sane person would want to buy, but more importantly nothing is familiar. We slowly zoom into a hooded figure in sack cloth is slowly picking his way through the crowd, though mostly he's being pushed out of the way. Then we hear a familiar sound. It's a tricorder, but its very faint and broken and not making much sense. The camera zooms past our figure to reveal a small child playing with it, the thing snapping open and closed. The child looks up and smiles then holds the tricorder in the air.
"Bwoken."
Hands take hold of it, but their unsteady, as though they're feeling their way ... they're not sure where it is. They feel about the device with is then held up into shot. Out of focus in the background we see a familiar face. Pull focus.
It's Geordie LaForge. But he's without his visor or those implants he received in the later films. Just white where his irises should be. He smells the tricorder, which gives a little spark.
"Yeah, it's broken." He's not smiling.
The camera pans into the sky blue sky, up towards space. We see the Enterprise in low orbit. In pieces, shuttle pod bay doors empty, the nacelles and saucer section shattered beyond repair. Credits roll over these pieces.

I thought of this on the release of Insurrection, by which point the film franchise had become horrifyingly cosy. It needed to shock the audience and not in a Nemesis killing Data for the hell of it, fan-wanky-wedding kind of way. You needed to put the audience in the position of not knowing where the hell it was going.

Abrams seems to have achieved this. It's hilarious and will either be the most misjudged summer blockbuster since Transformers and Lost In Space before that or just the shot in the arm that franchise needs. Trek, Wars and Who are like three party politics in the UK -- it does no one any favours when one of the elements is weakened (Who of course being the Liberal Democrats).

I imagine there are Trekkers and Trekkies online somewhere in aperplexy though, with doses of oxygen on tap in much the same way as some of us did when we read The Leakley Bible which "was to feature the half-human Doctor seeking his father, Ulysses, through various time periods (including) contemporary Gallifrey, where Borusa dies and is merged with the TARDIS, and the Master becomes leader of the Time Lords;" [wiki]