'Star Trek XI' Gets Roddenberry Stamp Of Approval

Roddenberry, the son of the late "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry, visited a shoot from "Star Trek XI" a couple weeks ago, and shared some of what he saw with SyFy Portal's online talk show, SyFy Radio.

"I met with J.J. Abrams, but I didn't really see any of the main product," Roddenberry said, likely visiting when Abrams was shooting secondary shots and the like following principal photography. "What I did see, it looked great. The costumes, acting, sets."

Roddenberry also was impressed with the man behind "Mission: Impossible 3" who decided to take on the 42-year-old Star Trek franchise.

"J.J. is such a regular guy, and seems so much like a fan because he gets it," Roddenberry said. "While he has to work the way you have to work in Hollywood and balance what the studio wants, he's really on the side of the fans. He really tries to stay true of the continuity and stay true to canon."

Roddenberry hasn't seen a script, and assumes that there will have to be some rule-bending here and there when it comes to canon, but he really liked what he saw, and says it's easier now to shrug off some of the questions he tends to get from Star Trek fans who ask why he isn't more involved in Star Trek.

"If they did every bring me in, I am concerned that I would be brought in for namesake only and wouldn't have any sort of creative control," Roddenberry said. "So I would say no if they came to me at that point."

Where Roddenberry really gets his inspiration, he told SyFy Radio, is from fandom -- something he finds a bit circular since it was his father who first inspired fandom, and now that same fandom is inspiring him. And for the past six years he's been trying to get that inspiration down into a documentary with Scott Colthorp called "Trek Nation" that celebrates the fan in a way the Trekkies documentaries never could.

"I wanted to show fans in a positive light," Roddenberry said. But with any creative process, there will always be different approaches to the material, and Colthorp wanted to explore the idea of having a son searching for his father while Roddenberry had his own ideas.

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