Have you had trouble being convinced by the new Star Trek trailer because Captain Kirk isn’t in a wig and a girdle?

Us too. But hope is at hand. Even though Star Trek hasn’t been released yet, Paramount has hired a bunch of writers to script a sequel. This is obviously the start of a series of relentless, progressively worsening Star Trek movies that will end when the cast are tubby 70-year-olds who openly despise one another.

In the meantime, however, at least we have Chris Pine‘s album of spoken-word Bob Dylan interpretations to look forward to. Which is something.

It’s hard not to be excited by the prospect of a new Star Trek movie. Finally, a film that combines everything we love – aliens, plotlines that appear to be stolen from a decade-old episode of Hollyoaks, a soundtrack that’s identical to The Dark Knight‘s soundtrack and Eric Bana looking like dozed off in the middle of tattooing his own face. Star Trek is going to be awesome.

Or, alternatively, Star Trek is going to be terrible. We don’t know yet, because it isn’t being released for over a month. In fact, all we do know about Star Trek is that a) William Shatner isn’t in it, b) Simon Pegg‘s going to do an inexplicable accent in it and c) if it isn’t better than Watchmen, the planet will be swallowed up by the charred intestines of spontaneously-combusted geeks by May 9.

But Paramount must think that Star Trek is pretty decent – or at least that people will be stupid enough to go and see it – because it has already assembled a group of writers to start work on a sequel. The New York Daily News reports:

Paramount will release the first film May 8 and has already hired a team of writers to work on a follow-up screenplay, Variety reports.”Obviously we discussed ideas, but we are waiting to see how audiences respond next month,” said Damon Lindelof, one of three writers working on the new script. “With a franchise rebirth, the first movie has to be about origin. But with a second, you have the opportunity to explore incredibly exciting things. We’ll be ambitious about what we’ll do,” he said.

So nobody knows what Star Trek 2 is going to be about, but since Damon Lindelof from Lost is going to be writing it, we get the feeling that it’ll drag on for five years, have a second act that’s set in the 1970s for no good reason and generally be so maddening that people will either stop watching it halfway through or spend the majority of their lives posting half-baked, cack-handed theories about it on the internet.

However, some have suggested that Star Trek 2 will be a remake of The Wrath Of Khan. Obviously this is stupid, since that’s a story that’s already been told. But Star Trek 4 had better still be primarily about the logistics of manufacturing a vessel to contain a pair of time-travelling humpback whales, otherwise we’re going to be sorely pissed off.

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