... Ain't It Cool News thought they had seen footage of the movie long before the release? http://www.aintitcool.com/node/37648
I remember reading the very beginning of this, then stopping because I didn't want to ruin the movie. I'd totally forgotten about it. Someone has a big imagination.
I loved the confusion with the enemy ship's name: Sunfire? Sunflower? That's exactly the uncertainty you'd get in that situation and it's an exquisitely convincing detail. "Mr. Atoz" get's a gold star for creative writing.
The USS Sunflower piloted by Philip J. Fry!!! What is this, a bad acid trip? Spelling sprawling all over the floor!!!! I'm glad I never saw that story. I was pretty psyched for the movie but if I'd read that "preview," I would have been in tears.
It could be that this guy read a very early draft and made up the story of having seen real footage. I read somewhere that originally, Orci & Kurtzman wrote an entirely different beginning in which the original Enterprise under the command of Pike was destroyed by Nero, but that Paramount vetoed that idea.
Yea for WILD SPECULATION ! I love how stuff like this magically shows up online long before a film's release, then once the film is out it's way different then the WILD SPECULATION you read months earlier online.... Both Battle For L.A. & Skyline are going through this phase right now, even tho' both won't be out 'till early & mid 2011 ! Note, this stuff is happening because more films are taking the J.J Abrams approach to not tell folks a blasted thing online, just dropping teeny tiny hints here & there about the project, then giving us Teaser Trailers of footage that may have stuff in them that WON'T be in the film itself as it hasn't even been shot yet ! Super 8, anyone, anyone ?
It was the Enterprise under Captain April that was to be destroyed in the opening. Presumably the idea's from the old novel Final Frontier, where George Kirk was first officer under April when the Enterprise was launched.
That would have been even better, because I liked Pike's role in the movie. And the sight of the ORIGINAL Enterprise (only slightly updated for the big screen) getting destroyed in the first 5-10 minutes of the movie, explaining A LOT more of the changes, would have won me over instead of putting me off like the first ten minutes of the real movie.
You can see in early drawings and memos that the Kelvin was originally the "U.S.S. Iowa" - an in-joke nod to the notion of Kirk being "from Iowa." I wish they'd kept that.
Plus the early drawings looked a lot more like TOS designs. A shame they felt the need to change that. I can imagine Abrams looking at the concept art saying "It's too clean and smooth, it needs more dirt and weathering and some harsher edges." thinking "Just like in **** **** tehehe."
Excerpts from that interview here. (The whole thing is available here.) In a nutshell: I don't think you were around (here) yet when an early batch of location spy photos turned up - these were from what we would now recognize as the Starfleet shipyard in Riverside, Iowa. A few folks (here) took one look at the dusty apparatus and scuffed-up, dirty shuttle and reacted in horror: "Oh, my God! J.J. Abrams thinks he's making ****ing Battlestar Galactica!!" Many jokes along the lines of "Star Trek: now with 80% more dirt!" ensued.
That link reminds me of that first blurry phone-photo of Kirk in his cadet reds - only nobody knew it was cadet gear back then and people thought they were either the new uniforms (complete with "how dare they go to TNG-style command red!"-type comments) or that young Kirk was a redshirt at this stage of his career. IIRC there was a similar blurry pic of Spock in his sweater from the scene where he tells Sarek and co. he's joining Starfleet, but from the angle you couldn't tell it was a sweater and people thought it was something like his burial robe from STIII. Everyone was all "OMG he looks just like Nimoy!" I remember thinking at the time that JJ had the pics leaked out on purpose to drum up publicity.