Things are starting to get exciting with regards to J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek sequel. Not only has a release date been set, and plans for a 3D conversion been revealed, but the project finally has who we suspect to be the villain in the shape of Benedict Cumberbatch.

“He’s a genius,” said Abrams of Cumberbatch in an interview with Collider. “Honestly, he’s just an incredible actor. If you’ve seen his work in Sherlock, he’s just got incredible skills. He’s an amazing stage actor. He did amazing work in Frankenstein. He’s brilliant. You try to cast people who are great. We got lucky.”

And as for the plot, Abrams is looking forward to delving deeper into the universe established by the first film.

“I think the job of the first movie was just to establish it,” he explains. “I don’t want to give anything away, but I would say that the burden we had in the first movie was just existing at all. With this movie, instead of having to stand on the shoulders of the original series, we built a little bit of a platform for us, with the last movie, to tell this story.”

And then there’s the 3D. According to Abrams, he was never that keen on the technology until seeing segments of the first movie that had been given the treatment…

“I did not fight for the 3D,” he says. “It was something that the studio wanted to do, and I didn’t want to do it. And then, when I saw the first movie converted in sections, I thought that it actually looked really cool. So, I was okay with their doing it, as long as I could shoot the movie the way I wanted to, in anamorphic film, and then let them convert it. So, those who want to see it in 3D, which looked pretty cool, can do it, and those that want to see it in 2D can do that too.”

Star Trek 2 will be released in the US on 17 May 2013, with a UK release date to be confirmed.

Source: Collider