Some years ago, when interviewing William Shatner, I asked the actor how he responds to those eager types who, on a daily basis, for more than four decades, have persisted in addressing him as “Captain Kirk”. With presence of mind, he said. “But usually, it’s, ‘Go f*** off.’ ”

Notwithstanding Shatner’s reputation as something of a curmudgeon, you can understand his reaction. In the mid-1960s, when they were auditioning for a low-budget space series, it’s unlikely that he, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley or any of the journeymen could possibly have imagined where their antics might lead. Certainly not to a future where middle-aged men who still live with their mums put on home-made outfits, attend conventions and order Aldebaran whisky in Klingon.

“The thing about Star Trek is, I was never really a big fan of it . . . it always felt like someone else’s show,” declares the director JJ Abrams. “The characters you’re always expected to care about in the series, I never found a way into.” Coming from the lips of the man charged with re-energising the Star Trek franchise, it will hardly be music to the fake Vulcan ears of the faithful. But Abrams has another message for the purists: “I say, don’t see the movie. Don’t waste your money. Just get angry.”

Weighing in at $150m, the new Star Trek film touches down amid fevered anticipation. Directed and co-produced by Abrams, it is entitled merely Star Trek — no colon, no subtitle — statement enough of its creator’s intent. Eschewing the flights of fancy that have left Star Trek spin-offs seeking out an audience, let alone new life, new civilisations, it’s a prequel to the definitive 1960s series and is set 10 years or so before the star-date of the original captain’s log.

Times Archive, 1976: Star Trek

What is the Starship Enterprise but America's unflawed vision of herself?

It’s a neat trick, combining a brand-new, high-tech adventure with those old familiar characters, albeit ones rebooted — and an impressive one. “We take the spirit of what was written 40 years ago and produce it with the relevance of today,” Abrams says. The film begins with young Kirk, Spock, Uhura and co working their way through the academy to take up their stations on the USS Enterprise — a sort of Fast Times at Starfleet High.

“Part of the fun of it was taking something that never really appealed to me,” says Abrams, “and making a version that would.”

Short, trendily bespectacled and a youthful 42, Jeffrey Jacob Abrams is a force to be reckoned with. The fast-talking wunderkind has become the consultant of choice when it comes to reinventing science fiction. Through television series such as Alias and Fringe, his monster shocker film Cloverfield, and his most celebrated brainchild, Lost, Abrams is a Spielberg for the new millennium. Three years ago, in his directorial debut, Abrams turned Mission: Impossible III into a $400m hit.

“The last thing in the world I thought I would be doing, if I got to direct another movie, was another sequel to a series based on a television show,” he chuckles. “But there were too many fun things in the script to not do it.”

Mirth is to the fore in Abrams’s new universe, and mercifully so. “My Galaxy Quest fear — which is a film I really like — is that if we don’t have humour in the movie, you will find humour in the movie.” (The 1999 film Galaxy Quest was a wonderful send-up of the whole Trekkie circus, involving the cast of a Trek-like TV series making guest appearances at a fan convention, only to be visited by real aliens who believe the show is a real-live transmission from an actual spacecraft.) While the Star Wars prequels, the most recent Bonds and Batman, even Harry Potter, have wallowed in the dark side, Abrams has kept it light.

“There are so many post-apocalyptic movies that there’s a sense of hopelessness,” he says. “As much as I want to see Terminator Salvation, it looks dark and heavy and brutal. There’s an optimism about Star Trek that’s very appealing. Even Star Wars was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Star Trek at least posited our future. We’re all going to be working together, not to go out and conquer other worlds, but to explore them.”

It was in 1960 that the writer/producer Gene Roddenberry came up with the idea of a bargain-basement space drama that would do away with the traditional galactic gimmicks of spacesuits, weightlessness and suchlike — the crew only going (and boldly) where the atmosphere was breathable and getting there by a process of “transporting”, obviating the expense of landing craft. Dispensing with encounters with little green men,

Roddenberry based his stories on the pioneer spirit of the Old West — the final frontier — placing the bulk of his drama in a 23rd-century living room, the bridge, each episode dealing with a moral conundrum.

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