Nero’s Mining Ship = the Death Star
The Mining Ship is more armored, more advanced than anything Starfleet has.
The Death Star is more armored and advanced than anything the Rebel Fleet has.
Death Star blows up Alderaan. Mining Ship implodes Vulcan.
Death star tries to blow up Rebel base on Yavin. Mining ship tries to blow up Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco.

Kirk = Luke Skywalker
Kirk is a farmboy in rural Iowa, being raised by his uncle. Luke is a farmboy on rural Tatooine being raised by his uncle.

Kirk has a destiny = Luke has a destiny.
(Destiny is a religious concept. It implies a Creator, an Intelligent Designer. So New Trek is now Christian-friendly, unlike Old Trek. This means a MUCH LARGER potential audience, which translates into more money for Paramount. In Old Trek, gods were nothing more than big alien bullies who liked to pick on less advanced races.)

Captain Pike = Ben Kenobi
Captain Pike tells Kirk to use his instincts. Ben Kenobi tells Luke to trust his feelings.
Captain Pike saves Kirk in a fight in a bar. Ben saves Luke in a fight in the cantina bar.
Pike sacrifices himself by surrendering himself to Nero. Ben sacrifices himself by going to fight Vader.
Pike turns into a crippled Admiral who can continue to advise Kirk. Ben turns into a ghost who can continue to advise Luke.

Warp Drive = Hyperspace
Warp Drive now resembles Star Wars’ Hyperspace - completely unlike the Warp Drive we have seen in previous Treks.

Spock = Princess Leia
Spock’s mom dies when Vulcan get imploded. Leia’s father gets blown up when Alderaan is exploded.
(Leia appears tougher than Spock, though- she keeps her shit together.)

Scotty = C3PO
Scotty’s short little non-speaking friend equals R2D2. They provide comedy.

Kirk = Han Solo
Kirk is now a lovable bad boy who refuses to play by the rules. Han Solo was a lovable bad boy smuggler who refused to play by the rules.

Luke/Han/Leia = Kirk/Spock/Uhura
Every space adventure needs a romantic triangle.

Dr. McCoy = Chewbacca
Chewie is Han’s sidekick, always muttering and complaining. Dr. McCoy is Kirk’s sidekick, always muttering and complaining.
(In the original series, Kirk Spock and McCoy had more equal roles, sadly in the new film, McCoy is just a sidekick.)

Spock = Luke Skywalker
Spock pilots the small spaceship that brings down the Mining Ship, Luke pilots the tiny ship that brings down the Death Star.

Enterprise = Millennium Falcon
The Millennium Falcon shows up in the nick of time to enable Luke to destroy the Death Star. The Enterprise shows up in the nick of time to enable Spock to destroy the Mining Ship.

Kirk gets a medal and applause from Starfleet = Han and Luke get medallions and applause by gathered assembly of Rebel fleet

Star Trek is Empire Strikes Back

Ice planet = Hoth
Snow monster = Wampa

Old Spock = Yoda
Ice Planet = Dagobah
After Pike sacrifices himself, Kirk is without a wise old mentor until Old Spock shows up on the ice planet.
After Ben Kenobi sacrifices himself, Luke is without a mentor until Ben’s ghost tells him to go find Yoda on Dagobah.

Star Trek is Phantom Menace

Scotty = Jar Jar

Nero = Darth Maul
Both guys are bald and have face tattoos. And they are both evil.

Bigger snow monster eats smaller snow monster - Star Trek
Bigger sea monster eats smaller sea monster - Phantom Menace

Star Trek = Next Generation
Chekov = Wesley Crusher

Last time, I looked at a brand new open-source effort, Celtx. It was still very young, and not able to meet my needs. Well, I checked back, and downloaded the new 1.0 version. It’s very good, especially for being free, and shows a lot of promise. I firmly believe that this program could be THE FUTURE of screenplay writing software, especially if more developers begin to support the celtx file format. However, for me Celtx still has some serious drawbacks.

I found typing a script in Celtx to be quite tedious, though much better than using an ordinary word processor. I found myself typing about twice as much to get the same amount of work done, and I found it slightly buggy (though not fatally so) when formatting text. Also, it doesn’t give you a running page count - this is a very important feature, as we all know that one page equals one minute of screen time.

The most worrisome omission from a producer’s standpoint, though, is the inability to lock your script. While I can forgive this feature not being there in a 1.0 product, an entry on the site’s wiki states that the software’s creators don’t plan on offering it, and don’t consider it an important feature! Script locking is one of the most important tools you can have when producing a film or TV series - it allows rewrites to happen and guarantees that everybody in the cast and crew are working on the same version of the script. Without this feature, Celtx will NEVER become a serious tool for film production. I repeat, NEVER. Hopefully the developers will change their minds.

Celtx has a lot of other cool features, the best being that it runs on many platforms. If you have no money at all, you can’t beat the price (FREE). I will probably continue using it myself, just so I can collaborate on scripts with my less-wealthy friends on some comic-book projects.

My writing software of choice remains Movie Magic Screenwriter, now in version 6.0. It’s expensive, but solid. Final Draft is still the king, and in basic usability is almost identical to Movie Magic. A new entry in the field is Montage, but it is Mac-only, which keeps me from considering it seriously.

The world still lacks an Open Screenplay Format. Each program out there saves in its own, proprietary format. Some headway has been made in the programs importing the competition’s formats, but what we need is a universal, open format. PDF is useless in this regard - the best we have right now is RTF, which is sadly lacking.