Welcome to Thunderdome

Cowriter Damon Lindelof explains how the production design is even more impressive this time around:

"It was incredible, and I think that Trek 2 — there's certainly an instinct to just go bigger in the second movie and one of the things that we did was we connected all the sets, so you can just basically follow the actors off the bridge, into a turbo lift, down, walking through a plaza, into the med bay as opposed to [having to] cut every time you do that, because when we were shooting on the Paramount stages we just didn't have the money to connect all the sets. So the first day that I actually walked on the Enterprise, you walked through the Enterprise and it's a very insular experience of like, ‘Wow I'm actually on a starcraft.'"

He also offers plenty of praise for the cast:

"And then when you see all the actors again, and Kirk in his yellow — which we only really see at the very, very end of the first movie — and start playing those interactions between he and Bones, he and Scotty, Spock and Bones, etc. And then bringing in some new blood, Alice Eve is awesome. Benedict Cumberbatch, I can already say with a certain degree of confidence that he is gonna give an iconic film performance and one of the best sci-fi performances that I've ever seen. And not even having seen the movie yet, just sitting there in video village with the headphones on. So I'm really psyched."