Trivia: During the Battle of Vulcan, as Sulu goes under a piece of another starship, you can see R2-D2 go flying past just over his shoulder. (00:47:35)
Trivia: Mr. Scott has a pet tribble, it can bee seen in his lab on Delta Vega in a cage by his desk. If you listen you can hear the signature sounds of a cooing tribble. (01:23:10)
Trivia: Uhura picks up a transmission about a Klingon prison planet. This is Rura Penthe and was seen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The warden of Rura Penthe was played by William Morgan Sheppard, who plays the head of the Vulcan Science Council in this movie. (00:30:45)
Trivia: One very unusual filming location used in the movie - the Budweiser Brewery in Van Nuys California. When Kirk wakes up in sickbay he runs through the ship and finds Uhura in a room with several large horizontal silver tanks. These are the lagering tanks that contain the chips used for beechwood aging. The engine room looks like a factory filled with huge vertical tanks. In the movie they supposedly contain engine coolant; in reality they are Budweiser's primary fermentation tanks where yeast is added to turn sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol. (00:43:50 - 01:27:50)
Trivia: To perfect Scotty's accent, Simon Pegg practised with his wife Maureen, who is from Glasgow. (01:23:15)
Trivia: According to the DVD commentary, Bones' line about being left essentially nothing in his divorce was improvised by Karl Urban. (00:27:40)
Trivia: To practice the Vulcan hand salute, Zachary Quinto used rubber bands to separate his fingers. He couldn't quite perfect it without them, so he ended up having his fingers glued together. (01:55:10)
Trivia: The Planet Delta Vega on which Kirk is marooned by Spock is a reference to the original series episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" in which Kirk was faced with the choice of marooning his friend Gary Mitchell on the deserted planet Delta Vega after Gary obtained Godlike powers and became a threat to the Enterprise. That Delta Vega was close the the edge of the Galaxy however, not near Vulcan, which is 16 light years from Earth. (01:12:05)
Trivia: Winona Ryder plays Zachary Quinto's mother in the movie, even though in real life she's only five years older than him.
Trivia: According to the Blu-Ray DVD special features, the Enterprise is about twice as big as the Enterprise from the TV series. (00:39:00)
Trivia: The Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park in northern Los Angeles County, California, was once again used to depict the surface of Vulcan, as it was in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). The Vasquez Rock was also used in the "Arena" episode of the original series. The rock formations were named after a bandit that used them to elude capture in 1873. (00:44:30 - 00:58:50)
Trivia: When Uhura is ordering drinks at the bar, the bartender prompts her with a suggestion of a Slusho drink. Slusho was part of the viral campaign for Cloverfield, another JJ Abrams movie. (00:20:20)
Trivia: When the crew is discussing the possibility of an Alternate Reality, Spock says, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This is actually a quote from Sherlock Holmes, found in The Sign of Four. Spock also says the same line during the investigation of the Klingon Chancellor's death in "The Undiscovered Country". (01:09:40)
Trivia: Good friend and oft-collaborator of JJ Abrams Greg Grunberg (who worked with Abrams on Felicity, Alias, What About Brian and Mission Impossible: 3) makes an audio cameo as the voice of James T. Kirk's stepfather, who calls the young Kirk on his car phone. (00:12:15)
Trivia: This is Leonard Nimoy's first live-action feature film since Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991, and the first time he has played Spock since that film, as well; his appearance in a two-part episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" pre-dated the film's release by a week. (01:15:15)
Trivia: Simon Pegg did not have to audition for the role of Scotty. Director J.J. Abrams contacted him via e-mail, offering him the part.
Trivia: In the scene where Bones and Kirk board the Enterprise, they enter the medical bay. As they walk through the doors, to the right of the screen on the wall is a very futuristic looking device. In reality, this is a Dyson airblade hand dryer you can find in public bathrooms. (00:41:35)
Answer: There was a scene cut from the movie that shows Nero being held in Rura Penthe, the klingon prison planet that was attacked in the transmission that Uhura intercepted and translated. The attack was the Narada crew coming to free their commander. And if you were to read the Countdown comic book that is used to give back story to Nero and his relationship with Spock, you'd see that the Narada originally looked nothing like what we see in this film. It was more utilitarian. But after the destruction of Romulus, Nero and crew come across a Romulan space station that is taking in refugees from the doomed planet. They had been working on some technology reverse engineered from Borg technology. Nero offered his ship as a test candidate as they were looking to start field testing it on a ship at that time. And as far as waiting for Spock, it could have been a simple thing to calculate the time and place of Spock's arrival using temporal mechanics based on the size and intensity of the singularity that sent them there, and an educated guess of when Spock entered the anomaly based on the telemetry they had at the moment they entered in themselves. They've had 25 years to wait and calculate what they needed to know.
Garlonuss ★