Jennifer Garner gasps for air as thugs dunk her head in a toilet. Dazed survivors stagger through the wreckage of Oceanic Air Flight 815. Philip Seymour Hoffman screams at a battered Tom Cruise, “Where’s the rabbit’s foot?” A Manhattan going-away party is interrupted by…something big. Nearly every story by geek-god superproducer J.J. Abrams—including his radical new Star Trek—begins mid-action, with some intense havoc. His stories grab you by the throat and throttle you to attention.

It’s just one reason Abrams has become this generation’s George Lucas or Steven Spielberg: an unrepentant geek thriving in the thick of pop culture. So, with apologies to the master, this story about the rebooter of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible III, cowriter of Armageddon, and creator of Lost, Alias, Cloverfield, and Fringe begins the same way.

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