Alex Kurtzman
Alex Kurtzman is a writer, born 1973.
Kurtzman spent the 2000s writing very large films with Roberto Orci: Transformers (2007) and Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). The pair wrote fast and wrote for directors with strong hands, and their scripts tend to get judged by whose movie they became.
Directing came later and has not gone as far. People Like Us (2012), co-written with Orci and Jody Lambert, was the debut. The Mummy (2017) was the big swing, and our catalog holds no feature he has directed since.
What he did instead is more interesting. Kurtzman has spent well over a decade creating television: Fringe (2008), Hawaii Five-0 (2010), Transformers: Prime, Sleepy Hollow (2013), Clarice (2021), The Man Who Fell to Earth (2022). And then Star Trek, where he is the closest thing the franchise has to an author: Discovery (2017), Short Treks, Picard (2020), Strange New Worlds (2022).
That last group is the argument about him. The shows are wildly unalike, which is either a portfolio strategy or the absence of one, and viewers split along exactly that line. Strange New Worlds is the strongest case for his stewardship, Discovery the show that spent its early seasons working out what it was. Either way, modern Star Trek on television is his to answer for.
Movies (3)
TV (12)
Where to start with Alex Kurtzman
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is where to start, and not only because it is the best of the modern Trek shows. It states most clearly what his version of the franchise is for, which is episodic optimism with a very large budget.
If you want the writing rather than the empire, Fringe holds up better than its reputation, and People Like Us is the small personal drama that shows what he does with no spectacle to hide behind.
Then the two that divide people. Star Trek: Discovery is serialised, emotional and uneven from season to season. Star Trek: Picard is a show about getting old that rebuilt itself between seasons until it worked. The Mummy is the instructive failure, a monster movie assembled to launch something larger, and Sleepy Hollow is the daft one nobody expects to enjoy defending.
The Star Trek era
He runs the whole franchise now, which is an unusual amount of control for one producer. Discovery started the streaming era and divided everyone, Picard is the most argued-about, and Strange New Worlds is the one that finally worked.
Before Trek
Fringe is the best thing on this list by a distance, five seasons of science fiction that earned its ending. Hawaii Five-0 was the commercial hit, and The Mummy was meant to launch a shared monster universe and launched nothing.