Criticism quickly gave way to screenplays, and though Kurtzman and Orci went to different colleges, they continued to work together over the phone and during summer vacations. After graduation, Kurtzman got a job at Sam Raimi’s Renaissance Pictures, which was then known as the home of syndicated series like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Kurtzman and Orci wrote an episode on spec, then were commissioned to write two more; by the following year, they were the show’s head writers. From there, the duo jumped to J.J. Abrams’ spy show Alias; three seasons later, they made a further jump to big-screen work.
Kurtzman and Orci’s work is easily identifiable, regardless of director, by the themes they weave through one screenplay after another. The most common and important is their fascination—or perhaps obsession—with shadowy conspiracies. Nearly every one of their films feature protagonists working to expose corrupt companies or governments. In The Island, a couple discover they are actually “products” of an amoral biotech company that’s been housing and deceiving their illegal clones in an underground facility. In Transformers, Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky finds a hidden race of robots, along with a classified branch of the military known as Sector 7 that’s covertly reverse-engineered every technological breakthrough of the last century. Star Trek Into Darkness has the crew of the starship Enterprise uncovering a traitor in Starfleet, who is using an unfrozen tyrant from the past to destabilize the galaxy and bring about a war between the Federation and the Klingons. And in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy battle the unholy creations of Oscorp, New York City’s leading technology company.
Over the years, Kurtzman and Orci’s screenplays have been criticized for their absurd twists and gaping holes of logic. The duo tend to write films, like Star Trek Into Darkness, that are thrilling to watch, but instantly collapse under the slightest bit of post-screening scrutiny. Many of their plots are ridiculous, and complicated to the point of incomprehensibility. The first Transformers, for example, follows no fewer than four different strains of parallel action, several of which dead-end long before the finale. The second Transformers, Revenge Of The Fallen, is more focused but also stupider, with robots that look and talk like racist caricatures, lowbrow slapstick and bodily function humor, and scenes that start on one side of the United States (in Washington D.C.’s Air And Space Museum) and inexplicably end on the other (the Air Force Boneyard in Tucson, Arizona). Calling these choices lowest-common-denominator is an insult to fractions.
For as long as he was in the film I don't mind him not talking.
