Roberto Orci wrote, almost always with Alex Kurtzman, the small story inside the enormous one. When a director gave it room, as in Star Trek and Fringe, it held; when the machines took over, as in the second Transformers, it did not.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in the first season of Fringe, a programme about impossible things happening to bodies in Massachusetts stops being about the bodies. The scientist in the basement, John Noble's Walter Bishop, turns out to be the point, and what he once did to his son turns out to be the plot. That is the habit Roberto Orci brought to everything he wrote: a small story hidden inside a large one, with the large one there mainly to pay for it. He said as much. He and Alex Kurtzman would work out the character story first and then ask, in his words, "Could we isolate that character story and write it as a $500,000 indie?"
The two of them wrote together from the late 1990s, on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, and were running those programmes at 24. Alias followed in 2001, then the films: Mission: Impossible III (2006), Transformers (2007), and in 2009 both Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. They created Fringe with J.J. Abrams in 2008 and wrote the second Star Trek in 2013. The film partnership ended in 2014, and Orci went on to create Sleepy Hollow and Matador for television. He died in 2025.
The method needs a director willing to sit still for it. In Star Trek (2009) the script has to get a familiar crew into place quickly, and Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey cut it so that it does; the jokes and the friendships between Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are good enough that we wanted the film to slow down and let a conversation last. Fringe takes most of a season to become the better programme it was always going to be, and when it did we were more moved than a series that opens with a plane full of corpses had any business making us, because the story it turns out to be telling, a father, a son and what the father once did, is kinder than anything the pilot promised. Alias is the warning. The more its writers explain what the Renaissance prophet Rambaldi built, the less any of it matters, and we were happier once we stopped following.
It also needs the spectacle to wait, and Michael Bay does not wait. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) is 150 minutes of complication that never gives the fighting a purpose, and Shia LaBeouf's Sam and Megan Fox's Mikaela never become people we want to sit with between battles. There is no small story to be found under the metal. Critics have said the same about Orci's work more widely, that the emotional beats are familiar and sometimes glib and the blockbuster plotting tangled in the manner of the period. On the evidence of the second Transformers they are right. On the evidence of Star Trek they are about half right.
Watch Star Trek, and give Fringe the season it asks for. Leave the second Transformers to the machines; it is the one time the indie went in and did not come out.
Biography
Roberto Orci (20 July 1973 – 25 February 2025) was a Mexican-American screenwriter and producer. Born in Mexico City, he moved with his family to the United States as a child and later attended Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California, where he met his frequent collaborator Alex Kurtzman.
Orci began his career writing for television series including Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. With Kurtzman, he contributed to films such as Transformers (2007), Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and produced entries in the Now You See Me franchise, including Now You See Me (2013), Now You See Me 2 (2016) and Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025). He also worked on television series such as Fringe and Hawaii Five-0.
