So following the semi-interesting news that Eric Bana (Munich) will be playing the bad guy in the new Star Trek movie, shit just got genuinely interesting. (Well, it did if you’re a huge fucking nerd. Which I am. And I’ll assume you are too, considering you saw that headline and continued reading.)

Okay, so: Simon Pegg—he of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz—has just been cast as Scotty, while John Cho (yep, Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) has nabbed the role of Sulu. They join Bana, Heroes’ Zachary Quinto as Spock, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, and Leonard Nimoy as… uh, Spock. Again. Also. As well. The full story from (where else?) the Sci Fi Wire is here.

Man, Simon Pegg as Scotty is just flat-out awesome. The dude’s excellent in everything I’ve seen him in (esp. Shaun and Fuzz), and I think he’ll be a really great Scotty—smart and witty and trustworthy. Also, I’m looking forward to hearing him shout about how he canna do something. I hope it’s something important that he canna do, and I hope he does na ha enough time to do it, and I’ll bet you a billion dollars he does it anyway. This is because in the future, Scottish spaceship engineers will have magical, wizard-like powers. They will steal them from the Irish leprechauns in the surprisingly brutal Adorable Accents of the United Kingdom Wars of 2087.

And I really like the John Cho casting, too. George Takei’s Sulu was always the weakest link in the original series’ cast (well, maybe Uhura was weaker), and somebody as likeable and earnest as Cho will go a long way in making the character stand out. Esp. if, like Takei had to do in that one amazing episode, Sulu does the thing where he gets the crazy-making disease that’s transmitted by SWEAT and he tears off his shirt and runs around with a fencing foil trying to kill everyone and basically acting super, super gay. Looking back, that’s probably the best scene that’s ever been on television. Also looking back, anyone who was surprised that Takei turned out to be super, super gay is an idiot.

Maybe most importantly, both of these casting choices just seem really sharp. They fit, but I don’t think they were what anybody was expecting. That’s kind of how I felt about the whole Star Trek project when I heard J.J. Abrams was going to be in charge of it, but so far the casting (w/ the exception of Nimoy, maybe) hasn’t really been that intriguing. But these two choices make me pretty curious about what might be happening here.

At this point, the only big casting question marks that remain are Kirk and Bones. I always thought Matt Damon would be a great Kirk, but with how the casting seems to be going, Damon’s probably too old for this crew of the Enterprise (GO BACK TO DRINKING YOUR PRUNE JUICE OLD MAN), and I have no idea who could play Bones, aside from the Mercury’s bearded newsman, Scott Moore. (Alas, I recall that Moore, while trimming his lustrous, mighty beard one summer afternoon, told me that no matter what “them liberal L.A. fat cats” paid him, he “wouldn’t never go to no Hollywood, no way no how.”) Anybody got any other ideas who they should cast? I guess we’ll find out who’s playing them soon enough; Star Trek starts shooting next month, for a Christmas Day 2008 release.