Trek

LMAO. Hell no. I'm not one of the netizens of NF that will be going there. 

I don't recognise or care about anything with "Star Trek" on the label, or allegedly taking place in the Trek universe or a loosely-associated one, since "JJ Trek" in 2009. 

Vintage Trek, on the other hand, I still have a tremendous deal of affection for. When the heck are we gonna see DS9 and VGR in true (or even Ultra) HD? Grrgh!


Well, I knew this had to be the reason for your thread, as soon as I saw the relatively non-descript title. Indeed, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" has been spiffed-up, yet again, by the same people that did the earlier "Director's Edition", and the results are reportedly a bit of a shitshow a little bit mixed, yet again... *sigh*


I don't have a subscription to any streaming service. I don't even have a Blu-ray player. Somehow or another, I'll still try and see this. I mean, I'm a big TMP fan -- I just have to.

And yet, everything you've said seems in-sync with what I've been reading and hearing about, as well as the few bits 'n' pieces I've seen for myself (stills and video clips). Very disappointing that this same team has apparently produced another mixed bag. But, I guess, hardly surprising. Last time, back in 2001, they released what they claimed to be Robert Wise's "definitive" version, yet they didn't even clean up the fucking print. At least, not properly. It looked blatantly muddy with plenty of dirt and artifacting. And the DVD master itself (the film was only remastered in SD back then) also had really bizarre technical issues, like very obvious interlacing/distortion in various places -- interlacing, for a film transfer, released by a major studio, of a major title, in the digital remastering era. And that's without delving into some of the questionable VFX "additions" for that version. So the idea that these people would put out a consistent product, even decades later, was always going to be fanciful.

"Borderline egregious" sounds like a good description of the new version's alterations. That was my immediate and lasting impression of the San Francisco shots in the 2001 edition, as well as the tacky-looking nacelle behind Kirk, Spock, and McCoy when they sit and chat ("Will you please: Sit. Down.") in the officer's lounge; not to mention the fake-looking "wingwalk" sequence, where the steps cartoonishly form against the Enterprise's saucer, as Kirk and Co. head out to the V'Ger plaza near the climax of the movie (which you seem to be describing above). These may all have been improved since then (or not???), but still with many questionable aesthetic and technical choices outstanding. Indeed, the new version seems to have a throwback to the terrible animation of that aforementioned "walking to V'Ger" sequence, right at the very beginning; where the re-done opening titles "sparkle" (a cheesy "star" animation around the edges of the text as each title card flashes up). I read about this new change and then saw it with my own eyes: the sparkles occur at a low frame rate, looking incredibly cheap and distracting: a pretty big red flag. Why do something so markedly low-fi at the very start of what is meant to be a plush, spared-no-expense, 4K UHD release?

So, yeah, if the wingwalk sequence still looks like crap... That's not just embarrassing. It's unacceptable.

As for ruining the mystique of V'Ger: Unforgiveable. Although, in honesty, they already did that in the 2001 edition. There, they chose to show the internal spacecraft of V'Ger for the first time (and completely re-did that shot in this new version), because they ran out of time and money to do it properly in 1979 (it was planned). Unfortunately, they didn't really get the scale of V'Ger across as it prowls up to the Earth, even though original matte paintings existed to provide a reasonable sense of how it could be done. They simply weren't followed. So the shot lacked the gravitas it could -- and should -- have had. If they've botched it again, well... As I've been arguing, this is a pattern with them (no pun intended). 

Pattern because V'Ger "patterns" people in the movie.

*slow redlettermedia laugh*

HA-HA. HA-HA.

Although many ideas were tried out in the concept-painting phase for V'Ger when the film was originally being made (no-one really knew what the interior looked like since the script was extremely vague on details), the final realisation of V'Ger under the direction of Douglas Trumbull (RIP) and John Dykstra ended up shrouding much of V'Ger's innards in a beguiling, impenetrable haze. Thus, even when the Enterprise is flying intimately close to V'Ger's, ah... organs... a good deal of V'Ger's, er... modesty... is preserved. Which increases the mystique of the strange vessel a hundred-fold. I actually made a post about the lighting of V'Ger on The Trek BBS in 2009:

www.trekbbs.com/threads/for-tmp-fans-lighting-vger.106401/

Straight from there, the following link (archive link as the page is no longer accessible):

web.archive.org/web/20090510065956/https://www.barbeefilm.com/vgerpage02.htm

For all the detail and complexity of V'Ger that was considered in the conceptual phase or attempted in the model-building phase, this snatch of text is a neat reminder that much of it was never meant to be perceptible:


Mysteries within mysteries. Many people have rightly noted that V'Ger has a Byzantine, cathedral-like interior. We're never meant to grasp or see exactly what is going on. V'Ger, in many respects, could be considered a cinematic emanation of God. The V'Ger object is impossibly vast, surrounded by a cloud, contains a "record" of potentially the entire universe (or, indeed, multiple universes), and can even send reincarnated messengers to speak with the lowly "carbon units". Enterprise crewmembers are repeatedly shown looking transfixed when the Entrerprise penetrates the cloud layer; and Spock has something close to a religious vision, followed by a kind of spiritual rebirth, when he tries melding with V'Ger in a secret chamber (and is ejected to convey his revelation to his crewmates). The film deals in some pretty big concepts. While the success of Star Wars was the impetus for the troubled production (back and forth between a television series, a motion picture, and a TV movie) kicking into high-gear and finally becoming a feature film, TMP was artistically following much more in the footsteps of "2001" (there are many intertextual resonances: see Reply #168 by me on The Trek BBS that I made a couple of years ago in a separate thread). Partly because of Roddenberry, partly because of Trumbull -- and partly, perhaps, because you had a big-name director like Robert Wise working on the picture. 

Denuding V'Ger of its mystical raiment is almost sacrilegious. Especially when simplistic digital effects shots are used to convey a mighty vessel that, for most of the picture, is shown with cutting-edge late-1970s optical and chemical photography. The former is razor-sharp; almost, if you will, an affront to mystery. The latter offers a pellucid, dreamy quality bordering on the nightmareish. Much more what you would expect when moving toward the divine (religious texts are nothing if not violent; and religious revelation in the ancient world was intimately tied up with mania and epileptic seizures -- analogised in the film with Spock getting overloaded and knocked unconscious when he tries melding with V'Ger: in some ways, this is the true climax of the movie, with the rest functioning as commentary). 

I'm not sure that the people that put this new version together understand the real visionary nature of the film. They weren't there when it was being made; and they seem to lack a subtle, gentle touch. Great care should have been taken to get this thing right. Fans have waited four decades to see the film released in a knock-out version; with all the intricacy and grace that the original had or fell slightly short of.

Instead, what we appear to have been landed with -- what the film may always be stuck with (no matter how many more revisions are crowd-attempted in the future) -- is some odd chimera. Some parts of the movie are alleged to look and sound very nice now. The new version is actually being hailed as a major improvement in the aural department (dialogue has been significantly cleaned up and the music track has supposedly never sounded better). Colours and tones seem very film-like and on-point in many places. On the other hand, scenes and shots are now alleged to be a little inconsistent in places (as you said), and there's possibly heavy grain reduction in places. Then there are the new effects and even old ones not getting any noticeable clean-up (e.g., matte lines around many ships in the film's opening space scenes). They have put a new matte painting of the Earth into those early scenes, but the ugly, weird matte lines remain around all the spacecraft! It just seems... odd. George Lucas fixed this problem in the 1990s, for Pete's sake.

All that said:

It'll be nice to watch this later in the year. It's been a while since I sat down with TMP and watched it from start-to-finish. For all the flaws with this new version, it'll probably be close to impossible to return to earlier versions. I've always liked the additional "Director's Edition" material. Especially Spock's tear for V'Ger. I'm shocked that was never included originally. No wonder Leonard Nimoy felt his contributions were ignored and that the film was, in his estimation, a "beached whale". A harsh assessment and not one I really agree with. Nevertheless, because the film was rush-released into theaters due to a distribution deal that Paramount was legally bound to honour, corners were cut and it didn't receive the fine-tuning it needed. The "Director's Edition" at least tightened up the editing and introduced a little bit more character detail along the way. Great! But many of the choices made, especially with regard to the new shots, stuck out like a sore thumb in 2001 -- and it sounds like that is still the case, more or less, in this 2022 release.

Perhaps it is time to accept that TMP is a strange film document and frustratingly incomplete. Like V'Ger itself. And we should love it regardless. As a science-fiction feature -- certainly: as Star Trek doing big-screen science-fiction -- the film remains a beautiful exception (nothing of its like would be attempted today). TMP, along with "2001", is very nearly as good as it gets.

Hey, not much wrong with your memory. The Spock tear moment is so vital, it feels like it's always been a part of the movie. The other moment you cite is the only other "major" character addition I can recall off the top of my head. Truth be told, there wasn't that much added. It was just a few little things here and there. For instance, prior to McCoy beaming to the Enterprise, there's a funny moment with a cute ensign and a small ensemble arriving first, and Kirk asking: "What was the problem down there?" The ensign states that the irascible doctor wanted to first see how the transporter scrambled their molecules. Although, one of the things that makes this whole scene weird, even in the original where McCoy is shown beaming straight to the pad without that preceding exchange, is that there is a horrifying transporter pad accident five minutes before -- a rare occasion where Trek goes full-on David Lynch as two Starfleet personnel (one of whom is the Vulcan science officer Kirk speaks to at Starfleet Headquarters) are trapped in the transporter beams and bizarrely (and fatally) deformed. To suddenly have humour there in the same location, about the unreliability of the transporter of all things, feels a little strange. But that's TPM for you.

Oh, and the cold computer voice in the original cut is awesome, especially in that gruesome moment.

"Malfunction... Malfunction..."

Yeesh. 

(On the other hand, that scene so needs to be turned into a meme of Disney's handling of Star Wars). 


Hmm. On paper, I'm with you. I'm just not sure of what the exact situation is. I read some edits might have been applied, but then something else I read suggested a slight expansion in the Spock Walk sequence? Or not? I'm presently confused on the matter. The only thing I can say in their defence is that Robert Wise intended to trim down some sequences originally -- and Jerry Goldsmith supposedly built a certain level of repetition/redundancy in his score to make that possible (mainly in the V'Ger flyover sequences). So edits were very much anticipated back in 1979. However, yes: the film is basically a symphonic masterpiece, the Star Trek version of "Fantasia", and any carving up of its musical sublimity is an abomination to even think about.  


Wat Tambor.

Hey, Mister Tambourine Man...



Which William Shatner himself did a cover of:



Anyway, sorry -- WHAT?! 

Yeah, exactly. And it's in turquoise. FFS.

I suppose I kinda dig the "clamshell" light effect. I mean, it's a little evocative of the famous painting:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus

Venus/V'Ger. Pretty neat.

And V'Ger's representative: Ilia. A sensual Deltan. Who is sent back to the Enterprise naked. In a shower. Her bald head clearly evokes nudity, too. And she spends the rest of the movie in a bathrobe. 

But I agree with what you're saying. The original shows the V'Ger plaza as a haunting, far-off location: a blazing beacon at some almost unreachable distance -- as majestic, untouchable, and undeniable as a star. A perfect encapsulation of how the V'Ger entity, much like the universe itself, is always beckoning humanity on.

I have no idea what the hell that is in the new version. There is also pretty obvious colour-banding now. Why the heck couldn't they massage and diffuse the light a bit? This is the age of HDR, after all. Instead, they went with some weird, awkward, tacky blob effect. Effin' stupid. 


Nice thoughts. And yeah, that's been said about the original matte painting before: that it's like some trippy LP cover art or gauche 1950s science-fiction magazine cover. Yesteryear eccentricities are definitely baked into the original version of TPM. Roddenberry himself, let's not forget, was a former cop turned beatnik radical -- very much on the free-love/sex-maniac side of life (and an avowed atheist, too). The only other film he has his name to (as writer/producer/director) is a sex comedy. And the TPM novelisation is the only novel he ever wrote.

In that, GR goes a little into the "New Human" movement, which gives a little background to Decker's character. Roddenberry imagined that the human race would become very open about sexuality in the future, even trying to link consciousnesses in a kind of cultivated, collective orgy of minds -- kinky Buddhism; or the Borg without their technocratic, assimilate-and-conquer mentality. I can't remember all the details, but Decker was either a little freaked out by it all, or thought that a career in Starfleet suited him better (Starfleet is meant to be for the ambitious savages of the human race). So he broke off his ties with the New Human movement and with Ilia (who is a Deltan, whose role race is basically at the New Human level, or beyond). Hence, their "fusing" at the end of the film is Decker completing his own programming, picking up where he left off, pointing the way toward a deeper future for human (or human-machine) consciousness.

On the other hand, this ending was only developed late in the scripting process, long after filming was underway (and the novel was written to flesh out and justify those latter decisions). TPM is well-known for its tumultuous production, which included cameras rolling with a script that essentially lacked a compelling ending, with copious notes and memos about how it ought to end or might end, and even William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy got in on the action after they received limited script approval rights. But what a bravissimo ending they all eventually came up with! This was a movie in need of, well, a climax -- and it got one. One person involved in the production dubbed it (sources differ as to whether it was a Paramount executive or possibly Alan Dean Foster who wrote the story treatment TMP is based on) "the forty-million dollar fuck". 

Anyway, a quixotic hankering for a bygone era isn't necessarily a bad thing. But you don't need me to tell you that. I'm extremely fond of the "distorts the very dimension of reality itself" readings of TPM. I mean, it's even brought up in the discussion at the end at the V'Ger plaza, when Decker himself (aptly enough), rebutting McCoy's characteristically limited refrain: "What more is there than the universe, Spock?" responds: "Other dimensions. Higher levels of being." You can totally read the film that way and have it make more sense. Indeed, it makes a lot more sense, when you do.



LMAO.

(Is there an echo?).

But seriously, I only saw your sneaky text in this editing/reply phase. I was about to respond all serious 'n' shit: "I have no idea. I let people form their own opinions and don't bark at them for having different ones." But then, that isn't entirely true. 

Just... look. I dunno. Star Trek isn't what it once was. We can probably all agree on that. It had its Silver and Golden Ages. This is more like its Bronze or Piss-Yellow Age. I don't mean to be harsh. It just doesn't interest me very much. Maybe this is how many prequel fans feel about Disney Wars. Oh, well.

Cryogenic
Here's a Ranking of all the ST shows by Entertainment Weekly
ew.com/tv/best-star-trek-series-ranked/

Muli Khan the Magnificent.