Why was the budget for The Final Frontier reduced?

How soon we forget "marsh-melons."

Honestly, those campfire scenes make me cringe. Thank God (or "God") that we got THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY so that Star Trek's proud history didn't end with a rousing rendition of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

 

Oh, I dunno... "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" played on a Vulcan lyre was rather nifty.

(hey, I have to find something nice to say about this ridiculous movie that has the honor of being the only one I nearly walked out of when I saw it in the theatre)

If you're giving a Star Trek party, you can make "marshmelons" with a bit of food coloring or icing (haven't actually tried it so am unsure of which method would work best). Just get a bag of ordinary white marshmallows and paint them to look like little watermelons.

 

While I agree that would be a bad place to end, the marsh melons thing was fine..
Dependent on a deleted scene, but also works fine if you assume like everything else on the ship, the computers broken.

Ending on clapped out ship would also be terrible.

 

Shatner is a mixed bag with this film. He strenuously wanted Sybok to win over Spock which would've frankly ruined this film. It was only through Nimoy's strenuous objections that Shatner eventually relented.

They were also stuck with the FX company as the Industrial Light and Magic lot were off doing Indy and Ghostbusters and apparently there was noone else around. .

 

Which would have fit with the often suggested theory (which I happen to agree with) that "The One" is actually a renegade Cytherian who was imprisoned in the center of the galaxy.

And I believe the novelization does suggest that "The One" was indeed actually influencing Sybok throughout his whole life.

 

Yes back then it really had to be ILM especially for space FX. Nowadays theres more choice of FX houses equal to ILM

 

The Galileo shuttlecraft model had nacelles that were short in height whereas both of the full-scale Galileo shuttlecraft mock-ups had the proper nacelles in dimensions that replicated the 1701-A nacelles. [To be accurate as on TOS, both the 1701 and shuttles had nacelles that looked similar.]

model:
http://www.thelogbook.com/earl/hizzouse/q2-06/1701a02.jpg

full-scale mock-up:
http://www.startrek.com/legacy_media/images/200511/mov-005-disembark-galileo/320x240.jpg

 

Maybe Shatner figured the audience was starting to laugh at them for their ages anyway (esp. with the new youngsters on TV) and figured he'd get out in front of it, show the ol' gang could laugh at their own wrinkles and gray hairs too.

 

Again, not true. The third string crew had been offered(these are the guys that did "Spaced Invaders" on the downlow at that time), but Shatner wanted a first string team. Of course, Bran Ferren's first string was everyone else's seventh string, but that's why it looks so bad.

I've said before that Bran Ferren made a habit of having one great effect in a film full of crap, and it was never for the scene that needed a big effect. In STV, the big effect was Kirk falling off El Capitan, when it needed to be Kirk fighting the Rockmen. In another film called Second Sight, the big effect they did was Bronson Pinchot flying around the room acting like Peeves the Poltergeist, when it needed to be the scene with the jetliner driving around the streets of Boston(an effect they did by, no joke, scratching the emulsion off the film with a ball point pen).

 

Kirk falling off of El Capitan is your example of good effects work in STV? You mean the scene where his jacket blatantly changes color because of bad blue screen/color correction work? That's one of the worst effects in the film!

 

Ferren's "one great effect" was the planet as seen from space.

Virtually everything else was crap. The animation effects. The strobey motion control shots. The works.

I saw this movie when it opened. It was embarrassing then and it's embarrassing now.

 

The idea of a false-prophet leading people to their doom was done already on TOS, one of the worst (but amusing) episodes, The Way to Eden.

The fact is that it would have been very difficult to find a way to extend the character arcs of the TOS crew after Trek IV. They eventually found a vehicle with Trek VI, but it was not easy.

When you move from TV to film, it really does demand more core character arc movement. The reason the last X-Film movie flopped, for instance, was that it didn't really tie into the mythology and was really just an extended episode.

All the prior Trek films had higher personal stakes. Trek IV was kind of an extended epilogue of Trek III, with the crew just happening to need to save the world which then grants them a lenient "sentence" for stealing the Enterprise.

It's only when you get to Trek V where it seems like there really isn't much story left to tell. If they had decided to finally do a TOS series (ala Phase II) that would have been a good time to do it.

Introducing a long lost brother felt much too contrived. It was bad enough to insert an old flame and an illegitimate kid in Wrath of Khan, but to continue adding relatives we've never heard of before just strained credulity.

Really, once you get a certain point in a franchise you need to know when the well has gone dry. So it's not even a problem of the writers as much as the business decision to move ahead in the first place. The odds of coming up with a script that could extend these characters for one more film were stacked against them.

 

True, but he did co-write the story, and as the film's director, was closely involved with the development of the script with screenwriter David Loughery.

 

You're right. Not the best example. But still funny.

 

Wasn't that done by just dangling them over a treadmill with mountain texture on? No cso?

 

Nope.

What's does CSO mean?