Hope i'm not stepping on any toes. It has always puzzled me that at the start of Star Trek lV ( The voyage home) The scene is of i assume a court room filled with dignitaries from and through out the Universe. My point is. How did they get a copy of Star Trek lll ( The Search for Spock ) As it is the film footage they are clearly watching in order to seal Captain Kirk and his crews fate. I am not at all criticizing any part of the movies, I just wondered if anyone else has had the same thought. Thank you
Enterprise's black box. Which for some reason includes exterior shots of the ship even after its destruction. Perhaps it is also augmented with recordings taken from the Klingon Bird of Prey which Sarek took with him from Vulcan. Why is this in the Abramsverse forum?
Oh, that's easy! The events of Star Trek IV with the playback take place in the 23rd century. Star Trek III was released on home video in 1985, so they had plenty of time to find a copy of it after 300 years. And welcome to the forums, but yes, it's the wrong movie category forum.
IIRC, there is Klingon text that's superimposed over the ST III footage, so perhaps it was taken from Kruge's ship.
As others have stated, I would suspect that all of the inter shots of the Enterprise come from the equivalent of "black boxes" that were aboard the ship. After all, we saw in the TOS episode "Court Martial" that there are some pretty detailed recordings made that can be reviewed from a variety of camera angles, and toward the beginning of TSFS, Kirk himself reviews similar visual records of engineering with Sarek. (This notwithstanding the reference in "The Menagerie" that no ship makes logs as detailed as the ones being witnessed. But the evidence from the later episodes and movies would seem to clearly suggest such logs do exist. Perhaps the technology was added right after "The Menagerie"?) The external shots are a bit more troublesome. External shots of the Enterprise's destruction could have been provided from the Klingon's recordings, but there's a couple problems with that. First, in one shot, there's a visual of the Enterprise's destruction from the point of view of someone on the Genesis planet, or at least a ship or probe close to it. That would seem to suggest a third party observer. Second, the Klingon's no longer have Kruge's ship. At the time of this hearing, it's on Vulcan with Kirk and company. True, Kirk could have made the footage available to Starfleet, but why would they have provided it to the Klingon ambassador to use against Kirk, complete with superimposed Klingon text?
^ Assuming it is Klingon footage, the Klingon ambassador probably got ahold of it somehow. Maybe the Federation was required to give him the footage, as part of Kirk's trial? Even if the ambassador couldn't get it on his own, he could have demanded that the Federation turn it over to him so the Empire would know the extent of Kirk's "crimes".
It does not make sense. Nor does it make sense that when in Part III Sarek and Kirk review the game footage and find the exact camera angles and editing of TWoK. It's simply a lazy way to reuse footage.
The show-and-tell in ST4 is the handiwork of Klingons, for Klingon purposes. It thus stands fully to reason that it would feature material from Klingon sources, which explains the exterior views. (Also, ST5 establishes that Starfleet has "virtual lens" technology so that a shuttlecraft on the surface of Sha Ka Ree can pipe up imagery that appears to be shot from a point several meters outside the shuttle. Not a major technological feat even today - it just calls for computing power. ) Hmmh? I don't see any such thing. The destruction views are all bow shots, which would be consistent with Kruge being in front of the ship when she starts exploding. That Kruge veers off doesn't necessarily mean he would lose the bow vantage point. (Heck, perhaps Kirk's self-destruct orders included setting the doomed ship to tail the Klingon BoP, in hopes of assuring mutual destruction!) That Kirk's apology to the Council would be included in the material is also natural. Klingons would have access to that, as part of the process to sort out the Genesis nastiness, which is what this session supposedly is all about. The bits from Carol's report would be included in Kirk's report, so that explains them, too. So it's the interior shots from aboard the Enterprise that appear to be the most difficult thing to explain. Kirk pretended to be fully cooperating, even allowing the Klingons to come over using the Starfleet transporter; he could also have agreed to letting the Klingons observe Enterprise surveillance camera material. Or the Klingons could have hacked in, like Spock did in "Balance of Terror"; it's not as if the deserted ship could have put up any resistance. That still wouldn't explain the camera angles: supposedly, the surveillance system would have dozens per each room, and Kruge choosing the exact same ones would be odd and unlikely. In contrast, Kirk and Sarek choosing the same angles for their ST3 replay of ST2 climax is less unlikely: the material would be edited for closeups on what happens to Spock, and this is what we mostly see. The camera also briefly follows Kirk's approach, but that's also an expected or at least allowed aspect of auto-editing: the camera (in reality, the integrated and edited imagery from all the cameras) would follow any action or movement, and Kirk is the only one providing any. Perhaps the views of the Klingons on the Enterprise bridge come from Klingon sources, though? We know Starfleet tricorders can make visual records; Klingon instruments could be shooting the imagery we see, and sending it over to Kruge. (That Kruge seems to be relying largely on audio could be excused by his ship being shot to pieces; he can't access everything he is getting, not quite yet.) I agree that an interesting question here is how the Klingons got access to the Klingon material. Did Kruge send it to his superiors before beaming down and perishing? This should certainly be technologically possible, but I don't see Kruge throwing away his trump card that way when he could sell it to his superiors at a high price (a promotion, a harem, whatever). At that point, Kruge is still triumphant. Timo Saloniemi
I view it from ... a different perspective: I tip my hat to Lenny for having handled a fair amount of exposition, especially so early in the film, in as interesting a way as possible. And as economically as possible, too, that's true. I've always hated monologues designed to recap, or fast forward the story, although it seems actors just love having pages of dialogue to recite. But if this exposition had to be there (and I would argue that it didn't), then Nimoy did a credible job of directing it, here.
When I saw the film back in '86 I just assumed it was cobbled together footage from the Enterprise disaster recorder (we've seen those ejected from destroyed ships before) combined with data from the Klingon ship transmitted to Earth by Kirk. I assume Kirk made a full report during his months on Vulcan.
Given how many takes and alternate angles are typically shot when covering a scene, the could have dug out some other takes to provide alternate angles (like a wide master shot) which one could say was "ship's recorder" footage. At least it would be different and not like watching the previous movie within a movie
^ True, but there's a lot more to using footage than just digging out the film. It all has to be processed, color corrected, have sound added, have visual effects added, etc. And all that costs money. And I'm sure they were going for the cheapest solution possible under the (likely correct) assumption that most moviegoers won't much care about the reuse of the footage like we Trekkies.
...For all we know, the adventures we so enjoy are all raw flight recorder data to begin with. Timo Saloniemi