What costs more, location shooting or sound stage shooting requiring lots of post production SFX? I hear the argument for TVH being the cheapest financially but with all the water, whales, and travel, I'm not so sure. Also are we using 'cheap' to imply cost or quality? TFF gets my vote for the bottom... IMO the sets just look flimsy.
I love the Excelsior bridge. It's probably my favorite set from the TOS films. It oozes 80s garishness. Admittedly, Styles's chair did look like it was going to topple over any second. This more or less describes every Trek film no directed by Wise or Abrams. Most of the camera work was safe, the angles were traditional, the mise en scene was paint-by numbers, and there wasn't a whole lot of individuality or personality going on. Carson loved his aerials. Frakes took some liberties on a few important shots, and Meyer did his best to character capture, but all and all a fairly drab. You know who did actually mange a few good shots: Shatner. Even if they were totally wasted. That said, I think Khan's set design was mostly pretty good. Meyer's submariner approach to the Enterprise's lower decks still holds up. The bridges look sturdy. And it's hard to deny the awesomeness of the Regula cave and the nebula--let a lone the Genesis animation.
Cheapest looking film? Well, as much as I love it, that has to go to STV:TFF. There were some great looking sets (the Enterprise bridge, and Paradise City), but in so many other areas the film just looked shoddy, which is a shame. Still, I love it and I doubt I'll ever stop loving it.
A couple of location inserts like Alaska in TUC don't negate everything else that looks cheap in a movie, nor do a few cheap looking shots in an otherwise visually extravagant film make it the overall film look cheap. TWOK looks cheap. Many of the sets are lit like a TV movie, a lot of the added set detailing looks like dollar-store crap glued to the walls, and the sandstorm looks like what it is: badly DXed (double exposed) elements wiped across the scene. TSFS also looks cheap for a lot of the same reasons, and the really obviously soundstaginess of the Genesis planet seals the deal. Closeups of the control panels revealing the fiberglass pebble textures don't help. YMMV.
Well here is a more interesting question... Out of movies 1-6 (THE ORIGINAL MOVIES) which one do you think looks the cheapest?
I guess the slightly inferior external ship shots in V earn it my vote. Not that such things bother me! STIII I love too much to judge fairly, but I was certainly shocked to learn recently that the Conehead on the Excelsior bridge was supposed to be a Deltan!
To be honest, the Trek films after TMP and before '09 all have a B-movie production quality. I do agree with the previous comment that Shatner did try to bring a more cinematic quality to the camerawork in his directorial effort.
From The Motion Picture through Generations, every Star Trek film cost about 20 to 25 percent more than its predecessor, with two exceptions (The Wrath of Khan, obviously, and The Undiscovered Country).
I didn't realize that was a Delta in III either, but that can be retconned easily into another race. Or maybe there's a segment of the Deltan population that are coneheaded. (How much do we know about Deltans anyway? Have there been any other major Deltan characters besides Ilia?)
This isn't canon, but I think that Jedda, the Regula One scientist who gets vaporized by Terrell's errant phaser shot in the Genesis cave, is supposed to be Deltan as well.
^Are there Deltans with hair? There must be if he was Deltan, which I also remember reading somewhere. --Sran
Agreed. For whatever reason, all the sets and costumes just seemed.... Cheap. Star wars managed to have believable sets and costumes. The most cringeworthy moments for all TOS movies and tng were when they tried to do a "cantina" scene. Ugh
I would not say your points paint the entire film as cheap. For every obvious soundstage (Genesis), the TOS film universe received a strong expansive, visual upgrade with the creation of the space station, Grissom, Excelsior and the Klingon BOP, which would have a far reaching effect well into the Berman era of ST. Even the Phasers & communicators finally appeared to be a logical extension of TOS design, instead of the oddly primitive, bulky creations from TMP/TWOK. TSFS gave audiences a taste of the possible size of Starfleet only suggested, but not truly presented in TOS.
The Enterprise sets in TMP looked gorgeous (although, I was never a fan of the engineering intermix set). They did a really good job updating sets originally constructed for a TV production and giving them a gloss expected of a big-budgeted film. After that, the sets began to look like what they had originally been built for — a television production.
I actually really like the Excelsior bridge. The different proportions and scale, and black chairs and consoles, gave it a very different feel to the usual Fed ship. Most non-Ent bridges are in fact just redresses, IIRC. The final location on the Gen planet looked like a set, but previous bits were convincing, if obviously small in size. I think the problem with that final set is the way it was shot. More naturalistic light, more sense of depth in the photography, better blocking (positioning of actors), would have produced a much better result. While I like TFF I have to admit it has some very weak visual moments. Some of the ship shots actually look good, but a lot of them just look unfinished (I still find INS worse to look at in this respect). The moons behind Uhura are obvious a backdrop or projection, as they are distorted by the camera angle. Paradise City looks okay, but the action there was obviously all shot in a rush, as most of it looks unconvincing (I can't help thinking Shatner could have had a career in times of old making cheapie Westerns - De could have starred!). And note how much trouble they have aligning the phaser beams with the weapons during that sequence!
I thought Shatner's fight moves worked, along with Takei's horse / Phaser shot scene. To be fair, many sci-fi films had that problem. The Star Wars (1977) lasers not aligning / going in the wrong direction is a notorious error in some parts, and even by the time of increased professionalism of Return of the Jedi, that problem occasionally popped up.