So how much would have quality SFX in TFF helped the movie to you?
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seems abit silly the more you think about it dosnt it. why would Kirk risk his life climbing a mountain with no safety ropes/harnesses. like...why? did he secretly want to commit suicide after the stressful events of Trek II/III? did he know spock would save his ass if anything went wrong?
Well it would have been suicidal all right. The only difference is he would have lost his grip at 25 feet max and cracked his head open as he hit the ground instead of the at the 1000 foot or so mark we were supposed to believe he had reached before he slipped.
My opinion of TFF has changed is recent years, as I've found that I enjoy the film much more than when I was younger. Although improved visual effects would likely have given it a more finished look, I don't know that they would have made a difference in terms of the story the film was trying to tell; I can't give Shatner high marks for execution, but I understand what he was trying to do with TFF and appreciate the film for what it was.
--Sran
--Sran
I feel just the opposite. I mean, this was a story about the search for a "God" that turned out to be a superpowerful alien entity. Rock monsters would've been a ridiculous anticlimax to that story, a crude and banal instrument for something so advanced. I preferred the version we got, with Kirk being chased by something unseen, implying some unknowable cosmic force. It was the one instance where the low FX budget made the film less cheesy than it otherwise would've been.
Okay, I guess there was a confusion with the word "they." You were using it at that point to mean the studio executives, but I was misled because in your previous sentence you'd been talking about "the amount of time and effort that was put into the SFX for the film," so I assumed that the following "they" was in reference to the people who actually made that effort, i.e. Dykstra and Trumbull, rather than the executives who hired them.
Wonder why/how Shatner came up with wanting the villain to be a rock monster? Some connection with the opening climb up the face of a gigantic rock? The rock is death. Go climb a rock. Kirk challenges the rock. challenges death.. and almost dies before Spock saves him. At the end of the film he is confronted with 'god' who he challenges ('what does god need with a starship') then 'god' turns into a rock (monster). The personification of the mountain? Of death? He runs away from the rock monster (death) and climbs up another rock/mountain to escape (connecting to the opening climb)... there he and the rock monster do battle before Spock saves him (again)
It all seems...Connected...somehow. By rocks
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He didn't. He originally wanted the "God" entity to send ten rock monsters after Kirk -- basically telekinetically controlled puppets, I suppose. But for budget reasons, he had to scale it down to a single rock monster, played by a stuntman in a suit -- and the result looked so bad that they ended up cutting it altogether.
Well and that's the thing with me.....I WANT to like it on some level, it has a few moments here and there that are OK to watch again, even though as a film it is really weak.
But I just can't because I don't respect it because of how it was made.
Like I said TMP isn't a "What a great film" in the way i think of TWOK, TSFS, TVH and TUC. But I RESPECT GREATLY the way it was done. The story wasn't bad, even if it dragged on way too long, the effects were top notch, they hired Goldsmith a respected music composer (yeah I know he did V too) I thought it had its good character moments. Kirk was older and wiser, but still a little bit of a maverick and they even had the guts to make him wrong in his confrontations with Decker. Spock and McCoy had a lot of quips that were like TOS that added humor. The opening was kick ass and the closing with the music and the Enterprise jumping to warp was great.
In TFF the SFX are a representation of the whole. It was a weak story, it was clearly meant to make Shatner look like the strongest and most rational person in the universe, it had slip on the banana peel humor and was just sloppy and not put together well, and the terrible SFX are a symbol of how it was done so slipshod. I mean really NOONE noticed in the dailies that they passed lower numbered floors after they had already flown above them in the turbo shaft rocket boot scene. That wasn't some thing that could have slipped by anyone and was only noticed by people after repeated viewings....I remember noticing it the first time I saw the film it was that obvious.
And I know it's easy and vogue to bag on the Shat for it being so lousy, and he does deserve the lion's share of the blame. He was the director, it was his story. But Star Trek at this point wasn't like Star Wars where one man controlled every element of the films. Bennett was there, Roddenberry even though he had no real power could have spoken up and I'm sure there were people at Paramount who had authority. Yet it seems not one of them said "Whoa Bill......we know it's your first stint as director, but some of this stuff is just silly and ridiculous, let's put the brakes on and think this through a little more."
I mean hell they threw Roddenberry out of any true position of power after TMP yet noone who saw them singing Row Row your boat or Scotty banging his head on a beam had the balls to say "Uh...no" Was Shatner really THAT powerful that every cornball idea he had, minus the rockmen I guess, was just rubber stamped without anyone daring to say this doesn't work, it needs to be changed.
The SFX and HOW BAD they were just symbolized the whole way the film seemed slapped together. If they'd gotten that part right then MAYBE I could say, well it's not a good story, but it had it's moments and it's clear they really put in their best effort.
Having read a few interviews, no I don't have citations, this is pretty much what the original intent had been. Especially the climbing part.Wonder why/how Shatner came up with wanting the villain to be a rock monster? Some connection with the opening climb up the face of a gigantic rock? The rock is death. Go climb a rock. Kirk challenges the rock. challenges death.. and almost dies before Spock saves him. At the end of the film he is confronted with 'god' who he challenges ('what does god need with a starship') then 'god' turns into a rock (monster). The personification of the mountain? Of death? He runs away from the rock monster (death) and climbs up another rock/mountain to escape (connecting to the opening climb)... there he and the rock monster do battle before Spock saves him (again)
It all seems...Connected...somehow. By rocks
It wasn't just Shatner who wanted those things. Remember, the film before this was The Voyage Home, which was largely a comedy and was really, really successful. And studio executives always want to copy anything that's successful. They were pushing TFF's makers to play up the comedy. They wanted it there -- probably more than Shatner himself did. Heck, Shatner wanted to do a thought-provoking, philosophically significant story about the search for God. He was forced to gut it and rework it because the studio was uncomfortable doing anything too controversial. He also wanted to do a darker story where Spock and McCoy actually fell out with Kirk and turned against him, but Nimoy refused to play that.
So Shatner was anything but some absolute dictator that nobody questioned. That's just staggeringly wrong. The film is the way it is because there were enormous limitations on what Shatner was able to do, because his ideas were at odds with the ideas of other people in the production and the story we ended up with was an uneasy compromise between them. Also because the '88 writers' strike cut into pre-production and gave them less time to refine the script, and because of the budget cuts they had to make, and so on. If Shatner had been given utterly free rein, the film would've been immensely different from what we got.
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^ Agreed. I'd love to see what he could have done, but I doubt we'll ever get that chance.
Wonder why/how Shatner came up with wanting the villain to be a rock monster? Some connection with the opening climb up the face of a gigantic rock? The rock is death. Go climb a rock. Kirk challenges the rock. challenges death.. and almost dies before Spock saves him. At the end of the film he is confronted with 'god' who he challenges ('what does god need with a starship') then 'god' turns into a rock (monster). The personification of the mountain? Of death? He runs away from the rock monster (death) and climbs up another rock/mountain to escape (connecting to the opening climb)... there he and the rock monster do battle before Spock saves him (again)
It all seems...Connected...somehow. By rocks
The rock climbing at the beginning is a metaphor for mankind's quest for God and parallels the film's main story. Like Sybok on his quest for God, Kirk is striving to do more than he can do but doesn't recognize that fact. And when Kirk falls, he is saved because he was with his friends (McCoy was worried about Kirk, so Spock kept an eye on him and caught him when he fell).
Yeah, the opening scene is a bit goofy, but it works well with the overall story.
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Pretty much this. I have a soft, warm place in my heart for TFF, many childhood memories attached to it, so I give it a big break. There are moments in the film which shine brighter than any other Trek film, and those buoy the movie for me.
Modernized special effects would be nice, in a "what we could have seen as SFX" for the film, but it wouldn't really change anything for me. Personally, I'd love to see the Shat get the chance to do it how he really wanted, but that's a pipe dream, which means it will never happen.
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Eh, I think he could have done it. If I had the money, I'd give him a nice, fat budget, and tell him to make a Star Trek movie any way he wanted. It would be worth it just to see the results (we are, of course, assuming I'm Bill Gates/Warren Buffet rich).
You don't need a lot of money to come up with a good story. The premise of the story was flawed and they never got past that. All the fancy set pieces and flashy visuals don't make up for the fact that there's no damned story there and in everything I've seen regarding the treatments there never was.
And he had the money. TFF cost 43% more than TVH. He just spent it badly.
And he had the money. TFF cost 43% more than TVH. He just spent it badly.
Well, sure. I'm not saying Shatner's ideas were good. Personally I think they would've been better off abandoning his "search for God" idea altogether and starting from scratch, rather than compromising it into pointlessness. I'm just refuting the notion that Shatner was some kind of dictator that nobody had the power to stand up to. That hypothesis has zero basis in reality. The film's flaws were the result of a bunch of different people's decisions combining in unfortunate ways. There's no single person that can be blamed for them all.
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You don't need a lot of money to come up with a good story. The premise of the story was flawed and they never got past that. All the fancy set pieces and flashy visuals don't make up for the fact that there's no damned story there and in everything I've seen regarding the treatments there never was.
And he had the money. TFF cost 43% more than TVH. He just spent it badly.
Hey, it's my imaginary money.
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