Cinematic VS TV?

[Starborn Dragon]

okay, here I go.

Over the years I've been a fan of Trek, one of the most common complaint among fans about the TNG movies were that they were just another TV episode and not really cinematic.

Now, a long time ago, when I first heard this, I thought it was indeed a right criticism.

But now, in my ripe old age, after many years of thinking about it...

I really don't understand the difference between what is cinematic and what is TV.

I would appreciate seeing a discussion on this subject please, so I put forth this question to you.

What are the differences that makes something cinematic or TV?

 

[Chronos]

The complexity of the plot, for one.

The plot for a television show should fit neatly within a ~45 minute block of time. The plot for a feature-length film should fit within a 70+ minute block of time, although the average feature film is closer to 120 minutes, and Star Trek films (I-XI) run ~114 minutes on average - TOS films averaging ~115 minutes and TNG films averaging 112. So the run time hasn't changed much between the two, although NuTrek (not included in the above avg.) averages 129 minutes between the two movies.

The complaint is that the TNG movies feel more like TV episodes. This makes sense if you consider that Insurrection is a story that could have easily been told in a regular ~45 minute episode, rather than the 103 minutes it was given. Insurrection is also the shortest-running TNG movie. Compare Insurrection's 103 minutes with the next three shortest: The Search for Spock at 105 min, The Final Frontier at 106 min, and The Undiscovered Country at 110 minutes. By comparison, I would say that the content is actually quite sparse in Insurrection while TSFS, TFF, and TUC have all of the storyline and action fairly condensed.

As an example, consider the movie adaptations of Tolkien's works. My copies of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King have 458, 398, and 466 pages, respectively. The film adaptations run at 178, 179, and 201 minutes, respectively. This means that the movies run at about 2.573, 2.223, and 2.318 pages/minute. To put it simply, the movies are packed with story. On the other hand, my copy of The Hobbit is 272 pages, and there are three movies based on it which run at 169 (182 extended ed.), 161 (186), and 144 (174) minutes. This means 0.574 or 0.502 pages/minute depending on which edition you're watching. It's one of the rare examples of a movie that's longer than the book and, in my opinion, it really shows in the way things are paced and filled.

In the same way that The Hobbit could have been condensed into one or maybe two feature-length film, Insurrection could have easily been an episode of The Next Generation if it hadn't been hit by the filler-stick in order to fluff it up for release in theaters.

The scale of the plot is another factor.

Moviegoers want to see something different. It costs more to see a movie than to see an episode of Trek, and you expect more because the budget of a movie is many times higher than the budget of any episode. Most episodes are relatively unimportant - usually on the scale of saving a planet or something. The movies, on the other hand, are expected to be big, spectacular, and galaxy-shaking. If the Federation or a main character isn't in danger, something is wrong with the plot.

4 of 6 of the TOS movies feature the Federation in some sort of danger. 1 of 6 features a main character in danger. The other is The Final Frontier. On the other hand, 2 of 4 TNG movies feature the Federation in terrible danger, 1 of 4 features a main character in danger, and the other is Insurrection.

Between these two criteria of plot complexity and scale, there are a number of movies that don't fit.

For complexity: The Motion Picture, The Voyage Home, and Insurrection could have probably been condensed into a 45 minute episode.

For scale: Insurrection.

Both of these criteria fit the bill for Insurrection. That's the reason why it has a reputation of being like an episode of Star Trek rather than a Trek movie.

Of course, I only took into account how "episode-like" the movies are, and not necessarily the quality. I wouldn't consider Generations, First Contact, and Nemesis to be episode-like, but being movie-like doesn't necessarily mean that they're of the same quality as The Undiscovered Country, and The Voyage Home is a movie that could have easily been an episode, but many fans like it, although I think that it's the most overrated Trek movie.

Although, the quality of said movies is beyond the scope of this thread, and is even more subjective.

 

[Kilana2]

The TNG TV setting versus TNG cinema setting: the cinema version of Enterprise-D was darker (dimly lit corridors).

Enterprise-D crashed with all the families aboard. Next Enterprise was more suited for battle scenes. Families aboard the flagship that faces dangers on a regular basis wasn't viable anymore. Then the Dominion War established in DS9. I for one liked the family concept of Starfleet. But it was more suited for the TV show than for an action movie shown in cinemas.

As for the German Trekkies: they changed some of the voice actors for the dubbing, most notably Riker, who wasn't spoken by Detlef Bierstedt in the movies. Fans who didn't watch TNG on TV on a regular basis wouldn't realize it, or so. So for me there is a TV Riker and a movie Riker

 

[HIjol]

Actor relationships with crew and writers become potentially more rich and deep with TV vs Cinema, due to time together. Also many TV shows are still built around commercials, and paced to keep us from changing the Channel.

Oh, and refreshments are One Hell of a Lot more expensive at the movies!

Plus, what happened to Goobers®?

 

[MacLeod]

As Chronus highlights it's a not a simple issue, and that several of the films could have worked equally as well on TV. So do we as movie goes raise our expectations from what we expect from a movie vs a TV series?

Which medium is the story better suited to film or TV?


We must also judge them by the time they were filmed in, TV shows have raised their levels in recent years, attracting more well known actors to lead roles, actors who we might be more familiar with from supporting movie roles.


Of course at the end it comes down to personnel taste,

 

[mos6507]

A TV show typically does not move an individual series lead very far on their long-term arc. A film typically does. That's why superhero movies usually can't go more than 2-3 films. Batman winds up seeming to fight a very small number of bad guys and then he hangs up his cape. It's just part of the expectation of films.

There are exceptions, of course. James Bond as a character seems to rarely move forward. Attempts to give the character more gravitas like his love interest dying in HMSS wind up getting brushed under the rug later.

But if you look at the Trek movies, usually something really "big" happens character-wise. A character dies. The enterprise gets decommissioned, destroyed, updated. Etc...

When the only thing that happens in the span of the movie is the leads solve a very specific problem but are otherwise largely unchanged from when they started, that is what winds up feeling TV-like. You know, another day at the office. That's the vibe I get from Insurrection. It starts in the middle of the their arcs and the most memorable thing I took away from it was Riker trying to get back together with Troi which was not really integral to the plot.

Same with Trek V. The middle age dilemma of Trek II was replayed as sort of a late-middle aged or near-retirement dilemma, and it lacked gravitas. For the most part, Trek V was "another day at the office", and the fact that it grappled with a Godlike alien is nothing new for Kirk and company.

So the downside of moving the characters through arcs is once they are done with their arc, there's nothing you can do with them anymore storywise. The franchise then has no more legs other than reboots.

You really can't have your cake and eat it too. On TV you have the comfort-factor of tuning in and seeing your series regulars going about their routine. It's a family-like vibe, like 20 years of Gunsmoke. And there's nothing wrong with that. But in a film you get to up the stakes for the characters in a way you just can't do on a series, at the expense of "using up" the total potential of the characters almost like burning the candle down to the base.

 

[Richard Baker]

For me to get into a theater and watch something on the big screen it needs to be a movie that demands to be seen on the big screen.
I think of it a bit like the difference between a James Bond film and an episode from 'The Man from Uncle'. Both can have car chases, gun fire, beautiful women and even gadgets, but one tells a fairly simple story in an evening and the other one has the hero faking his own death, trains to be a Ninja, combats a group of armed helicopters in a gyrocopter and then storms the evil lair inside a freak'n hollowed out volcano.
Scale, epic visuals and a multitude of scenes woven together into a great story- that is what I pay to see instead of just waiting for the DVD release.

 

[martok2112]

In addition to the storytelling....for me, it is also a matter of visual scale.

Let's take Star Trek The Motion Picture for example. There were ten years between the end of the original series' run, and the premiere of The Motion Picture in 1979. During that time, there was the whole Phase II project which was aborted in favor of doing a big screen production due to the massive success of George Lucas' Star Wars.

When The Motion Picture was almost completed, the visual effects were pretty much unusable, with the citation that they looked no different from what was seen on TOS ten years before. With only weeks left before its big screen premiere, John Dykstra (who was the effects lead for Star Wars) was called in, and the effects were vastly improved. Also, the effects ended up filling the big screen nicely from end to end. The feel was epic, even if some felt the story was even more stilted than the worst episode of TOS.

The following five movies varied in feel. TWOK had the big screen feel. (I never saw it on the big screen, sadly, but I could clearly see its effect when it came to home video...and especially got released in letterbox format.) By the time of Trek V and VI, you could see hints of TNG in the set design, and in the visual texture. Although Trek VI retained its big screen feel, I could see that the television feel of TNG was starting to take over. (I think this is largely because the movies were still being done under the Paramount television division...not its feature film division, even though they were introduced as Paramount Pictures.)

When Generations was released to the "big screen", only a year or so had passed. The Next Generation was lauded as having visual effects that were close to feature film quality at the time. So, when Generations hit, despite a few minor differences, the movie really looked like an episode....and felt like an episode because it was written by television writers, not big screen writers. The first three TNG films were hindered by this. Everything was done with television writers and directors. Even First Contact, arguably the best film of the TNG series, suffered from the "television episode" feel. It's space battle was only about as epic as a fleet battle on Deep Space Nine, and did not fill the big screen very well. The gunfights on the Enterprise E also did not fit the big screen very well. I agree with the almost unanimous assessment that Insurrection really suffered from the "tv episode" effect, both in visual and storytelling terms. (This is also one of the reasons I was largely disappointed with the film "Serenity", which was the big screen leap for the all too shortly lived series "Firefly". It just didn't have the big screen feel because on a visual level, it didn't differentiate itself well from its television sire...and the story itself could've been a series finale or at least season finale. Serenity plays out much better on home video.)

Nemesis, arguably the worst of the NG films (although it remains my personal favorite) was led by a big screen director, Stuart Baird (albeit one with only three or four titles under his belt, who is better known as an editor), and written by a big screen scribe, John Logan (who, despite his Trek fandom, did end up applying a lot of "fanboy" vibe and some technical faux pas'.) But the action on a visual level filled the big screen much more effectively, and the space battle at the end (practically the entire last half of the film) looked and felt much more satisfying. Some of the acting also seemed, to me at least, a bit more in line with the big screen feel....not nearly as forced as is usually seen in a television episode.

Since this is largely a "first ten films" subject, I will leave the Abrams Trek films out, although I do feel that they certainly are worthy of the big screen.

This is only my personal assessment, but I hope it adds some to the discussion.

 

[Maurice]

...the whole Phase II project which was aborted in favor of doing a big screen production due to the massive success of George Lucas' Star Wars.

When The Motion Picture was almost completed, the visual effects were pretty much unusable, with the citation that they looked no different from what was seen on TOS ten years before. With only weeks left before its big screen premiere, John Dykstra (who was the effects lead for Star Wars) was called in, and the effects were vastly improved.

Phase II was killed because Charles Bluhdorn didn't believe in the model for the Paramount Television Service, on which the show was to run. Given the end of that, and the money expended to get the show up and running, and the success of Star Wars, the decision was made to turn the pilot TV movie episode into a feature.

TMP was nowhere near done when the plug was pulled on VFX vendor Robert Abel & Associates (RA&A), and far from the effects looking like the TOS effects (methinks you are conflating the evaluation of the Phase II model work with the scrapped TMP effects work), the issue was that the RA&A footage which Robert Wise finally got to screen was not up to snuff, and there wasn't much of it (so say various sources). With effectively nine months left before the release date, RA&A was booted, Douglas Trumbull (2001, Silent Running, CE3K) was brought in to make it happen, and he then subcontracted Dykstra's Apogee company to split the effects load. There were no effects to be "improved" because they weren't finished, or many even started. The RA&A work (except for the ship interior wormhole stuff) was abandoned unfinished.

 

[martok2112]

...the whole Phase II project which was aborted in favor of doing a big screen production due to the massive success of George Lucas' Star Wars.

When The Motion Picture was almost completed, the visual effects were pretty much unusable, with the citation that they looked no different from what was seen on TOS ten years before. With only weeks left before its big screen premiere, John Dykstra (who was the effects lead for Star Wars) was called in, and the effects were vastly improved.

Phase II was killed because Charles Bluhdorn didn't believe in the model for the Paramount Television Service, on which the show was to run. Given the end of that, and the money expended to get the show up and running, and the success of Star Wars, the decision was made to turn the pilot TV movie episode into a feature.

TMP was nowhere near done when the plug was pulled on VFX vendor Robert Abel & Associates (RA&A), and far from the effects looking like the TOS effects (methinks you are conflating the evaluation of the Phase II model work with the scrapped TMP effects work), the issue was that the RA&A footage which Robert Wise finally got to screen was not up to snuff, and there wasn't much of it (so say various sources). With effectively nine months left before the release date, RA&A was booted, Douglas Trumbull (2001, Silent Running, CE3K) was brought in to make it happen, and he then subcontracted Dykstra's Apogee company to split the effects load. There were no effects to be "improved" because they weren't finished, or many even started. The RA&A work (except for the ship interior wormhole stuff) was abandoned unfinished.

Guess I just kinda brute forced the story....quick and dirty version, according to what I remembered from hearing on the commentary, having listened to it many years ago. It's been a while. Thanks for the clarification.

 

[Lance]

David Gerrold said it best in The World Of Star Trek when he stated (I'm paraphrasing) that the difference between and TV show and a movie is that TV shows are about the general day-to-day of their protagonists, whereas a movie has to instead be about The Most Important Day Of Their Life. What he meant by this is that TV shows can afford to be more mundane and low-key, whereas a movie needs to by its very nature be about a special event, or to tackle something that the TV show could never have done in quite the same way.

The general criticism of the TNG movies (although realistically it's probably only "Insurrection" that suffers the most from it) is that they told stories that the TV show already did, or maybe just weren't 'big' enough in the way they decided to retell them. So in effect, it feels a little too cosy, like you're sitting down on your sofa with the remote control in your hand rather than in a movie theater chomping popcorn.

The TOS movies had an ambition bigger than that. Although it's worth noting that the odd man out is "Star Trek 5", which, like "Insurrection", feels disarmingly old school in a shot-at-Desilu-on-a-budget-of-twenty-five-cents kind of way; and which, like "Insurrection", often comes in for harsh criticism.