TOS movies: Lacking a certain sense of the bizarre?

[Kor]

Yes. Long-time fans of Kirk don't have much motivation to give a hoot about Antonia.

Kor

 

[Lance]

Exactly.

I would say the films which play closest to the TOS spirit, if not with the formula proper, are ironically the most panned: I and V being the most "otherworldly"; the only films which can properly be titled voyages to the unknown. Yes, V starts and ends on Earth, but IMO it's the last film in the TOS series to have that "Let's explore the the unexplained" frame of thought going for it. TMP is the only film which really ponders more universal, rather than personal, themes (akin to deeper episodes of TOS): "Is this all I am?" and V'Ger might as well be a world in and of itself or herself. V questions the concept of God itself...Pretty daring.

Also, I think showing Earth in the 23rd century is something which should never have been done, because...It'd have made for a better mystery that way. I'm not phrasing it exactly as I'm thinking it, forgive me, but basically, I think never seeing what Earth looks like in that time period would have been interesting. I mean think of how alien our modern 2017 world would seem to someone in 1717. Showing home base really in a sense limits, perhaps is the word, the series...Makes it more a product of its time, more a speculative vision of the future. Trek was never about the tech or portraying an accurate vision of the future. It was about the unknown. It was reaching for an ideal. It was to boggle the mind and ignite the imagination.

Showing Earth really makes things more mundane, lesser, because frankly, in a galaxy where we've in TOS established that there's TONS of utterly strange things, creepy things, almost supernatural things, Earth is in contrast quite boring, even in the 23rd Century. Also, seeing that Terran society in the 23rd Century is not all that different from our current society really was sort of a bummer. With the way TOS is played, I'd have imagined a much more, for lack of a better word, sterile Earth. Think of the way for example Krypton is portrayed in the Superman comics and the first Superman film - a cold sort of sterile world of science - I always imagined the home world of our characters in TOS to be something akin to that. Not dystopian, but utopian to the extreme if that makes sense, too perfect - which is why these characters would want to go to space to begin with. Not a San Francisco that doesn't look all that different from modern day Frisco.

Showing 23rd century Earth (24th century Earth, too) certainly makes things more mundane, if only on merit of the same reasons why showing the senate in Star Wars makes things more mundane than when these concepts were off-screen entities in the original trilogy: because it requires by nature stories that explore mundane (forgive the pun ) "down to Earth" subjects like how governments work etc etc. Until 1979 these concepts were still basically abstract in the Star Trek universe, because what we were shown in TOS was a ship that was clearly part of a larger organization, but our focus was on the ship and her crew, and not the mechanism that it operates under. What little we were told was drip fed us and only then in terms of how it affects the ship on whatever it's current mission was. Oftentimes "home base" was some outpost or starbase out in the far reaches, where Commodore 'Generic' was the guy who represented authority in that sector, a function increasingly taken by Earth throughout the movies that followed. Like it or not, that was a substantial shift from TOS, and it affected the feel of the stories being told.

One of the things that struck me most about Star Trek: Beyond is that, perhaps fittingly for a movie released in the 50th anniversary year, it was actually the first movie featuring the original TOS characters that felt completely in line with the TOS story format as used on television. A starship exploring the great unknown, far from Earth, the only point-of-contact with Starfleet being a far flung deep space outpost, the crew forced to live by their wits while surviving in often uncomfortable alien environments. Although the TOS movies featuring the original cast members did occasionally manage in their own ways to capture the TV show's sense of seat-of-your-pants adventure, none of them in my view completely replicated that unique sense of wonder, danger and the great unknown that the 1960s series had in abundance.

 

[Commander Kielbasa]

Showing 23rd century Earth (24th century Earth, too) certainly makes things more mundane, if only on merit of the same reasons why showing the senate in Star Wars makes things more mundane than when these concepts were off-screen entities in the original trilogy: because it requires by nature stories that explore mundane (forgive the pun ) "down to Earth" subjects like how governments work etc etc. Until 1979 these concepts were still basically abstract in the Star Trek universe, because what we were shown in TOS was a ship that was clearly part of a larger organization, but our focus was on the ship and her crew, and not the mechanism that it operates under. What little we were told was drip fed us and only then in terms of how it affects the ship on whatever it's current mission was. Oftentimes "home base" was some outpost or starbase out in the far reaches, where Commodore 'Generic' was the guy who represented authority in that sector, a function increasingly taken by Earth throughout the movies that followed. Like it or not, that was a substantial shift from TOS, and it affected the feel of the stories being told.

One of the things that struck me most about Star Trek: Beyond is that, perhaps fittingly for a movie released in the 50th anniversary year, it was actually the first movie featuring the original TOS characters that felt completely in line with the TOS story format as used on television. A starship exploring the great unknown, far from Earth, the only point-of-contact with Starfleet being a far flung deep space outpost, the crew forced to live by their wits while surviving in often uncomfortable alien environments. Although the TOS movies featuring the original cast members did occasionally manage in their own ways to capture the TV show's sense of seat-of-your-pants adventure, none of them in my view completely replicated that unique sense of wonder, danger and the great unknown that the 1960s series had in abundance.

Especially when you have an entire movie set on Earth (IV). I like IV for what it is...But I don't understand how it is celebrated as being one of the best, when it's the film that is most un-Trekky of the bunch. Only the concept of the whale probe itself (which in a way kind of feels, if one really looks at it, like a lesser rehash of V'Ger) makes it trekky, really. Yes, Trek did time travel before, but one such travel was very poignant with Edith Keeler; the other was a nice contrast between the advanced men of the USS Enterprise and the primitive man of the 1960s, and also was a subtle nod at all the UFO sightings people were reporting in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

I feel the mainstream public has never truly gotten Star Trek. In a way, I don't blame them; it's geeky. Yes, so is Star Wars, but that series always had a simpler, more universal story: Farm boy who aspires for more becomes hero; Han Solo is the bad boy we all want to be, etc. Star Trek is much more male oriented, much more science-y and not many people could relate to Spock in the way say someone could relate to Lando or some other SW character.

And yes, having "Home base Earth" really takes the urgency out of things. I've never thought of it that way, but you're right. If we're shown the safety of Earth is just Warp speed away, it makes the crew's' "milk runs" seem all the less interesting, and all the less uncomfortable. There is no real sense of danger in any of the films, that is true.

I also feel that again while I enjoy the II, III, IV, and VI, I feel those films were attempts at pandering to a "lower common denominator" - people who wouldn't "get" Trek but love them some space fighting action and starships. The only films which kept TOS' spirit, I and V, are panned....Even by fans! And I'll never understand why on the latter point.

 

[Nebusj]

I'd agree; the Original Series movies do lack a bit of that whimsical outrageous flair that makes the series so much fun. There are bits, here and there, especially in stuff like the Vejur Spacewalk or the Time Travel Hallucination, but even those are dressed up to look respectable. We would get some great spectacle, including stuff like the location shooting for The Undiscovered Country or the Star Fleet Command/Federation Headquarters shots in The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home but those are all also fully grown-up stuff in a way.

I'd go a bit farther; a lot of the Berman-Era Trek didn't land that joyful wondrous future touch well. It's difficult, though. Good bizarre has a light touch to it and Star Trek has never been good at light touches, Original Series included. And again, a lot of 87-04 Trek managed spectacle or awesome concepts. Just little that quite compared to a starship held in a glowing green hand.

Beyond did give us that wonderful spectacle of a jigsaw-puzzle super-starbase and that did thrill me. A starship gliding in a tube under a river, itself underneath a whole other plane of cityscape? Yes, please.

 

[Commander Kielbasa]

It's not even that. It's that the episodes had an almost psychedelic flair to them. Like you could listen to "2000 Lightyears from Home" by the Stones along to an episode - not literally, but that's what I mean by the bizarre. The movies lacked that sort of otherworldlyness.

 

[plynch]

Maybe this is why -- though I loved them when they came out -- I never watch the movies. Never. We have them all on VHS and still have a player. Something tells me they're on Netflix but I haven't ever checked. I do watch the original 79 eps though. That was the original vibe I fell in love with as a kid. Early imprinting is hard to shake, I suppose.

 

[Commander Kielbasa]

Maybe this is why -- though I loved them when they came out -- I never watch the movies. Never. We have them all on VHS and still have a player. Something tells me they're on Netflix but I haven't ever checked. I do watch the original 79 eps though. That was the original vibe I fell in love with as a kid. Early imprinting is hard to shake, I suppose.

They're no longer on Netflix - only the various shows are - but they are on Amazon prime.

 

[Lance]

The ultimate irony is that, the two movies which (arguably) most encapsulate the feeling of their respective TV shows in movie form, are the ones that are by far the most lamented.

'The Final Frontier', for better or worse, veritably drips with that kind of fantastical "out there" of the The Original Series TV show, a series that frequently seen our crew encountering dodgy God-like beings on a grand cosmic scale; while the storyline of 'Insurrection' was very much out of the playbook for the kind of morality plays that The Next Generation often did so well in it's seven-year television run. Neither movie is enamoured by either the fans or the public, presumably because there is a general expectation that movies be.... something else.

My point about Earth becoming a home base is that the 'original sin', a seed planted in the very first motion picture that for the very first time ever in Star Trek history showed a threat coming to Earth instead of our crew going to a threat, eventually grew into the silliness that was Shinzon deciding to attack Earth in 'Nemesis' because movie studios think their audiences are too stupid to understand the enormity of a threat unless it comes in the form of the destruction of good old Sol III. What started out in 1979 as an ambitious new take on the Star Trek format, ultimately became a hoary old cliché that actually limited the scope of the stories they could tell, not expanded them.

 

[plynch]

I liked Insurrection precisely because it is a good, thoughgtful, interesting "episode" in the life of the Enterprise crew. If you like Trek episodes, why do so many people want -- and I've read it here numerous times -- something way different from the movies?

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Yes. Long-time fans of Kirk don't have much motivation to give a hoot about Antonia.

Nope. Particularly when we only hear about her in passing and never actually meet her.

The reason that Carol Marcus and Edith Keeler are both such fondly-remembered love interests for Kirk is because we met them onscreen, saw their chemistry with Kirk/Shatner, and could understand why Kirk fell in love with them. Antonia is barely even a footnote.

 

[Vger23]

I liked Insurrection precisely because it is a good, thoughgtful, interesting "episode" in the life of the Enterprise crew. If you like Trek episodes, why do so many people want -- and I've read it here numerous times -- something way different from the movies?

Because it's NOT an episode. It's a $55M major motion picture.

I watch Trek episodes to enjoy the television format. I watch Trek movies to experience something cinematic and different. When a Trek movie (Insurrection Is the worst offender) is less engaging, interesting, epic, fun, and exciting than 2/3 of the episodes from the series that spawned it (most of which cost about ~40 TIMES less to produce btw), I think that is unforgivable. Don't make a major motion picture as part of a high-profile sci-if adventure franchise that is mundane.

Insurrection was the only film in the franchise that I outright dislike.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Maybe it's just me, but what happens in Trek is apparently so "normal" to Trek fans it's instantly overlooked that most of them were bizarre films.

ST: TMP
Giant space thing that somehow became sentient from an old space probe, comes to Earth looking for its creator.

TWoK
Vengeful super human that ruled Earth and escaped and froze himself, awakened and tried to steal a space ship, gets stranded o na planet that survives an orbital shift enough for him to survive, seeks revenge with a magical device that can generate life out of nothing.

TSfS
The crew goes to a planet to seek out their dead friend since his catra is stored in another member's brain, find him reborn and growing older on a planet still after all this time creating tiself, take him back to his world where his old mind is transfered into his new body.

TVH
A big giant black Lincoln Log with a round brain ball comes to earth to talk to whales. Actually, fuck all the rest of the whales, just one missing species. The probe is apparently fluent of humpbackonese.

TFF
A man commondures a space ship to travel to the center of the galaxy to find God. This man can also generate thoughts into real visual matter.

Generations
Long-lived scientist seeks to re-join a galaxy-traveling convergence of time and space. Yeah, happens all the time.

FC
Alien cybernetic organisms seek to prevent humanity from stopping them, by travelign back in time. Featuring Misses Potato Queen.

Insurrection
Aliens try to resettle residents of a planet that age extremely slowly from magical particals that fall on the planet. And these residents can apparently slow down time.

 

[plynch]

Because it's NOT an episode. It's a $55M major motion picture.

I watch Trek episodes to enjoy the television format. I watch Trek movies to experience something cinematic and different. When a Trek movie (Insurrection Is the worst offender) is less engaging, interesting, epic, fun, and exciting than 2/3 of the episodes from the series that spawned it (most of which cost about ~40 TIMES less to produce btw), I think that is unforgivable. Don't make a major motion picture as part of a high-profile sci-if adventure franchise that is mundane.

Insurrection was the only film in the franchise that I outright dislike.

OK.

 

[Mojochi]

What makes you think the TOS approach would've made for a dire film series?

Look at the success of the original Star Wars trilogy - while more of a space fantasy than Trek ever was - it dealt with interesting alien worlds and such and yet was successful, wildly so.

Except, that's not what the movies were about. Star Wars was about a seemingly unrelated group of unlikely champions, drawn together for a common purpose, to fight a tyrannical regime. That franchise is even MORE character driven than Star Trek.

In fact, it may very well have been the Star Wars influence on the movie going culture of the time that influenced the shift in Star Trek's films, to a more character driven dynamic. Trek's movie formula is also very often a group of champions drawn together in a common purpose, defeat Khan, save Spock, save Earth, etc... Both sagas are about the people, their relationships, their challenges, & their growth. The intrigue of the universe stuff is always the backdrop.

The only major differences in form are that Trek is Earth based & Wars isn't... And Wars is somewhat faith based (The Force) & Trek isn't so much. As for alien worlds, cultures & influences?... Trek was doing a fair amount of that in the films too.

I don't see how, if done right, continuing the space western approach would've harmed the series.

Well, even Firefly drifted away from it for their cinematic film. The long form of a tv show just lends itself better to telling the tales of oddities. There'll always be time to get back to your characters. A movie is a self-contained entity. Having the characters be the driving force is almost imperative. If you're not telling a story about these people we're watching, who gives a crap about them?

 

[Lance]

The long form of a tv show just lends itself better to telling the tales of oddities. There'll always be time to get back to your characters. A movie is a self-contained entity. Having the characters be the driving force is almost imperative. If you're not telling a story about these people we're watching, who gives a crap about them?

"The Trouble With Tribbles" writer David Gerrold touches on this in analysis in his book The World of Star Trek. I'm paraphrasing, but I think he summarizes the difference between a long-form TV show format and a short-form movie as being the difference between a TV show telling the day-to-day adventures of our crew (and, therefore, not being able to mess around with the format too much on an episode-by-episode basis; status quo is God), versus a movie story being about The Most Important Day In The Lives Of The Characters. The stakes by nature need to be higher in a movie than a TV show, which I suppose accounts for why Earth becomes such a frequent target.

I guess my point wasn't so much about that, as it was about the sheer fact that the TOS story format was changed from 'Us Going To The Unknown' to 'The Unknown Comes To Us'. Every single TOS movie uses Earth either as a "home base" or as the stage for an alien encounter, things that TOS itself expressly forbade in the format series bible, and three of the four TNG movies likewise have some element of Earth being a part of the Big Stakes (the Borg invasion in FC, Riker needing to get a message back to them in INS, and Shinzon deciding to launch an attack against Earth in NEM.) Which is fine, as long as it's handled delicately enough to not become a cliché. Unfortunately, it became a cliché.

Star Trek on TV was about '[exploring] strange new worlds' and discovering 'new life, new civilizations'. Trek at the movies often conflated that to become something closer to "The strange new worlds can come to us, and we'll learn about them by way of how they affect our civilization". On some level that was a complete 180° for telling Star Trek stories. It made the movies very different to the TV show on a fundamental level, because that.... 'otherworld-ness' of TOS was frequently underplayed.

 

[tharpdevenport]

To be fair, the consequences of exploring strange new worlds and civilizations can lead back to Earth with negative consequences, but the movies never did that.

ST: TMP
A probe comes back to Earth. New strange new world or civilization sent it.

TVH
Probe sent from a race not previously encoutnered.

TFF
Not human race specific.

TUC
I guess you could say this came the closset to it.

FC
Doesn't count because the Borg go after anybody they deem technologically assimilatable. Plus Q flung them in their path in the first place, so it's not like they were exploring to find them.


And that was it. Seven seasons of "Buffy the Vamprie Slayer" had more consequences of actions coming back on you than the Trek films.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Because it's NOT an episode. It's a $55M major motion picture.

I watch Trek episodes to enjoy the television format. I watch Trek movies to experience something cinematic and different. When a Trek movie (Insurrection Is the worst offender) is less engaging, interesting, epic, fun, and exciting than 2/3 of the episodes from the series that spawned it (most of which cost about ~40 TIMES less to produce btw), I think that is unforgivable. Don't make a major motion picture as part of a high-profile sci-if adventure franchise that is mundane.

Insurrection was the only film in the franchise that I outright dislike.

Exactly. Insurrection wasn't just an episode of TNG, it was a forgettable episode of TNG.

 

[Mojochi]

I guess my point wasn't so much about that, as it was about the sheer fact that the TOS story format was changed from 'Us Going To The Unknown' to 'The Unknown Comes To Us'. Every single TOS movie uses Earth either as a "home base" or as the stage for an alien encounter, things that TOS itself expressly forbade in the format series bible, and three of the four TNG movies likewise have some element of Earth being a part of the Big Stake.

My feeling is that this isn't so much a fault of the movie format per say, but actually a trend of the times. In addition to the movies, the TNG series is also FAR more liberal about returning to Earth, or having alien plotlines involving Earth etc... It was a natural evolution of the brand, since the people who watch it are ON Earth lol. It stands to reason we'd eventually want to see something of that aspect of their universe. Without that, there'd always have been something missing. Adding current era Earth rounded out the thing, & finally made US feel we were connected to its story, which is also a dynamic that is more imperative in a movie than a tv show, because it's that much more important to involve & invest your viewer in only 90-120 minutes, vs having 20 hours a season, or more to do it

So, though there's folks like you, who prefer the original form, people in this later period responded just as well to the grounded feel of Trek also being an Earth based scenario, which imho opened up the realm of storytelling to hitherto untapped ideas, & despite the fact that the "boldly go" aspect was more... bold... it was also a bit stifling to force it at all times. (Face it, 60s tv formats were VERY stifling) I actually don't mind it so much, so long as there's still Star Trekking going on, or stories that involve the galactic community. It simply broadened their story. Ironically, people often give me a hard time about my objections to DS9, on the grounds that there's essentially NO star trekking going on. That whole series brings the encounters to the home base. I do enjoy the show & like their storytelling & characters, but the concept is fully counter to the idea Star Trek represents, but that too is just another evolution taken to keep fresh ideas rolling in. I was initially opposed to the notion of prequeling as well, but 50 years is a long time to run any story concept, so you give them some berth.

 

[Lance]

So, though there's folks like you, who prefer the original form, people in this later period responded just as well to the grounded feel of Trek also being an Earth based scenario, which imho opened up the realm of storytelling to hitherto untapped ideas, & despite the fact that the "boldly go" aspect was more... bold... it was also a bit stifling to force it at all times.

I never said that I "prefer the original form". (I don't believe I expressed a preference? )
I'm merely pointing out (analytically) the differences in the formats.
There's room enough in the Star Trek universe for every different sort of Star Trek.
But I think we can all agree, I'm sure, that the movies are definitely a different kind of Star Trek to the original series.

 

[Mojochi]

^ certainly. I'm not sure they'd have been able to pull off anything like the show had been a decade earlier