With today's tools, fans have forever to fix things in what amounts to be an infinite period of "post:'"
I saw the new effects earlier this AM as my feed popped it up.
Most visual changes are good, excellent for sure and I'm trying not to use the word "stellar" as that induces a pun, but the original's barrier did seem to look wider and more encompassing. Or specifically, rather, at 0:31 what happened to the big wide barrier that it's now a little lightning puff in the middle? 1:25 compares both and both are imperfect yet the original effect doesn't taper off into outer space black the way the new one does. The new f/x are still better overall, if not by a wide margin, and the new viewscreen shots do the scenes much justice.
Fixing the story is another thing entirely.
A difficult task, part of the problem stems from the demands of the time - the worst by far is demanding the movie be "funny" because the fishy whale story released in 1986 was so well-received. The "fish out of water" trope, especially when the fish are moved from another aquarium into ours, can be funny, but that doesn't translate to the same characters being in their aquarium. (Also note how TNG kept taking itself seriously for the most part, since fans did not care for the comedy takes of "The Outrageous Okona", one of the few that dared trying to be comedy and failing because Trek just didn't do comedy consistently well. Let parody shows do the comedy, especially if you want the main one to keep credible. Tangent on that, at least for TOS it was the late-60s and enough people were doping LSD to sit through the comedic-styled episodes in season 2, but a lot of it doesn't hold up. YMMV, of course but it's easy to see why TNG played it straight. )
I would suggest "The Final Frontier" be used in much the same way as "The Menagerie" enveloped "The Cage," but here scenes would be used even more sparingly, with new footage, though not quite like Unification. It would perhaps be more like
The Caves of Androzani.
The Caves of Androzani? So Kirk is laying on the floor about to die and he sees scenes from STV swirling around him?
This movie is much closer to THE GOD THING than TMP (itself worthy of a mini-series) and it really *should* be the greatest Trek tale.
^^this
The one problem is, even in 1989 or 1976, that it's a bit of an anticlimax. STV handled it fairly well (but still received flak, which - let's face it - would be inevitable.)
One of my favorite tropes are when main characters are hardly even seen:
"Proof Positive" from The Incredible Hulk.
"History of Doom" from Challenge of the SuperFriends.
The latter of the two...with a smattering of "Trial of a Time Lord" might be the best (if not the only) way to do this.
So Kirk is forced to sit through a sequence of events clipped from STV? That might work, but which clips are to be saved? All the ha-ha-bonk stuff or when the story actually got on with things after getting the levity out of its system? Sadly, this reduces the movie down to 30 or 45 minutes and there'd still be a small handful of narrative gaps. I'm not an editor, but watching the movie a few times and writing down possible timestamps to snip, snip then edit, then rewatch... couldn't do a worse job than the hacked-up colorized Doctor Who classics (where they removed some actually needed dialogue, among other things, especially 'The Daleks' as some of Ian's lines had the biggest messages to make, but before I digress into that any further...)
STV
did improve, but turning the crew into doorknobs for cheap jokes is almost as crass as dumbing down the 'dults to make Wesley look smarter, which is the dumbest form of scripting...
I always loved NBC's rather ethereal beginning of The Martian Chronicles--though here you may have a gathering of the Doud, Metrons, the Q, etc. They are quite concerned about the denizen of Sha Ka Ree.
The history of this last adventure is explained to the youngest member (Phaedra?) of the "ascended" ....with the more forgettable footage of the movie played on multiple mountains, clouds--the whole film flashes by...think the "heads" scene in ST: IV
The tale would no longer be "ST:V" but retconned into "the last round up" on camera.
In this production, you can linger on the most hard-hitting scenes of McCoy and his Father, the confrontation towards the end...some of the finest scenes in all of Trek free from the silliness and elevated, at the risk of having them crap marble as AMADEUS warned.
"Balance of Terror" and "Doomsday" are perfect as they are of course.
Ah, so Q or Trelane or another floaty incorporeal life form is putting Kirk on trial? I dunno. It'd feel too much like a clip show and not a new adventure; even "The Cage" reused in "The Menagerie" felt like something new (and was because "The Cage" was a pilot never intended to be aired, until someone reminded the staff how expensive the pilots were and that they had to make up the difference later so they used two episode slots and chucked in the bulk of the 1964 pilot, while universe building, with no set of rules cemented yet (so we still see Spock uncharacteristically smiling at some vibrating plant leaves after being oddly bewildered in a case of universe-shaking).
(Does touching the leaf make one happy? Is that a(n un)subtle drug reference? Maybe both of them are smiling due to being horny. I've no clue... also, if taken from the original 35mm negs, then it likely might be in real 4K... but film is 24FPS, not 48 unless put through a computer to generate new frames between the existing ones to artificially double it with...)
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