TMP: Robert Wise's 1980/81 Edit Ideas VS. DE Version

A bit like the British ITV comedies of the seventies where old sketches were included in the feature film versions!
JB

 

Moby Dick is more about Ahab's obsession than the big whale per se. Trek stories drawing on it include "The Doomsday Machine," "Obsession," VGR: "Bliss," and First Contact.

 

Also Space 1999s Dragon's Domain!
JB

 

It's very much in the mold of Corbomite. But the specifics are much closer to The Changeling and One of Our Planets is Missing. I'm always mildly annoyed that One of Our Planets isn't recognized here. Both because it's true and it indicates that Roddenberry wasn't as dismissive of TAS as he later was.

I always say TMP is The Corbomite Maneuver to Wrath of Khan's Balance of Terror.

 

It doesn't indicate anything, because similarity does not prove deliberate imitation, no matter how quick laypeople are to assume it is. On the contrary, writers accidentally hit upon similar ideas all the time. It's actually quite hard to avoid, because we're all working from the same pool of ideas and there's a finite number of story structures. Writers generally try to avoid such similarities if they can, but some inevitably slip through nonetheless, especially if the writers are unaware of the similarities. So laypeople get this entirely backward -- similarity is usually evidence that the later writers didn't know about the earlier work.

As I said, I used to suspect the similarities between "One of Our Planets is Missing" and TMP were the result of Foster's experience adapting TAS, but it turned out I was wrong; the similarities were added by Harold Livingston, who may not even have known about the TAS episode.

 

TWOK is nothing like "Balance of Terror" except for the fogbank at the end.

And "Cash Markman" aka Marc Cushman's IMDB (link).

 

Re the spacedock flyby: I've always just looked on it as a nice musical interlude, which were a lot more common in movies back then, people were more used to them. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had three of them. The one in TMP had the bonus of some great-looking VFX shots. Plus going to the cinema and seeing it on the big screen with an audience is a different experience. I heard a lot of criticism of the pace of TMP in the '80s and '90s, but the movie was probably 20 years old before I heard anyone say the Enterprise flyby was too long.

 

Jumping back to the V'ger cloud being "too big" for FTL travel, said "powerfield" could well be a gigantic warp drive effect. The movie never gets into it (I don't care what the novelization says). But TOS had always treated the particulars of warp speeds as whatever is convenient for the plot. I mean, the space amoeba "zone of darkness" is another example or some giant effect moving at FTL velocities. None of it makes sense or is consistent, so you either accept it on its own terms or you write gigantic threads in the Trek Tech forum.

 

I may have loved it, but I remember people saying that both the Enterprise flyby and leaving drydock were long and boring as soon as we left the theater in 1979.

I have to admit that when I watched TMP with my kids that even I thought that the V'ger flyover was ridiculously self indulgent, even in the DE.

 

The V'ger flyovers don't work because they're largely POV shots with nothing to give you a sense of scale. The shot of the teeeeeny Enterprise flying over the disc feature near the end of the flyover sells the terrifying scale better than anything in the sequence. A few shots like that would have done the trick instead of seeing the entirety of the ship from end to end, where it looks more like a weird blue valley than anything. Also, had they managed to execute what Syd Mead's conceptual paintings suggest, with hot white electric arcs and powerful glows coming out if it, the whole thing would have worked better and felt more "alive".

Yeah, and people thought the effects sequences were excessive on opening weekend, so that's not an after-the-fact thing.

 

Sure, you're always going to get a range of different responses to anything. What some people like, others will hate. But that's the point, basically. The TMP sequences were not universally loved, but they were not universally hated either. There was a reason for them to exist that made sense in the context of the time and the work, and many viewers were happy with them, though it should go without saying that not all viewers were.

Well, there was a creative and aesthetic reason for the Enterprise flyover to be as long as it was. The main reason the V'Ger flyover was so long was because it was an unfinished cut and they didn't have the chance to trim it down as they'd intended. Which is why the DE trims the latter but not the former.

 

Ehhhh, pretty universally hated. I've being on the losing side of that argument for 40 years now. There's a reason it's called "The Motionless Picture".

Totally. It's dizzying.

Of course it wasn't until I'd been watching it for years that I got what a spatially cohesive piece it is. But it's still indulgent.

David Gerrold had an interesting criticism of the musical score. He didn't feel it was right for the film and the slowness of the score reinforced the slowness of the film.

Since TMP is generally considered the finest score of the Trek movies and even by some considered the finest score of Jerry Goldsmith's career I thought this was surprising. But then I remembered a story about when Elmer Bernstein was score The Ten Commandments. It was the scene where the Hebrews are leaving Egypt and what's on screen is slow and majestic and Bernstein scored it that way. DeMille told him "No!" He said to score the pace the way he wanted it to be not the way that it was. So the final score is this fast and sprightly thing. I wonder what TMP would have been like with a less "majestic" score.

 

But we're not talking about the after-the-fact reputation, but about how it was perceived at the time. Yes, the barbs were there from the start, but they were not universal. There were those of us, myself included, who loved the sequences just as they were. And let's remember that TMP was actually the most financially successful Trek movie until 2009. Despite the rhetoric from the critics, audiences kept going to see it. It's important, then as now, to remember that an opinion that dominates the public conversation is a very, very different thing from an opinion that's actually universal. As a rule, negative opinions are always disproportionately represented, because people who dislike what they get have more incentive to complain than people who are satisfied with it. So it's important to look past the talk and consider the actual performance of a film.

I think the music for the drydock sequences is some of the most dynamic film music I've ever heard. I can't listen to it without wanting to dance, or at least to wave my arms around like a conductor. Majestic, yes, but hardly sluggish.

 

I love TMP's score. It literally saves many of the sequences that would be deadly dull without it. When the V'ger stuff gets big it's amazing ("Meet V'ger" and "The Force Field" have moments of this), but Wise apparently wanted "mysterious", so we get too much of that. Composers typically ask the director "what do you want the audience to feel here?" I'm betting Wise didn't say, "I want people terrified by the immensity of this mofo."

 

It's definitely got a lot of shades of the animated episode.

 

I don't know who subtitled this movie as "The Motion Picture," but even that moniker seems to suggest that TMP is a sophisticated offering with class and style to it. I really like that philosophy, because it's so apt, here. Any version of it is worthwhile, just because of that. I prefer the original theatrical release, but I like them all.

 

"The Motion Picture" so people would not think the ads were for the TV show. This name was chosen as far back as 1977 when it was applied to Phil Kaufman's aborted film (known colloquially as Planet of the Titans).

 

Typically movies spun-off from another medium would simply be subtitled "The Movie", much like Superman was advertised as such a year prior. I honestly can't recall many movies that use "The Motion Picture" as a subtitle prior to Trek. An IMDb search isn't really helping either.

Was there a specific reason they didn't simply use In "Thy Image" as a subtitle?

 

Cause that sounds awful?

 

The only other film I could find searching Wikipedia with that subtitle was Nutcracker: The Motion Picture from 1986.