I love the Special Longer Version. The things that were removed for the Theatrical/Director's Editions seemed to be character beats. It does stall the pacing of the movie, buuuuuuut it needs some person to person interaction. Special Longer Version has more of those.
My latest attempt to fix McCoy's face in the lounge scene. Skip to the end, I only adjusted the lighting slightly for the other sections and left them in for comparisn. It is tricky - some slight flickering, but the original wasn't 100% either. It was the seventies!
This is my attempt to make the airlock scene from the SLV a bit more interesting and to re-establish some of the crew banter from TOS.
That took me a while to realize. I had lived with the original for so long. I would like to hear the story behind working on this shot for the DE. I can't imagine the people involved are 100% happy with it either. I said elsewhere: TMP is cursed. There can never be the Most Perfect Version for some reason. But of all the screwed up versions of TMP the 2022 DE is the least screwed up. And it's a joy.
Me: “Hay guyz, witch vershon of TMP u want??!?” @Admiral Archer : Yes, your answer is perfectly valid!
Well at this point i have bought TMP on vhs, cd-i, dvd, and BR, all i am missing is the new 4k version. Lol And with the way the world is going i assume the last version i will ever get to see will be the Soylent Green version, where i am wheeled into a room to be euthanized and turned into food, while i watch a big room wide version of TMP, and i hope it's the extended cut. Lol
Grace's Trek dialogue is extremely limited so it's easier to spot which episodes it came from plus it's hard to string it together to sound like a conversation. I think I can only get away with it because they're communicating over comms. I'm just working on head synchronisation for the Memory Wall scene now but I was able to find more non Trek dialogue for that.
I’m going to confine my comment to one thing in the musical score. I adore the Overture (Ilia’s Theme) in the original theatrical release. I think the extension and rebalancing of it in the 2022 remaster spoiled in.
The tweaked score in the new DE when Spock goes through the aperture just sounds weird and wrong but only because I've heard the other version so many times. After more exposure I assume I will get used to it.
If I’ve only seen it a few times, including the theater in 79, would I like the new DE just fine? I really need the “this” handshake in sickbay, which I think is not in all versions.
Probably. "This simple feeling" is in all versions, it's the bit of Spock crying a couple scenes later that was removed from the theatrical cut (IIRC, because it seemed redundant after the Sickbay scene).
I've been saying for 20+ years that if you hated TMP this edit will not change your mind. But if you at least liked it you will like it more. Also when you stand it up to 40 years of Star Trek in specific and movies in general, it only gets better.
Yeah TMP stands up so well visually and musically. It depends what kind of Trek fan you are I think. There's so much to love in it and the new version definitely polishes that even more. There were several moments where I just turned to my friend with my mouth open in awe at how amazing it looked. This movie is 42 years old.
Who was going to be Decker's first officer I wonder? It probably wasn't Sonak but I feel like that's an easy out. And who was Spock's first officer in TWOK?
Now I'm obsessed and I need to know who would have been Decker's exec. And why wasn't this person stupendously butt-hurt about being displaced? (Just messing with you. Decker had plenty good reason to be upset.) What other ripples did the Voyager Incident cause? The thing I noticed after the DE2 came out was that Commander Decker does not appear at the all hands briefing. Not that I've ever been in the navy or anything, but I have been at meetings where the person I had been reporting to was summarily disappeared. It didn't make me feel good and I wasn't immediately heading off to a suicide mission. (Well... Not LITERALLY.) I might guess that Spock didn't have an exec as such given his position as a teacher. It might be interesting to ask what kind of staff he might have had. Or are we to assume that it was McCoy, Uhura, and Scotty (with Sulu helping out temporarily)?
CLB's novel Ex Machina has a subplot about this. IIRC, Decker hadn't chosen his first officer yet, since the ship wasn't supposed to launch for a while, but the crew had been speculating about who it was going to be. I think he was leaning towards Uhura, because of the large number of nonhuman crew that had come on board the ship and the need for someone adept at communicating with people from varied foreign backgrounds; also, Scotty didn't want it, it'd take time away from engineering, and another aspect of the novel is Sulu getting bitten by the command bug and starting in on the path to the captain's chair, so he hadn't been lobbying for the position, either. It'd guess Sulu would be (or had been, since he had one foot out the door as per the trimmed line) Spock's first officer.