About twenty years ago
- Thread starter usspicard
- Start date
Wow.
All hail The Undiscovered Country, the best of the TOS films!
It was pretty lame, actually. Heavy-handed, simplistic, clumsily written and uninteresting.
Any competition for best of the TOS-based films is limited to the first four...and number three really is never in the running.
Any competition for best of the TOS-based films is limited to the first four...and number three really is never in the running.
Even fans who have problems with the script should be able to acknowledge the essential goodness of Cliff Eidelman's music, and in particular the way the opening-title music grows from the unadorned six-note motif, eventually punctuated by the Praxis explosion. I only have a VHS version but still recall how good this sounded in the theater in 1991.
Uh, he wasn't technically ASKING a question...
I think TSFS is good, but not at the top. And as for TMP being in the competition for the top spot, outside of folks at this site, I haven't seen a Trek fan who would seriously consider it.
TUC was great by the way, except for some characterization issues with the crew suddenly becoming racists.
Quality is not determined by the number of people who do or do not like a film. It is determined by whether or not I like a film.
TMP is a good film. It is not a great film, but it could have been had it not been hamstrung by so many production problems.
TUC is an okay film. It really does feel more dated than any of the other TOS films, yes even TVH with it's 1986 time traveling. The writing on TUC was just plain awful. It must be Denny Martin Flynn's influence, because Meyer's writing was usually pretty darn good.
very well then.
I think TMP is a re-tread of "the changeling," padded out by a half-hour to forty-five minutes of special effects and characters staring at a screen. The characters are awkward and off, and there's not enough story to fill the time.
It's pretentious, slow, and a false start for the film franchise, which is why the next films went in a totally different direction.
but the special effects and music are great.
TUC is very well-written, a clever political allegory with snappy dialogue and an original and inventive plot.
the only significant flaws are that the whodunit mystery is too obvious and the out-of-nowhere racism of some of the characters.
The Undiscovered Country.
The movie that redeemed the original series crew and quite possible saved Trek itself after the embarrassing, abysmal failure of The Final Frontier.
Pretty sure many would consider TUC to be among the better original series movies, along with Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home. It's that odd-even thing, ya know.
The movie that redeemed the original series crew and quite possible saved Trek itself after the embarrassing, abysmal failure of The Final Frontier.
Pretty sure many would consider TUC to be among the better original series movies, along with Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home. It's that odd-even thing, ya know.
It's derivative, but it's all right.
Eh. I think Eidelman's score is so-so. As has been pointed out, it's a bit derivative of previous works. But, mostly, it's just a taste difference. Eidelman's score is rather dark and brooding most of the time, which fits the general tone of the film, but is not my general preference. I much prefer the brighter scores of the earlier films. Even Horner's scores, which Meyer didn't want to consist of big brassy marches like Goldsmith's, still are much more uplifting than Eidleman's.
I couldn't wait to see TUC and I thought it was great.
BUT
There are things I notice now that I never noticed at 12. I won't go into them at length, mostly because I don't feel like it. One thing that strikes me is the wild degree they took cultural references and the way they were attributed. The President was directly quoting Reagan in the middle of the film and Kennedy at the end. Why would "Only Nixon can go to China" be a Vulcan proverb? Shakespeare in the original Klingon. "Guess who's coming to dinner." Are the Klingons supposed to be Soviets or African Americans? Is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really an ancestor of Spock's?
Another thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how could enemies become allies to stay enemies? Would these people trust each other long enough to carry out a conspiracy? I bet this was also ripped off a headline but I don't know what the headline was.
On another note, I don't know what Cliff Eidelman's score is derivative of (honestly, I'm sure it is and I don't disbelieve, but nothing's jumping to my mind right now so examples would be helpful) but this is one of my favorite soundtracks for a Star Trek movie, up there with TMP and FC.
For a brief moment in the theater, 20 years ago, when Scotty went to the air vent, I wondered if he was in on the conspiracy.
BUT
There are things I notice now that I never noticed at 12. I won't go into them at length, mostly because I don't feel like it. One thing that strikes me is the wild degree they took cultural references and the way they were attributed. The President was directly quoting Reagan in the middle of the film and Kennedy at the end. Why would "Only Nixon can go to China" be a Vulcan proverb? Shakespeare in the original Klingon. "Guess who's coming to dinner." Are the Klingons supposed to be Soviets or African Americans? Is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really an ancestor of Spock's?
Another thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how could enemies become allies to stay enemies? Would these people trust each other long enough to carry out a conspiracy? I bet this was also ripped off a headline but I don't know what the headline was.
On another note, I don't know what Cliff Eidelman's score is derivative of (honestly, I'm sure it is and I don't disbelieve, but nothing's jumping to my mind right now so examples would be helpful) but this is one of my favorite soundtracks for a Star Trek movie, up there with TMP and FC.
For a brief moment in the theater, 20 years ago, when Scotty went to the air vent, I wondered if he was in on the conspiracy.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being "derivative" - when it comes to music, that is, not story; derivative stories (such as TMP) I can do without.
Even Jerry Goldsmith, who had the talent to produce really enduring scores (not just TMP but Patton and Planet of the Apes), could be derivative at times. For example: The Ilia melody, in the overture and elsewhere in TMP, is built on motion from the fifth degree of the scale to a flat sixth and back again, more than once; I don't know whether he'd heard George Duning's "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" music from 1968, but the same is true for Duning's Miranda melody, although the meter and rhythm are different.
Similarly I have no trouble with being derivative of one's own prior work - in Horner's case, many of the ideas in TWOK came direct from his Battle Beyond the Stars score. When I saw the latter (years after seeing TWOK the first time), I didn't care; all composers do this. (The same 5-flat6-5 motion discussed above is also heard in the "middle eight" of Goldsmith's Voyager theme.)
It's true there are no "uplifting" moments in TUC's score, but I think that might be an aspect of opening with main-title music of such foreboding. That is, I can't think of a movie with uplifting music that didn't also start with uplifting main-title music.
Even Jerry Goldsmith, who had the talent to produce really enduring scores (not just TMP but Patton and Planet of the Apes), could be derivative at times. For example: The Ilia melody, in the overture and elsewhere in TMP, is built on motion from the fifth degree of the scale to a flat sixth and back again, more than once; I don't know whether he'd heard George Duning's "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" music from 1968, but the same is true for Duning's Miranda melody, although the meter and rhythm are different.
Similarly I have no trouble with being derivative of one's own prior work - in Horner's case, many of the ideas in TWOK came direct from his Battle Beyond the Stars score. When I saw the latter (years after seeing TWOK the first time), I didn't care; all composers do this. (The same 5-flat6-5 motion discussed above is also heard in the "middle eight" of Goldsmith's Voyager theme.)
It's true there are no "uplifting" moments in TUC's score, but I think that might be an aspect of opening with main-title music of such foreboding. That is, I can't think of a movie with uplifting music that didn't also start with uplifting main-title music.
the conspiracy makes sense if you remember Valeris' line about those "who stand to lose from peace." The conspiracy was about people whose positions and power, as well as world-view depended on keeping the Federation-Klingon conflict going, so they could cooperate long enough to fulfill their goals.
Some of those lines you allude to are meant to be humorous.
Meant to be? Yes. But they fail at being humorous in almost all cases.
