Personally, I actually like his design work for the TOS films (IV-VI) better than his 24th century design work.
The sleek Okudagram and all-touchscreen Enterprise-A bridges will always be superior to the weird mishmash of touchscreens and recording studio switches and faders that was in TUC.
I must admit I do have a fondness for that TUC bridge, though…
I'm a huge fan of the movie. The bridge is so hit or miss though.
That was unrestrained Nick Meyer again. I have said many times that I think Meyer needed to be balanced out by someone like Harve Bennett who kept some of his ideas in check and had more respect for the source material.
I thought it was a good choice to back away from the TNG look a bit, considering how many decades separated the two time periods.
The TFF bridge is actually my all-time favorite bridge. I thought it was a perfect transition point between the TOS/TMP bridge and the TNG bridge. I wish Meyer hadn't changed it for TUC.
It's a good transition point, it's just that they're in different centuries so maybe it's not time for that yet.
Well, yeah, but that really was Wise's call.
@Mudd's right. It's all work-for-hire stuff. None of those production guys get points or residuals.
It also provides some visual contrast between the Enterprise and Excelsior bridges, with the Enterprise having a mix of touchscreen and tactile controls, and the Excelsior being all-touchscreen, emphasizing that one ship is newer than the other.
Ah, but do we know for sure that Excelsior is newer? This is the Enterprise-A we are talking about, not the original Enterprise. And despite the fan speculation and such, nothing was ever said to indicate that it was an existing ship that got rechristened vs. a brand new ship at the time of TVH. Scotty even refers to her as "this new ship" in TFF.
Seems weird that they'd decommission it less than ten years after launch?
Starfleet has been known to make weird decisions on more than one occasion.
Perhaps it was the last Constitution class off the assembly line and Starfleet decommissioned the whole class at the same time? Or perhaps it's just that Starfleet was quite obviously really in love with the Excelsior class and wanted to christen a new Enterprise of that class? (Heck, the Excelsior class has to be the most used and long-lived in all of Starfleet history based on what we see on screen.) Or perhaps they eventually decided the Enterprise-A was just a lemon and not worth continually repairing? Or maybe it had to do with that weird crap they were cooking in the galley that can survive direct phaser fire.
Good point (and I myself tend to fall on the "Enterprise-A was actually brand-new and not the Yorktown with all the corpses hosed out" side, and was decommissioned due to frame damage from a dozen-odd unshielded photon torpedo strikes), so let's say a newer generation or newer technology, even if the -A technically came out of the shipyard after the Excelsior. In-universe, it's a bit wibbly, anyway, since the -A has a new/overhauled bridge in TUC compared to TFF and TVH, and we don't know when the Excelsior's bridge was swapped from the TSFS mdoel. You could make the argument that the Excelsior's bridge is actually older, and the TVH/TFF touch-screens turned out to be buggy, so it was the more recent model that shifted back to physical controls for key functions.
When was the Enterprise-A hit a dozen times while unshielded?
Oh, right. The one movie where they didn’t contrive a reason to have the shields down, but the visual effects still acted like they did. Well, two or three unshielded torpedos still isn’t great.
It's akin to a Zumwalt vs. one of the later Burkes (though in Star Trek, the "great experiment" was a successful class). The Enterprise might be newer, but its design is older and less advanced.
These are the bridges of the Zumwalt and the first Flight III upgraded Burke, commissioned seven years later:
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