Dochterman on the ST:TMP DE

[Maurice]

...like the sound effect of V'Ger's second plasma bolt continuing for something like 20 seconds after the bolt vanished.

Never happened.

There were some sound errors on the bridge in the SLV related the V'ger attack, but there were no energy bolt sound issues on the theatrical cut.

 

[Christopher]

^I just checked the DVD, and it is there in the '79 cut, although I misremembered the length of the discrepancy. Right after Ilia says "Ten seconds" and Decker says "Transmitting," the torpedo vanishes from the screen and the sound takes 6 or 7 seconds to fade out afterward. Also, there's absolutely no sound effect for the electric discharge that burns Chekov -- a blatant mistake.

 

[Maurice]

I know what sound you're referring to, but since the weapon hadn't hit the ship I never took it be to be a sound FROM the weapon, as nothing else on the viewscreen makes noise. The sound in question always came across to me as something from equipment on the Enterprise, like maybe the shield power or something.

 

[Maurice]

Okay, this is a complete non-sequitur, but seeing Christopher's and Alrik's avatars back-to-back is making me do too many double takes!

Now I've made it more confusing.

 

[CoveTom]

Just about the only change I can think of that wasn't based directly on the 1979...

I'll reply in more detail to your specific points later, but for now, I wanted to address this. A large crux of your argument seems to be that the changes are okay because they were originally intended in 1979. But, to me, whether they were intended originally or something that was invented new in 2001 is irrelevant to me. I still don't care for them making changes.

All works of art -- paintings, sculptures, musical works, novels and, yes, even movies -- are created with certain restrictions. And I happen to think that, generally, those restrictions are good. They force the artist to be more inventive and more creative than they may otherwise have been. As I said upstream, I agree fervently with Nick Meyer's assessment that "art thrives on restrictions."

One of the key restrictions in making a feature film is the restriction of time. Being held to a deadline. And having to make it work within that period of time. For TMP, you can argue that the deadline was arbitrary and too short, but it existed none-the-less. As a result, the artists involved, from Robert Wise to Doug Trumbull to the sound designers, were required to do the best they could with the time they had. And, in my opinion, what they created was a substantially very good work of art. Flawed in some ways, sure, but still a creative success regardless.

To go back decades later and have a largely new group of people, even with the guidance of an aging Robert Wise, attempt to "properly" complete the film is, IMHO, not just a bad idea for TMP but a bad idea in 99% of the cases where any sort of "director's cut" or "restored cut" or "whatever happy special cut" is done. Leave the work of art alone, warts and all, as it was at the time of its creation. Move on to new works of art. Don't tinker with what's gone before.

(As somewhat of an aside, the one exception to this I can think of is the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II. Why? Because that is a case that is almost unique, if not totally unique, in film history. Basically, you have the footage for a completely separate second film that was discarded. I don't consider the Richard Donner Cut to be as much of a re-cut of the original Superman II as the completion of a completely different film that was never finished.)

 

[Christopher]

To go back decades later and have a largely new group of people, even with the guidance of an aging Robert Wise, attempt to "properly" complete the film is, IMHO, not just a bad idea for TMP but a bad idea in 99% of the cases where any sort of "director's cut" or "restored cut" or "whatever happy special cut" is done. Leave the work of art alone, warts and all, as it was at the time of its creation. Move on to new works of art. Don't tinker with what's gone before.

A lot of creators would disagree. Not just filmmakers, but a number of prose authors have gone back and rewritten old novels or short stories. Sometimes it's just correcting mistakes and cleaning up the writing style -- for instance, in the '70s Poul Anderson revised a number of his '50s Dominic Flandry stories with more credible science -- but sometimes you get whole new books out of it, like Arthur C. Clarke reworking his first novel Against the Fall of Night as The City and the Stars, or David Gerrold getting at least four different books out of the same starting concept (Yesterday's Children, its revised and expanded version also called Starhunt, Star Trek: The Galactic Whirlpool, and Voyage of the Star Wolf, which in turn spawned two sequels). Heck, I've been working on a novel that expands on my first published story and I've revised and fleshed out a lot of stuff from the original piece.

Besides, I happen to think the Director's Edition is a superior film to the theatrical version. Just as the various director's cuts of Blade Runner are superior to the theatrical version with its awful narration and bogus happy ending. I don't think it makes sense to say that any whole category of creative endeavor "shouldn't" be done. Any type of creation can be done well or done badly. If something produces good results, then it was worth doing.

 

[CoveTom]

^ Well, of course, I don't mean "shouldn't be done" in the sense that an artist should not be allowed to go back and do it. Of course, George Lucas had the right to rework the original Star Wars trilogy and Paramount had the right to do whatever they wanted to with TMP. And, yes, I'll admit that occasionally this produces a result that I think is better than the original. You and I disagree on TMP, with me still preferring the original in many if not most ways. But, for example, I like James Cameron's director's cut of Aliens better than the theatrical cut.

Even with that having been said, though, it is still my opinion -- and just my opinion -- that attempts to go back and revisit a previously completed work generally turn out badly. An artist comes back to a work many years later with an entirely different viewpoint than they had in the beginning. And I think that most often leads to negative results.

And I am particularly adamant, for whatever that's worth, that the original version should remain available even if they do such tinkering. I think it was absolutely horrendous that George Lucas tried, for so many years, to insist that his "special editions" were now the one and only versions and steadfastly refused to release the original cuts on DVD. I would feel the same if, for example, they wanted to pull all copies of TOS except for the "Remastered" versions.

 

[Christopher]

Even with that having been said, though, it is still my opinion -- and just my opinion -- that attempts to go back and revisit a previously completed work generally turn out badly. An artist comes back to a work many years later with an entirely different viewpoint than they had in the beginning. And I think that most often leads to negative results.

Trying to do anything creative generally turns out badly, simply by Sturgeon's Law. People always say "I object to X category of film/show because most examples I know are bad," but the category needs to be judged in the context of films/shows as a whole. Does it really turn out badly more often than other things do? Is the ratio of bad "director's cuts" to good ones really significantly higher than, say, the ratio of bad remakes to good ones, or the ratio of bad horror movies to good ones, or the ratio of bad sitcoms to good ones?

I don't think there's anything about coming back with a new viewpoint that intrinsically would produce negative results. Often it can be very positive. Presumably you're smarter later in your career than you were early on. I look back on that first published story and I'm embarrassed by how weak the characterizations were, how excessively talky the story was. I established a ship with 40 people aboard and only named four of them, two of whom were nothing more than exposition puppets. Now, in the novel version I've been working on, I've been able to enrich the characterizations considerably and flesh out the cast, as well as correcting some scientific and technical flaws.

I think there are a lot of reworked films that are better than their originals, though they may occasionally have new faults added. There's the TMP DE, there's the Blade Runner Final Cut, there's Brad Wright's re-edit of Stargate SG-1: Children of the Gods (I regret the loss of the full frontal nudity, but otherwise it's a stronger film than before). As for the updated Star Wars films, there are a number of changes I find awkward or problematical, but there are some things about them I like a great deal. And I'm generally quite fond of the new visual effects in TOS Remastered, particularly the new shots that take the place of recycled stock footage. I can't really think of that many cases where I felt the original was better than the revised version. (Gerrold's Yesterday's Children was one. The original had a fairly dark ending that I felt arose naturally from the story leading up to it, but the revised version added a bunch more chapters afterward that continued the story and added a more upbeat ending that totally changed the meaning of the story's events in a way that I found to be a copout. I'm also not that crazy about the stuff restored to the Wrath of Khan director's cut; I think the Peter Preston stuff is embarrassingly melodramatic, or rather, even more so than the film as a whole.)

And I still say the TMP DE needs to be distinguished from something like Lucas's Star Wars Special Editions because the intent wasn't to update it, but to make it the way it was meant to be made in 1979. The edits and new shots were based on the production notes that Wise, Roddenberry, et al. made at the time. It was the 2001 Wise's best approximation of what he thought the 1979 Wise would've done, rather than his attempt to do the 2001 Wise's version of it. I don't think that's any more intrinsically objectionable than something like, say, the film restoration of Metropolis, or the restoration of the murals in the Sistine Chapel, or the attempts to reconstruct the audio tracks of erased Doctor Who episodes. A modern reconstruction isn't going to exactly match the lost original, but at least it can get close.

And I am particularly adamant, for whatever that's worth, that the original version should remain available even if they do such tinkering.

I have no disagreement with that at all. The original should always be available for the sake of the historical record if nothing more. But that doesn't mean an effort can't be made to improve on it.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Some shots may (or may not) have been improved in the DE, but it was decades too late to actually improve the movie as a movie - the limits of the thing were defined by the direction, the script and the performances. All of those had always been far exceeded by the imagination and scope of the movie's art design, and widening the gulf just a tiny bit more - if the additions did - was pretty meaningless in that respect.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

One part of the movie that got so much attention in the DE - when the Enterprise is attacked by the plasma weapon/assimilator - was fundamentally absurd to begin with. Even with new shields, it is ridiculous that the Enterprise would survive even one attack from V'Ger without getting stored inside it. I mean for God's sake the cloud is a twelfth-power energy field, enough to make Sulu almost crap his uniform; V'Ger can absorb whole galaxies.

The only way to fix the scene would be for Spock to realize that V'Ger had been trying to communicate before the first assimilator hit, thus compressing the scene, eliminating the new visual, speeding the whole movie along, etc. But would it have even been possible to make such an edit, and have it play well, without at least recording new dialog?

Granted that would have been a rewrite, but this is an example of an incremental improvement, that at least in my opinion would have actually helped the film. Rather than just giving it a fresh coat of paint.

Even so, the original cut is still in my top three list of Trek films, with TWOK and JJTrek.

 

[Maurice]

As I've pointed out repeatedly, the DE ISN'T what was intended in 1979. It doesn't conform to what Robert Wise said he wanted to do with the film back in 1980 (I have the interview), which included cutting it by at least 6 minutes. Furthermore, the DE VFX team didn't actually do what was intended for the VFX shots...unless you choose to take their word over people like Andy Probert, who were actually there. They changed designs (the city of San Francisco), added stuff (the extra area of the air tram station, invented a new part of V'ger), and didn't follow the storyboards for V'ger's arrival into Earth orbit. The DE might be a better cut to most people, but it IS NOT what was intended in 1979.

 

[Christopher]

One part of the movie that got so much attention in the DE - when the Enterprise is attacked by the plasma weapon/assimilator - was fundamentally absurd to begin with. Even with new shields, it is ridiculous that the Enterprise would survive even one attack from V'Ger without getting stored inside it. I mean for God's sake the cloud is a twelfth-power energy field, enough to make Sulu almost crap his uniform; V'Ger can absorb whole galaxies.

Given that all this is made up, it's a bit odd to argue something like that as though it were a matter of concrete fact. Naturally the intent of the scene was to showcase how advanced the "new force fields" supplementing the deflectors were -- they were able to hold off the same thing that effortlessly digitized the Klingon ships. Sure, maybe it requires some suspension of disbelief (though it's easy enough to assume that V'Ger was starting off with a low-power version of the weapon and could've ramped up much higher as needed), but it served the dramatic purpose it was intended for.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, the DE ISN'T what was intended in 1979.

Of course not. It was a modern reconstruction guided by the notes and storyboards from 1979. Naturally it was the restorers' interpretation of what was intended, rather than a magically exact duplication of what was intended at the time. That goes without saying, because all art and all history is interpretation. It's obviously impossible to duplicate a past idea or intention exactly; you can only do the best approximation you can, filtered through your own current interpretations. So it is not intrinsically a criticism to point it out. It shouldn't even be necessary to point it out, except to correct the misconceptions of those who confuse an interpretation of the past with a duplication thereof.

Naturally the thing about interpretations is that they're individualized. A different team with the same intention of reconstructing the film as it might've been had it been completed in '79 would naturally have produced a different result. That's the nature of art. And different isn't right or wrong, it's just different. It's the prerogative of different creators to bring their own perspective to a work.

It's a given that exactly duplicating what TMP would've been in '79 is impossible, so there's no point in dwelling on that. What matters is the intent that went into it, the intent of creating something that was faithful to the style and spirit of the original film and using notes and materials from that time as guidelines and inspiration. And what matters is how well the finished product works as an artistic creation, and I think it works very well.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

As I've pointed out repeatedly, the DE ISN'T what was intended in 1979.

Of course not. It was a modern reconstruction guided by the notes and storyboards from 1979.

The paint job that the Enterprise model at the Smithsonian has sported since 1992 is a much closer "reconstruction" of how the model looked in 1968 than the TMP DE is a "reconstruction" of what was apparently intended for the film in 1979.

Saying that the TMP DE addresses the artists' intentions for the film by not doing what the artists , y'know, intended for the film is certainly creative logic.

(Sad to say, none of my many photographs of the TOS ship in its glass case are suitable for continuing the avatar theme, as I am not in any of them. Well, perhaps not that sad as I'm badly in need of reconstruction and a new paint job myself. Maybe I can just Photoshop a cartoon pony into one of them.)

 

[CorporalCaptain]

One part of the movie that got so much attention in the DE - when the Enterprise is attacked by the plasma weapon/assimilator - was fundamentally absurd to begin with. Even with new shields, it is ridiculous that the Enterprise would survive even one attack from V'Ger without getting stored inside it. I mean for God's sake the cloud is a twelfth-power energy field, enough to make Sulu almost crap his uniform; V'Ger can absorb whole galaxies.

Given that all this is made up, it's a bit odd to argue something like that as though it were a matter of concrete fact. Naturally the intent of the scene was to showcase how advanced the "new force fields" supplementing the deflectors were -- they were able to hold off the same thing that effortlessly digitized the Klingon ships. Sure, maybe it requires some suspension of disbelief (though it's easy enough to assume that V'Ger was starting off with a low-power version of the weapon and could've ramped up much higher as needed), but it served the dramatic purpose it was intended for.

A dramatic reaction from a character, in this case Sulu when he utters "twelfth-power", should tell the viewer all we need to know: the ship is out of its league. Instead, Sulu could just as easily said "I have a helleva hangnail", as the ship pulls a deus ex machina that doesn't even have any bearing on the advancement of the story. The whole scene is a huge waste of time that showcases nothing relevant either to the story or the issues faced by the characters. I didn't find it dramatic because I couldn't overcome the expectation that the ship should have been turned into data patterns. Instead, it was just cringeworthy.

Having scanned their ship, V'Ger should know how strong their shields are, or I have to make allowances for the ship being the hero ship that I don't have to make for disposable red shirt ships. Of course, if the heroes didn't get a pass that everyone else doesn't, I guess it just wouldn't be Star Trek either.

[Disclaimer: By the way, just so everybody's clear, and there's no mistake, this post comprises my opinion. It should not be construed as an objective assertion about tangible reality; Star Trek is a work of fiction.]

 

[Christopher]

A dramatic reaction from a character, in this case Sulu when he utters "twelfth-power", should tell the viewer all we need to know: the ship is out of its league.

Well, yes, which is why it's made crystal-clear that the ship barely survived one hit and had no chance of surviving a second one. Being out of your league doesn't have to mean being destroyed instantly, and it should be self-evident why that's not going to happen to the heroes of the film.

The whole scene is a huge waste of time that showcases nothing relevant either to the story or the issues faced by the characters. I didn't find it dramatic because I couldn't overcome the expectation that the ship should have been turned into data patterns. Instead, it was just cringeworthy.

Of course it's relevant. It shows the danger the crew is in but in a way that doesn't immediately destroy them and end the story an hour early. It shows that this advanced new refit isn't just cosmetic, but actually gives the ship defenses strong enough to let it marginally survive an attack that destroyed everything before it, thereby selling the new Enterprise as badass while still making it clear that they can only survive one shot at most. And it's one of the few action beats in a movie that's generally criticized for its lack of action.

Having scanned their ship, V'Ger should know how strong their shields are...

Kirk didn't order the forcefields and deflectors raised until after V'Ger fired the first plasma bolt. There's no reason to assume that V'Ger would've instantly known the power of defenses it hadn't seen in action yet.

 

[Jeyl]

Count me in the minority for liking the new Red Alert Klaxon in the Director's Edition. The original certainly had a big punch to it, but it was so loud and back to back with itself that it drowned the audio around it.

One of the advantages with the new Klaxon is that it's sequence is much more spread apart, so you can afford to have it playing over the dialogue without it being too distracting.

That's actually one of the cooler things I like about the new Klaxon. The sound designers were able to add it in more scenes that the original sound designers couldn't with the original Klaxon. Like during the wormhole sequence. You hear the original klaxon when they first enter the wormhole, but after we go from the exterior shot of the Enterprise back to the bridge, the klaxon is completely gone. With the new Klaxon, not only is it there during the entire wormhole sequence, but it also slows down to match the characters' voices slowing down. Great continuity there.

As for the computer's voice?

INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!

SHUT UP!

... God, that's awful. After listening to the commentary track that was downloadable from startrek.com a few years ago, I like what the team behind the Director's Edition had to say about the exclusion of the computer's voice. It made the ship more crew dependable instead of sounding like everything was automated. I like hearing what's going on from the characters rather than hearing it twice.

"Theatrical Version"
Computer: Emergency Alert! Negative control at helm! Emergency Alert! Negative control at helm! Emergency Alert! Negative control at helm! Emergency Alert! Negative control at helm!
Kirk: Force fields. Full remaining strength. Total reserves.
Deckar: The ship is under attack. Man all defensive stations.
Spock: Captain, we've been seized by a tractor beam.

"Director's Edition"
*Red Aler Klaxon sounds*
Spock: Captain, we've been seized by a tractor beam.

MUCH better.

And if I may take another stab at the computer? The Enterprise's computer voice should ALWAYS BE FEMALE!

 

[Christopher]

^I agree with just about all of that. I hated the theatrical edition's klaxon and computer voice.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

At 26:35 when Cleary's console explodes, I could swear I still hear the original klaxon mixed in with the explosion, much fainter than it used to be, but still there. At about 26:47 when the scene switches to the transporter room, I could swear I hear a faint male computer voice saying a piece of "malfunction" once.

When they dropped these sounds, were they able to remaster the audio by simply eliminating certain master tracks, or did they have to use filters to isolate them on tracks that were already mixed? It really sounds like it was not the former, especially in some places, and that whatever method they used was not 100% successful, but only at best 99%. But those leading edges where it fails are killers. If they lacked full masters of each individual element, they could have always taken the trouble to create new versions of the sound effects from scratch, such as for Cleary's console explosion, which evidently they did not do either.

My annoyance at still seeming to hear pieces here and there of the expunged sounds, the original klaxon and the male computer voice, is one of the main reasons why I wish they had left them in place.

 

[Christopher]

Well, I never noticed them. And just because there's a fragment of those ugly sounds remaining doesn't strike me as a reason to keep them there altogether.

 

[Therin of Andor]

It is nicer to see it at closer range and closer to ground level, but the new paint job is distracting to me.

Betcha can't see this angle anymore!:


USS Enterprise at Smithsonian by Therin of Andor, on Flickr

Also have this shot handy:


USS Enterprise at Smithsonian by Therin of Andor, on Flickr