Last edited:
Entertainment Weekly Reviews The Star Trek Movies
- Thread starter Mudd
- Start date
TMP was the first revival of a dead TV show as a movie, but films like The Line Up and Batman were made concurrent with their spawning series.
I'm not conflating historical weight and firsts with film quality. I'm specifically referencing the Trek films in terms of their quality as regards the best films ever made. To my mind there's not a single Trek film that is in the league of M or The Manchurian Candidate (original) or The French Connection or The Third Man or Chinatown or On the Waterfront or West Side Story or Vertigo or Dog Day Afternoon or Unforgiven or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I could keep going but it's 2 am and it's zzzzz time.
Such things are subjective though I guess. I consider most star trek films better than West side story. Lol. Sleep well.
I'm just going by what was in the recent book...I think there's also a difference between something having a film made while it's in production, or being a TV series spun off a film, and what star trek did which was bringing something back. These things become increasingly popular over the following 20 to 30 years....with mixed success. I have a decent knowledge of film, but not enough to exhaustively say 'was the first' as was claimed by people working on TMP. I can say one of the first, because I don't think it was commonplace in Hollywood. (though of course TV shows were packaged up as films and sold abroad...the man from uncle, battlestar Galactica.)
Some of those I mentioned were produced after their series ended. Which recent book are you referring to?
The movie musical shall ultimately be proven to reign supreme, due to Hello Dolly! being the only movie that stands the test of time.
The movie musical shall ultimately be proven to reign supreme, due to Hello Dolly! being the only movie that stands the test of time.
Last edited:
Some of those I mentioned were produced after their series ended. Which recent book are you referring to?
The movie musical shall ultimately be proven to reign supreme, due to Hello Dolly! being the only movie that stands the test of time.
I keep forgetting it's title...at least I am never certain when I write it one here (you would think I could just be bothered to go check right? But it floats right out of my head.)....
Return to Tomorrow: an oral history of the making of Star Trek The Motion Picture.
Between that and Chekov's Enterprise there's quite a lot of material on the film.
Someone...one of the cast possibly, or the author, as it's possibly in the introduction...refers to TMP as the first.
Oh...and the furthest in the future I remember a film being shown to still exist (in fiction of course) is probably Kryten watching Casablanca in Red Dwarf. It oddly presages Prometheus, lol.
Could you hand on heart think of 100 films better than it or your favourite trek film?
See, I thought about it, and realised (and granted I probably watched more films in the first 25 years of my life than the next ten) that even assuming I could remember 100 films I had seen, and therefore liked them enough to remember them, it goes without saying that all of the Star Trek films would be in that list of 100 films I even find memorable. I could only honestly count films I had seen in their entirety (both the godfather and reservoir dogs put me to sleep within their opening few minutes...granted I only tried watching them late at night. Some of the other coppola epics I end up channel flipping in.) and found memorable enough to fill that list up. So doing research would defeat the object...I could just pull up the top 100 highest grossing films, or the top 100 on metacritic... But those would be dishonest lists. The first probably wouldn't include Blade Runner, or Chunking Express. The second would be a bunch of opinions, collated from people who publish their opinions, and is subject to trends and fashions, and I can't imagine say...Chaplins 'modern Time's making that list.
So, I have to go with the likely truth....it is perfectly possible for Trek to make the top hundred. More so if it's say the top 100 scifi films. A trek film might even make it into a fair number of top fifties, or top tens even.
If it wasn't so off topic, we could have great fun just trying to compile our own top 100 films, from memory alone. But that kind of fun is rather Vulcan.
(and before anyone suggests I am a cinema philistine for not liking the godfather...well, I promise I have seen enough to validate my opinion.)
Better than? Absolutely. Just because something is your favorite doesn't mean something is necessarily quality. One of my favorite movies is Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, a film that's pretty universally acknowledged to be an over-the-top, campy joke of a movie. I have no illusions about how good it is. Same goes for any of the Trek movies.
Last edited:
If you ever get around to watching the full movie (HIGHLY recommended, BTW), you'll no longer be surprised by that. That dude did some heinous stuff.
I'm the opposite of Cicero, in that while I knew there was a radio series, I've never heard any of it. Is it available online anywhere?
I probably could. Just glancing over at my DVD shelf ought to do it...
1) Citizen Kane, 2) The Third Man, 3) Double Indemnity, 4) Casablanca, 5) The Maltese Falcon, 6) Raiders of the Lost Ark, 7) The Adventures of Robin Hood, 8) The Apartment, 9) Some Like It Hot, 10) Planet of the Apes (1968), 11) Dr. No, 12) From Russia With Love, 13) Goldfinger, 14) On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 15) Superman the Movie, 16) The Rocketeer, 17) That Thing You Do!, 18) Blade Runner (Director's Cut), 19) Metropolis, 20) Chinatown, 21) The Odd Couple, 22) Psycho, 23) North by Northwest, 24) Rear Window, 25) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 26) Jaws, 27) Iron Man (2008), 28) The Avengers (2012), 29) The Conversation, 30) Sleuth, 31) Ghostbusters, 32) Lost Horizon, 33) Lost in Translation, 34) 12 Monkeys, 35) Brazil, 36) Charade, 37) Crumb, 38) Ghost World, 39) The Iron Giant, 40) 12 Angry Men, 41) Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 42) Monty Python's Life of Brian, 43) Bob Roberts, 44) Young Frankenstein, 45) Blazing Saddles, 46) Somewhere in Time, 47) The Mark of Zorro (1940) 48) The Man Who Would Be King, 49) King Kong (1933), 50) Time Bandits, 51) Back To The Future... I think you get the point.
Don't worry about it. One of my favorite TOS episodes is "The Omega Glory".
Taste is relative.
I will defend "Catspaw" with my dying breath . . .
And dare I admit that the love the theme song for DOC SAVAGE, MAN OF BRONZE?
Who doesn't love them some John Philip SoUSA?
Yes. TMP is my favorite Trek film, as it attempts to approach the greatness and grandeur of fine cinema. However, for various reasons, it isn't able to fully achieve that.
Archive.org has them. The radio series was UK produced, and in the UK was known as "The Adventures of Harry Lime." The US title of the radio series was "The Lives of Harry Lime." It starred Orson Welles. Good stuff.
https://archive.org/details/TheLivesOfHarryLime
Kor
Last edited:
Have no fear -- THE MAN OF BRONZE IS HERE! (ding)And dare I admit that the love the theme song for DOC SAVAGE, MAN OF BRONZE?
Thanks, I'll check them out!
If you ever get around to watching the full movie (HIGHLY recommended, BTW), you'll no longer be surprised by that. That dude did some heinous stuff.
I'm the opposite of Cicero, in that while I knew there was a radio series, I've never heard any of it. Is it available online anywhere?
I probably could. Just glancing over at my DVD shelf ought to do it...
1) Citizen Kane, 2) The Third Man, 3) Double Indemnity, 4) Casablanca, 5) The Maltese Falcon, 6) Raiders of the Lost Ark, 7) The Adventures of Robin Hood, 8) The Apartment, 9) Some Like It Hot, 10) Planet of the Apes (1968), 11) Dr. No, 12) From Russia With Love, 13) Goldfinger, 14) On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 15) Superman the Movie, 16) The Rocketeer, 17) That Thing You Do!, 18) Blade Runner (Director's Cut), 19) Metropolis, 20) Chinatown, 21) The Odd Couple, 22) Psycho, 23) North by Northwest, 24) Rear Window, 25) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 26) Jaws, 27) Iron Man (2008), 28) The Avengers (2012), 29) The Conversation, 30) Sleuth, 31) Ghostbusters, 32) Lost Horizon, 33) Lost in Translation, 34) 12 Monkeys, 35) Brazil, 36) Charade, 37) Crumb, 38) Ghost World, 39) The Iron Giant, 40) 12 Angry Men, 41) Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 42) Monty Python's Life of Brian, 43) Bob Roberts, 44) Young Frankenstein, 45) Blazing Saddles, 46) Somewhere in Time, 47) The Mark of Zorro (1940) 48) The Man Who Would Be King, 49) King Kong (1933), 50) Time Bandits, 51) Back To The Future... I think you get the point.
There's at least 4 on that list I would consider worse than TMP, not least as I prefer the Theatrical Release to Directors Cut on Blade Runner. It's basically subjective, and you have 49 more spaces to go. Which is basically my point.
IMO, these 'top 100' or 'top whatever' lists are the most pointless thing ever! You can classify movies in a list based on specific aspects such as direction, special effects, sound mixing, etc. and even that wouldn't mean that one film is better than the other. Each movie is unique, as is personal taste.
You seemed to miss the fact that I stopped listing movies because I didn't want to spend more time typing it up, not because I couldn't think of 49 more movies better than TMP. Hell, if I open it up to movies that aren't on my DVD shelf, it gets even easier.
But yeah, I don't want to waste my time doing that just so you can discount my entire list by saying "it's basically subjective" again. Life's too short.
Similar threads
- Locked
