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I'm with Rich Evans. ST:TMP is the best Star Trek movie. Here's my brief review.

TMP just got some love on the official Star Trek YouTube channel, where they posted the full clip of the travel pod flying around the Enterprise sequence!
It felt petty to comment on the video itself, but I was disappointed it wasn’t the cleaned-up version from the 4K Director’s Edition.
 
Been watching it in 4K (Special Longer Version) and am about 55 minutes in, while taking breaks (admitting that folks in the audience in the theater in 1979 🕺lacked this, nor was it 1945 when they had actual intermissions much more regularly so one could go get a new soda after indirectly disposing the one they'd bought an hour and a quarter earlier...

But I digress.

A few things noted in what is my top-4 films (for which two of the other three are TWOK and TSFS):

0. Disclaimer: It helps to pretend it's 1979 when you've only seen 79 episodes reran umpteen times, with no bloody A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Defiant, Voyager, NX, Rolaids, Tums, USS Peptobismol, or any other ship in the franchise. But even when not going to that extra level, the movie does hold its own as a good sci-fi mystery plot, even we know it took elements from a couple (mid-level) TOS episodes with goal of making them properly epic as well as "done better" or "done right", for which it succeeds because I can barely tolerate "The Changeling" anymore with flinging big numbers around like 90 torpedoes, dumb gimmicks like killing Scotty and wiping Uhura's memory and they retrained two decades' worth of knowledge in as many weeks as she'll be up to collegiate level in a week, etc, etc... somehow Spock can mindmeld with it, some campiness (NOMAD bouncing up and down, with that voice, arguably qualifies as being intentionally silly) and, of course, the casual sexism that just becomes too ridiculous, but before I really digress... Reeling in the number of hits and actually showing the palpable nature of the threat alone works a 90 million billion jillon kazillion times more than the TOS episode had and I wish I was being sarcastic, TMP really did it better in setting up the big threat, but I digress again:

1. In the three-deck tall rec room, Kirk angrily demands the viewer be shut off a second time because everyone's too busy gawking in awe at what they just saw (just don't ask how they could get images of VGer's cloud after the station relaying it all got zapped.) Kirk, some time later, states "viewer off" in his quarters. It's headcanon time, so the rec room is either controlled solely by a communications officer (outranking the captain in a case like this, like how a doctor can declare the captain unfit?) or for some other set of mental gymnastics to explain this minor difference. (Behind the scenes, this also came from an abandoned tv pilot script and may have been incomplete or not fully edited by the time it was retooled as a big flick.)

2. The special longer version was surprisingly good with pacing, so far. A couple issues, which can't be helped, are there, but what we get in return is well worth the trade-off.

3. Spock's shuttlepod has the name SURAK on it, in English below the Vulcan text. Nice touch. Not really legible before 4K. More, now have fun imagining the argument that Sarek and others must have had regarding the logic behind naming the pod.

4. More pod people goodness, how do(es) the occupant(s) inside not get dizzy when it flips like that? Cool effect, but... why... apart from "style over substance".

4b. The transporter scene after a refit without full testing rightly brings up some tangible real life issues, but the show has done teleportation from other sources so why couldn't spacedock or Earth lock in via the ship's geostationary orbit? Then again, shuttles are cool and I respect both TOS movies that made use of shuttles (TFF's use I adore, but I digress)...

5. Vulcan has moons. Spock said Vulcan had no moons in "The Man Trap", if I recall. This is a small nitpick, and being big on the big screen, the moons added to add to the visual delights of this alien world. But it's a small thing, nobody watched all 79 episodes and every bit of minutiae behind the making of this film, and bigger ones exist re: Spock's origins (e.g. his distant ancestor marrying a human woman later turning to be daddy and all but it's handled so well that it honestly didn't matter, but I digress again.)

6. McCoy's line about "What do we know about any of us?" is a great line, if not misplaced. It also is reminiscent of "The Measure of a Man" regarding the idea of Data being sentient by Phillipa at the end of the episode. Phillipa's feels tighter to the story, and McCoy's line could have been an interesting foreshadowing.

7. On the 4K, the insignia on Uhura's monitor is a waveform icon and not, as perceived on DVD or even blu-ray, a monotone hamburger.

8. The special version brought in a second scene involving Ilia's sex life, which helps a lot - but not fully - regarding her more sexually mature species and hints a tie-in with her "Oath of Celibacy", which - in the theatrical version - comes across very odd in of itself. But iIt's still vague and Sulu shouldn't be the only one drooling to sell the nature of the Deltans' complexities, but the point gets adequately made nonetheless, especially if any in the audeince want to think into it and without the need of adjacent novels, spinoffs, comics, etc, to fully describe what the screenwriter was intending by introducing this. (Plus, it's the 70s at the tail end of the "free love" moment, which they hadn't realized yet 🕺💃...) I wonder how they counter the strains of diseases that become resistent to treatments and rendering those issues worse as a result, unless they had means of eradicating them entirely (now there's your "fantasy" in "sci-fi/fantasy" for ya...)

9. I adore how the action in this movie isn't ships firing at one another but transporter accidents, the wormhole, etc. The word "templated" is simply impossible to use.

10. The cargo area almost looks like it's behind the shuttle bay, which opens to the outside of the ship. (Come to think of it, then the pod docks and Kirk and Scotty depart, the bay icon #6 but we're told that a shuttlepod arrived at bay 5. The timing of which seems too close and we saw no other pods connecting at the same time...)


Addendum/edit: When hitting the Windows key to insert the dancing figure emoji moticons, before hitting "post reply", the dude was blue and the lady was brunette. The pastel purple outfit especially seems oddly more apropos, especially to the 1970s, but both changes are unintentional but lovely.
 
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The transporter accident in TMP crystallised my personal head canon for the technology, tying together stuff that wasn't well explained in other episodes. The writers have since ignored all this but I am stubborn.

- Transporters are extremely complex. There is vital circuitry in the console, the pad, back up circuits in main engineering, and equipment in the hull (for projecting and sustaining the signal to its destination). I have never understood the notion of portable transporters.

- The difficulties in beaming site to site inside a spaceship in the TOS period are caused by an active warp core. Because the Enterprise transporter was not working beaming from the relay station would have run the risk from this distortion.

- the conversion takes place at the start point but the signal comes from the initiating pad, so the communicator should function as a relay for the scanner in the transporter room (suggesting that the molecular scanner can work over great distances or that every communicator has a self-contained independently powered molecular scanner seems a bit of a stretch). Portable pattern enhancers make sense as more powerful relays. I really struggle with the notion that anyone can just be scanned from orbit and beamed up but beaming down a relay before initiating transport would make sense.

It's a six stage process: 1) localised scanning and uploading a pattern into the pattern buffer, 2) phasing the transportee into the carrier dimension displacing energy encoded with information linked to each atom based on the pattern 3) containing that information in the correct order using the annular confinement beam and Heisenberg Compensators 4) transmitting that energy from its start point to a receiving pad 5) releasing the confinement beam so the person snaps back 6) Checking for errors as they snap back and overwriting errors with replicated matter.

Site to site is actually site to pad to site.

- Heisenberg Compensators are not 100%, which is why patterns in the matter stream degrade over time.

- The pattern buffer stores a template, not a copy of the person. This template is used for reference when the beam is released and they snap back into our dimension in the right order. If there are discrepancies between the person in the matter stream and the template, the system corrects errors by replicating matter to match the template. Most transporter shenanigans seems to take place at this point.

- No transport is 100% but the system plugs gaps with replicated matter routinely. Replacing someone with too much replicated matter can be fatal. This is why transporting isn't a fountain of youth.

- If too much of the matter pattern gets scrambled, adding more replicated matter (boosting the matter stream) may not save them.

- Plot specific shenanigans may allow someone to be replaced with 50% replicated matter and survive leading to transporter 'clones'.

- People lost in the stream are not dead, as the dimension exists outside time and space. They cannot be retrieved alive unless there is some way link their atoms to an energy stream.

- Coming back in the wrong order is both fatal and unpleasant.

-Pad to pad is safest because you have back ups at both ends.

-It really wasn't Rand's fault. The power surge from engineering without the functional back up sensor meant that too many of theirs atoms were misaligned to fix the errors at either end. I guess it was Decker's fault for authorising the transport?
 
TMP just got some love on the official Star Trek YouTube channel, where they posted the full clip of the travel pod flying around the Enterprise sequence!

That was a huge event in 1979 and, IMHO, largely holds up without the context of more than four decades of real life at this point and it's still magnificent: Between TOS and TMP, we're given enough info that the ship got a refit, teleporters are out so why not give the Captain a near-full trip around the outside of his favorite ship refitted? The modelwork is done so impeccably well and adds scale (which also ties into the movies themes once you notice how big VGer's stinky cloud is). In context, of course, in 1979 there were 79 tv episodes re-ran ad nauseum. Now consider each TOS episode was $190k (rendering the total of its aired production about $15,010,000) and now there's this big movie that cost more than twice that, and somewhere down the line they thought to make this look just as larger than life while looking real, and succeed they did. But I digress.



If anything, the VGer bean cloud being over 82 AU's in diameter, 1 AU is about 93 million miles because it has to be Earth-centric (distance from Earth to sun), making the cloud fritter a tad too large the moment you think about it, but overlooking that the scale as shown on screen still works. Even if the distance from the not-a-planet Pluto to the sun is 39.5AU, and I couldn't help but to look it up.
 
The transporter accident in TMP crystallised my personal head canon for the technology, tying together stuff that wasn't well explained in other episodes. The writers have since ignored all this but I am stubborn.

Sci-fi has a luxury in trying to explain fictional technologies, but there really has to be consistency. Between TOS and TNG are 80 years so one would expect developments and wiggle room, of course. And if they don't communicate or remember details; prior to word processors, it was a much lengthier process to look up old details unless there was a dossier of established traits and functions writers would be dumb to ignore. Like how Geordi has a VISOR thingy that allows him to see more detail and see and potentially stop problems before they really begin. Except for one prominent episode, but I'm about to digress from a digression so I won't, hehe...


- Transporters are extremely complex. There is vital circuitry in the console, the pad, back up circuits in main engineering, and equipment in the hull (for projecting and sustaining the signal to its destination). I have never understood the notion of portable transporters.

Definitely would have tiered redundancy for sure. Anyone using them would want any technical difficulties to be... well, zero...

- The difficulties in beaming site to site inside a spaceship in the TOS period are caused by an active warp core. Because the Enterprise transporter was not working beaming from the relay station would have run the risk from this distortion.

Interesting notion.

Not until season 3 TOS brought the concept up and I don't recall why. Mathematics regarding both location and relative velocity prevailing, intraship beaming could be inherantly dangerous if anything were to cause the ship to move out of calculated location, even by a fraction.

- the conversion takes place at the start point but the signal comes from the initiating pad, so the communicator should function as a relay for the scanner in the transporter room (suggesting that the molecular scanner can work over great distances or that every communicator has a self-contained independently powered molecular scanner seems a bit of a stretch). Portable pattern enhancers make sense as more powerful relays. I really struggle with the notion that anyone can just be scanned from orbit and beamed up but beaming down a relay before initiating transport would make sense.

I also liked how TMP (and VI) were the only films to have a physical shield between the pads and the control console, reinforcing the notion that these devices are doing more under the hood.

It's a six stage process: 1) localised scanning and uploading a pattern into the pattern buffer, 2) phasing the transportee into the carrier dimension displacing energy encoded with information linked to each atom based on the pattern 3) containing that information in the correct order using the annular confinement beam and Heisenberg Compensators 4) transmitting that energy from its start point to a receiving pad 5) releasing the confinement beam so the person snaps back 6) Checking for errors as they snap back and overwriting errors with replicated matter.

One problem, how does one get around moving while beaming? TOS era had I think one or two goofs, but from TNG-onward anyone could be talking or jumping or dancing or making babies for all anyone would care and they sparkle out without any pain. (TOS had it right where the people are fully frozen, remaining that way until rematerializing. For TWOK onward, "dramatically cool" or not (as if TOS didn't manage to have robust drama with the transporter in the background, sigh), it just looks lazy beyond any claimed spectacle, regardless of how pretty the sparkles are.)

Site to site is actually site to pad to site.

^^this

- Heisenberg Compensators are not 100%, which is why patterns in the matter stream degrade over time.

- The pattern buffer stores a template, not a copy of the person. This template is used for reference when the beam is released and they snap back into our dimension in the right order. If there are discrepancies between the person in the matter stream and the template, the system corrects errors by replicating matter to match the template. Most transporter shenanigans seems to take place at this point.

- No transport is 100% but the system plugs gaps with replicated matter routinely. Replacing someone with too much replicated matter can be fatal. This is why transporting isn't a fountain of youth.

But TOS didn't have replication technology as such? A couple episodes had "synthesizers", but regarding food. As this also isn't the movie "Soylent Green"...

- If too much of the matter pattern gets scrambled, adding more replicated matter (boosting the matter stream) may not save them.

Like making an omelet, the burnt bit of crust can be compensated for by plopping on an extra slide of green pepper or tofu or soy whey isolate (if not actual meat product for those who prefer).

- Plot specific shenanigans may allow someone to be replaced with 50% replicated matter and survive leading to transporter 'clones'.

Remember that old movie "Fantasia" where one broom is chopped but it ultimately ended up self-replicating up to 4096 instances, if I remember the calculated number of times two split and not the number of colors that the Commodore Amiga with the OCS chip set could display simultaneously, but there I go digressing again... But I'm amazed, of anything used as inspiration, to date no Trek episode went there.

I also looked it up:
  • Starting Point: 1 broom
  • Time Span: 3 minutes (180 seconds)
  • Doubling Frequency: Every 15 seconds
  • Total Doublings: \(180 \div 15 = 12\) times
  • Equation: \(2^{12} = 4,096\) brooms

Of course, if one broom is a byte as one byte is a character, 4096 being 4KB doesn't get you very far unless you're an Atari 2600 video game before bank switching allowed 8K to make something more complicated, but before I start going all over the place...

- People lost in the stream are not dead, as the dimension exists outside time and space. They cannot be retrieved alive unless there is some way link their atoms to an energy stream.

Make it too perfect and any chance for dramatic intrigue is lost, but eventually they would, Ever show just has a limited lifespan where reusing the same tropes just stops being compelling no matter how good it's done.

- Coming back in the wrong order is both fatal and unpleasant.

It puts burning that omelet into perspective with all the peppers and onions and bits of sausage fried...


-Pad to pad is safest because you have back ups at both ends.

^^this

-It really wasn't Rand's fault. The power surge from engineering without the functional back up sensor meant that too many of theirs atoms were misaligned to fix the errors at either end. I guess it was Decker's fault for authorising the transport?

^^this

It did look like the transporter failed at just the wrong moment, thinking everything had been finished reconfiguring. Decker, for lack of better phraseology, having "book smarts", may have recognized the problem, but didn't have the comparative "street smarts" the way an ideal Captain would, to immediately say to stop. This may have been a "learn by the seat of our pants" moment as he looks inexperienced as a captain, but was right enough to belay Kirk's order about using the newly-redesigned phasers. Their interactions and battles make for numerous wonderful set-pieces as the movie goes on, IMHO.

On first viewing and IMHO, the character progression with Kirk micromanaging while not familiar with the redesign renders it all the more interesting. Not to mention Starfleet was using their base system and the ship's to, in theory, be better than just pointing the beam somewhere and hitting the activator. Kirk witnessing events certainly and thankfully recognized it wasn't her fault. On second viewings, *boom* it hits, where Kirk is not familiar with the redesign (it almost gets them all killed with the wormhole scene), barking at everyone, McCoy reminding him his people know their jobs and even his obsession with getting command back, etc... the movie isn't the most whiz-bang-action, but it sure is more satisfying than what "fan consensus" sometimes recognizes it for. Not perfect, certainly, but the character pieces are far more appreciable. It's definitely a mature movie. (If anything, once they get inside the cloud and it's like 10 minutes of Dr Who title sequences, they could have truncated it halfway in when they see the four glowing spiky ball things as we get it, VGer's domain is big and as they can't use warp while in the solar system (another little tidbit sadly forgotten soon enough in the franchise), they are stuck in there no matter what.)
 
I also liked how TMP (and VI) were the only films to have a physical shield between the pads and the control console, reinforcing the notion that these devices are doing more under the hood.
I believe TWOK and TSFS used the exact same transporter set as TMP. The camera angles used in those films never really showed us the controls, but I believe the same separate control console area with the physical barrier was still there. You can kind of catch a glimpse of the partition as Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov are entering the transporter room after setting the self-destruct sequence on the bridge.
 
I believe TWOK and TSFS used the exact same transporter set as TMP. The camera angles used in those films never really showed us the controls, but I believe the same separate control console area with the physical barrier was still there. You can kind of catch a glimpse of the partition as Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov are entering the transporter room after setting the self-destruct sequence on the bridge.
i dont think its my post, i never watched star trek TMP.
 
I don't know that I'd say ST:TMP is the best, but it is absolutely my favorite ST film. Especially the recent 4K Director's Edition. I've heard it said that "the film is a turd, but I love that turd." I could put it in right now and just watch the whole thing again and thoroughly enjoy it. Not enough time tonight, but I think I will at lunch tomorrow. And Goldsmith's score is my favorite film score of all time, I never tire of listening to it, I always feel like I hear new things.

ST:TMP is also the only one that IMO truly feels like a big-time, serious, wanna-be-epic, actual motion picture or film, something that is truly 'cinematic.'

Rich Evans is amazing.

The episode of RLM from a few years ago where Mike explains that he's been a huge geeky Star Trek fan all of his life, but feels that modern Trek has left him behind and has so mangled the legacy of Star Trek that it's no longer Trek, and he realizes that he has to just bid it farewell was heartbreaking. Producers can make whatever they want, that's their job, I just wish they could watch that video and realize what they have done to some long time fans, the kind of fans who kept Star Trek alive for decades, the kind who kept it alive for modern Trek to even come along at all.
I've long had that feeling as well. I tried to watch SNW and I couldn't finish the first episode. Nobody acted like a paramilitary professional. They all talked and quipped sitcom characters. Lower Decks was just a less funny version of Family Guy. It seems like everyone involved with Star Trek now is always trying to force the show into a mold of their choosing, whether it fits or not. It's all action and TikTok snippets. Where's the wonder and awe? Where's the exploration? Where are the moral quandaries? Granted, some of these things are present, but for me, not in a way that meshes with what makes Star Trek great.
 
Been watching it in 4K (Special Longer Version) and am about 55 minutes in, while taking breaks (admitting that folks in the audience in the theater in 1979 🕺lacked this, nor was it 1945 when they had actual intermissions much more regularly so one could go get a new soda after indirectly disposing the one they'd bought an hour and a quarter earlier...

But I digress.

A few things noted in what is my top-4 films (for which two of the other three are TWOK and TSFS):

0. Disclaimer: It helps to pretend it's 1979 when you've only seen 79 episodes reran umpteen times, with no bloody A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Defiant, Voyager, NX, Rolaids, Tums, USS Peptobismol, or any other ship in the franchise. But even when not going to that extra level, the movie does hold its own as a good sci-fi mystery plot, even we know it took elements from a couple (mid-level) TOS episodes with goal of making them properly epic as well as "done better" or "done right", for which it succeeds because I can barely tolerate "The Changeling" anymore with flinging big numbers around like 90 torpedoes, dumb gimmicks like killing Scotty and wiping Uhura's memory and they retrained two decades' worth of knowledge in as many weeks as she'll be up to collegiate level in a week, etc, etc... somehow Spock can mindmeld with it, some campiness (NOMAD bouncing up and down, with that voice, arguably qualifies as being intentionally silly) and, of course, the casual sexism that just becomes too ridiculous, but before I really digress... Reeling in the number of hits and actually showing the palpable nature of the threat alone works a 90 million billion jillon kazillion times more than the TOS episode had and I wish I was being sarcastic, TMP really did it better in setting up the big threat, but I digress again:

1. In the three-deck tall rec room, Kirk angrily demands the viewer be shut off a second time because everyone's too busy gawking in awe at what they just saw (just don't ask how they could get images of VGer's cloud after the station relaying it all got zapped.) Kirk, some time later, states "viewer off" in his quarters. It's headcanon time, so the rec room is either controlled solely by a communications officer (outranking the captain in a case like this, like how a doctor can declare the captain unfit?) or for some other set of mental gymnastics to explain this minor difference. (Behind the scenes, this also came from an abandoned tv pilot script and may have been incomplete or not fully edited by the time it was retooled as a big flick.)

2. The special longer version was surprisingly good with pacing, so far. A couple issues, which can't be helped, are there, but what we get in return is well worth the trade-off.

3. Spock's shuttlepod has the name SURAK on it, in English below the Vulcan text. Nice touch. Not really legible before 4K. More, now have fun imagining the argument that Sarek and others must have had regarding the logic behind naming the pod.

4. More pod people goodness, how do(es) the occupant(s) inside not get dizzy when it flips like that? Cool effect, but... why... apart from "style over substance".

4b. The transporter scene after a refit without full testing rightly brings up some tangible real life issues, but the show has done teleportation from other sources so why couldn't spacedock or Earth lock in via the ship's geostationary orbit? Then again, shuttles are cool and I respect both TOS movies that made use of shuttles (TFF's use I adore, but I digress)...

5. Vulcan has moons. Spock said Vulcan had no moons in "The Man Trap", if I recall. This is a small nitpick, and being big on the big screen, the moons added to add to the visual delights of this alien world. But it's a small thing, nobody watched all 79 episodes and every bit of minutiae behind the making of this film, and bigger ones exist re: Spock's origins (e.g. his distant ancestor marrying a human woman later turning to be daddy and all but it's handled so well that it honestly didn't matter, but I digress again.)

6. McCoy's line about "What do we know about any of us?" is a great line, if not misplaced. It also is reminiscent of "The Measure of a Man" regarding the idea of Data being sentient by Phillipa at the end of the episode. Phillipa's feels tighter to the story, and McCoy's line could have been an interesting foreshadowing.

7. On the 4K, the insignia on Uhura's monitor is a waveform icon and not, as perceived on DVD or even blu-ray, a monotone hamburger.

8. The special version brought in a second scene involving Ilia's sex life, which helps a lot - but not fully - regarding her more sexually mature species and hints a tie-in with her "Oath of Celibacy", which - in the theatrical version - comes across very odd in of itself. But iIt's still vague and Sulu shouldn't be the only one drooling to sell the nature of the Deltans' complexities, but the point gets adequately made nonetheless, especially if any in the audeince want to think into it and without the need of adjacent novels, spinoffs, comics, etc, to fully describe what the screenwriter was intending by introducing this. (Plus, it's the 70s at the tail end of the "free love" moment, which they hadn't realized yet 🕺💃...) I wonder how they counter the strains of diseases that become resistent to treatments and rendering those issues worse as a result, unless they had means of eradicating them entirely (now there's your "fantasy" in "sci-fi/fantasy" for ya...)

9. I adore how the action in this movie isn't ships firing at one another but transporter accidents, the wormhole, etc. The word "templated" is simply impossible to use.

10. The cargo area almost looks like it's behind the shuttle bay, which opens to the outside of the ship. (Come to think of it, then the pod docks and Kirk and Scotty depart, the bay icon #6 but we're told that a shuttlepod arrived at bay 5. The timing of which seems too close and we saw no other pods connecting at the same time...)


Addendum/edit: When hitting the Windows key to insert the dancing figure emoji moticons, before hitting "post reply", the dude was blue and the lady was brunette. The pastel purple outfit especially seems oddly more apropos, especially to the 1970s, but both changes are unintentional but lovely.
I love everything about this post and wholeheartedly agree!
 
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