Rate TMP

[GalaxyX]

It was the only movie that felt like it was a TOS based movie, that's a plus.

However:

1. Those costumes were horrible.
2. Too much screensaver psychedelics going on.
3. I did not need to see Dekker's package throughout the entire movie.

I liked the starship porn, including the "money shot" (when they go into warp ) but the movie needed to be more than "Enterprise flies into screensaver storm for 1 1/2 hours"

So I give it a 3

 

[Grant]

'Starship' porn was okay....

the 'viewscreen porn' was deadly & gratuitous

They still left way too much in all version even the D.E.

 

[cultcross]

rewatching it now, its sooooo slooooow
"oh here's some more shots of strange blue stuff on the viewer - this could be interesting, lets watch this for 15 full minutes"

 

[egonbeeblebrox]

The more I watch it, the more I like it. The first time I saw it, I didn't think much of it. Of course, at that point, my main exposure to TOS was from the movies. Now that I've seen the series all the way through a couple times, I've grown to appreciate it a lot more. It's definitely closer to the show than any of the other movies. And I dig the general atmosphere it has, especially the Director's Cut.

 

[Grant]

The movie could easily have 15 cut out and it wouldn't change a thing.

you could lose 5 mnutes just from orders being repeated!!

Maybe in a real military, it's important for every order to be repeated--but in drama it's just stupid.

At 115 or 118 minutes it would be fairly watchable---at two hours 13 min. it's hardly bearable.

 

[Mr. Fergy]

I gave it a 3. It's not that bad, but it's not that great. At least, in my opinion. I enjoy it, but it drags too much.

Agreed.

 

[guardian]

It really irks me that they went back to redo the movie in '01 and still left it so slowly paced. It's very clear that they were trying to preserve the score more than actually improve the pace of the movie.
they were probably too cheap to hire someone to adjust the score to compensate for the missing bits--so just left alone almost every part with any underlying score. I know they DID adjust to the two segments 'Vejur flyover' & 'cloud journey' but most other scenes with music they didn't mess with. They needed to take EVERY scene and see how to quicken the pace and that would have menat getting someone really skilled to adjust the music.
Considering the beauty of the FX shots and epic scale--the movie could have been quite good at about 2 hours.

 

[Diesel Micky Dolenz]

It really irks me that they went back to redo the movie in '01 and still left it so slowly paced.

That really wasn't the point of the exercise, though. The idea was to give Robert Wise a chance to finish off the film the way he originally would have given the time and budget to do so. Personally, I found the film plodding, cold and sterile, and I have no doubt that another director could take it, re-cut it, and make a more entertaining film, but that was never the idea behind creating a "Director's Cut" edition.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

5 stars.

 

[guardian]

It really irks me that they went back to redo the movie in '01 and still left it so slowly paced.

That really wasn't the point of the exercise, though. The idea was to give Robert Wise a chance to finish off the film the way he originally would have given the time and budget to do so. Personally, I found the film plodding, cold and sterile, and I have no doubt that another director could take it, re-cut it, and make a more entertaining film, but that was never the idea behind creating a "Director's Cut" edition.

Wow, i don't know what to say!

They clearly state in multiple interviews, that they never had a chance to preview the movie. had they had time to do so, the feedback clearly would have indicated the movie moved too slow. then they would have re-cut it. To say that the point wasn't to make it a more entertaining film???

You're pretending that if Wise had more time he simply would have cut it more to his liking--not the test audiences?

Also they usually don't score the movie till they preview it and fine tune it. Here they did the opposite, they had Goldsmith do a final score as they went along because they had no time. Usually they use a temp score for the preview & then do a final score afterward.
because the score became iconic they didn't want to mess with in the D.E.---the score should serve the movie, but in this case the D.E. became beholden to the classic score.

 

[siskokid888]

The best Trek movie thus far. Not even close.

 

[Diesel Micky Dolenz]

You're pretending that if Wise had more time he simply would have cut it more to his liking--not the test audiences?

I'm pretending nothing. Wise was given the opportunity to re-cut the film for the DE, which he did. What we got is what he wanted it to be.

 

[guardian]

^^Very insightful.

He was pushing 90, he was being advised as to what he could do. Nobody wanted to tell an old man the movie was REALLY slow and considered boring by most people. They probably just told him the pacing was an issue. Also by then the movie had somehow became a classic. you don't change a classic too much.

And as I said before, they didn't want to spend weeks on the score alone by adjusting every scene.
Wise had stated they cut out the certain character interactions in 1979 because they had scored the big FX scenes and other scenes and didn't have time time re-adjust the score(and because the studio had payed big bucks for the FX and wanted them left in.). Easier to just pull out sections with no background music. But the SLV proved those scenes were the ones the fans liked. So in 2001 he had to add back the chatacter scenes while still not really fiddling too much with a lot of other scenes because of the music.

If you think, that they would have test previewed the audience in 1979 and got the results and then re-cut a 2 hour and 11 minute slowly-paced movie to 2 hours and 12 minutes?? --well I dare say you might be in the minority in thinking that.

 

[Diesel Micky Dolenz]

If you think, that they would have test previewed the audience in 1979 and got the results and then re-cut a 2 hour and 11 minuter slowly-paced movie to 2 hours and 12 minutes--well I dare say you might be in the minority in thinking that.

Again, I'm not saying anything about what would have been done in 1979. You complained that they didn't re-cut the film the way you would have wanted it. I said that wasn't the point of doing the Director's Edition, which it wasn't.

In Wise's own words:

At that point I normally would have taken the picture out for previews and then go back and give the picture a fine cut. We never had that opportunity. In fact, it's the only picture of mine that I didn't get to preview. But because we had that release date, we had to release the picture without giving it a fine cut and without getting some of the effects shots we'd wanted. We were also agreed that the picture would be about 2 hours and 10 minutes, so if we'd had a few more weeks back then, I'd have recut the picture to improve the characters and gotten some final effects in. We also would have done more work on the sound. After the picture opened, there was some talk about recutting for overseas release, but I just decided to let it stay the way it was and move on. But when the opportunity came twenty years later to finally finish the picture, I immediately said, "Yes, let's do this, and finally get Star Trek finished."

As it ended up, Wise was quite happy with the results of the DE:

If we'd previewed the picture, knowing that we needed to end up with a 130-minute picture, I would have opted to reinstate some of the lifts and trim some of the effects. That is precisely what we did with The Director's Edition, and I'd really prefer it if that were the only version of the film available.

If the idea had been to redo the film the way Paramount would ideally have wanted it, Robert Wise wouldn't have been involved and it would have been a "Special Edition" with a different director brought in to do the editing.

 

[Maurice]

^^^Just to clarify, 130 minutes was the MAXIMUM length the film could be, not a target length. Had it been 105 minutes the theaters would have been happier.

 

[Cyrus]

5 stars. Still the best.

 

[TrekNut87]

This gets a 3. Again an okay film, but nothing to get too excited about.

 

[idreamedmusic]

I gave it three stars, because it tried to emulate 2001 too much and seemed off because of that. I do like the story, but the pacing is quite horrible.

 

[Grant]

I'm still grappling with the concept that the D.E. wasn't an attempt to 'make it a more entetaining film'

Yes by all means make your 'director's cut' but don't worry if it isn't any more entertaining than the previous two, or that it still is slow as hell or that it contains usless repitition of dialogue. The fans don't expect it to be more entertaining--only more to your personal liking. ????

 

[guardian]

Well, if they were not attempting to make the movie 'more entertaining' then they succeded wildly. The main complaint for 25 years was it was slow & draggy & now we have 3 versions that are slow & draggy. Bravo. I hope they keep making TMP versions until someone finds a cut that is shorter by 10 or 15 minutes.
Ironically, Roddenberry wanted NOT to copy Star Wars with its whiz bang, shoot-'em-up style and ended up with a movie that seemed to copy 2001 with its 'trippy' ending and phlisophical ponderings.

Sorry, TOS was action-adventure, teamwork, character interplay & humor--TMP doesn't have a lot of any of that.

But we did get (still have) endless minutes of Sulu & Ilia being awed by a funky cloud. 'Yeah, he's never seen sh*t before on the viewer--let's show him being really impressed.'