I'm with
Dennis. I think they're fan-frakkin'-tabulous.
I was initially worried. When you think remastering of special effects, you think of
Star Wars and the (frankly) butchery committed to it by Lucas for his Special Editions. It's one thing to update an effect with modern techniques and another entirely to go inserting that which was never in the original.
So for example, while I approve of Lucas changing the Landspeeder special effects because they were badly-done even at the time, I don't approve of all the crap that got put into Mos Eisley as the speeder drives through it.
I was trepidatious, but I've been around a while. There's been trepidation in fandom every time something new is done with
Trek, be it TMP, TNG, whatever. In general, Paramount has done a very good job of remaining true to the original.
(Maybe too true, as the 2009 film may suggest.)
So I reserved judgement, knowing that given skill of the people involved,
at worst the end result would be visually entertaining.
Fortunately, any fears I had in that regard were groundless. The new effects are, in almost every case, an incredibly loving, faithful attempt to keep the look of the original effects. They succeed massively, in my opinion.
It's difficult to describe: I've been admiring Matt Jeffries' designs (at least those released publicly) since I first read
The Making Of Star Trek in the early 1970s. His design style has always fascinated me.
Now, unlike
Dennis, I have precisely zero talent in the graphic arts. Possibly less than zero. My daughter's the graphic artist in the family, so I have just some conception of how bad my skills are.
All I can do is look at Jeffries' drawings, compare them to others I've seen, and get this distinct sense of style that was Jeffries. It's in everything he drew, from ship sketches to set designs. You can even see it when he drew up blueprints or technical schematics.
It just feels Jeffries.
The Remastered effects also feel Jeffries. It's hard to put my finger on why, because they're all far more incredibly detailed than Jeffries could possibly have imagined. In his day, if he'd had the money to produce even a fraction of what he drew for
Star Trek, they'd've been models made of pine. He could never in a million years dreamed of the level of detail necessary to successfully pull off HD effects.
But the sequences still feel Jeffries. I can't put my finger on it, but they feel Jeffries.
Some of it, too, comes down to recreating a special effect so that it looks remarkably similar yet more detailed. The cloud creature in "Obsession" is a perfect case. The creature looks like a cloud in space, the same as it did originally -- only now it's very detailed, somewhat more supple around the edges. But it's still a cloud, it's still looks like how the effects designers might have done the same cloud with today's effects.
It's quite remarkable, in my opionion.
There are a few places where, by nature of how the industry has changed in 45 years, it was necessary to make some choices. What do space explosions look like? The originals look really, really crude today. Do we show all those ships that only ever showed up as a splotch of light on the viewscreen? If so, what do they look like?
What about the establishing shots of the
Enterprise in orbit? Those got re-used pretty heavily and they didn't always match what you saw from the planet's surface.
I think that in general, they made all the right choices. Yes, replace the planetary shots with more varied scenes. Yes, make them match the planet's surface a little more. Yes, update the space explosions and make the splotches of light into spacecraft.
But don't insert space battles where they didn't exist. Don't show the explosion in all the glory possible in modern CGI. Don't insert things that weren't originally there.
Yes, replace a couple of matte paintings. The originals were utterly fantastic. Period. Beautiful works of art, under any circumstances. The original plates deserve to be in museums.
They were so beautiful that
Star Trek re-used them a couple of times. The dramatic impact is reduced the second time around, and it's appropriate to create new ones.
There's no doubt in my mind that if the artists of 1966 had access to the techniques of today, every planet would have had a different impressive establishing matte painting.
The new designs are entirely faithful to the original look of the show. As I say, they just feel right.
There is only one -- and I repeat
one -- episode where they let themselves a little off the leash. And it was the right thing to do:
"The Doomsday Machine." It's legitimately the original series only real space battle, at least as we think of it today. Two ships, one little more than a dead hulk against an implacable foe a thousand times their relative size. If J.J Abrams did it, it could easily be a two hour movie of epic scope.
That it was attempted at all in 1967 was amazing. That it worked so well for so many years is a testament to the underlying story.
So they let themselves go just a little. They didn't Abrams-ize it, they knew that would be totally out of context for this material. But the battle is now a lot more visually specific. Where before there were stock shots of the
Enterprise firing phasers, then cut to the phasers hitting the planet-killer; now the
Enterprise makes a pass over the top of the planet-killer, firing as she goes.
No, it's not the original effect. There's no doubt in my mind, however, that had the original artists had access to modern techniques, they'd produce the kind of specificity we see in Remastered. They didn't want to use stock footage, they
had to because of the restraints they were under.
Some of it comes down to very specific design choices, as well. When phasers strike something, for example, the effect is consistent with the look of the original. Typically there's an actinic bright light at the center of the effect. Surrounding it as a fluid lighting effect, sometimes with shadow changes to make it appear more natural in context. They did not, however, add any of the flashy bells and whistles possible with modern methods. They just took the original effect and tried to make it look more realistic by modern standards.
As regards some of the coloring changes inherent in the HD restoration, I can't speak to that. I think in general they seem to have hit it on the mark: everything seems incredibly crisp and incredibly clean.
Star Trek never looked this good, not even when NBC broadcast it.
Maybe the colors are overcorrected in places, I don't know. But it sure looks great.
Overall, fantastic work. My only real qualms are with some specific artistic decisions in specific episodes -- but they're the sort of qualms a person always has. My vision may not match up with somebody else's, and that's ok.
The overall work is fantastic, however, and well worth repeated watching. And frame-advancing ...
Dakota Smith
Edit: I realize that "The Ultimate Computer" is also a space battle, but it doesn't lend itself visually to space battle sequences. The story isn't about how someone gets defeated in space, but how to stop the M-5 before it kills everyone in sight.
The battle is almost incidental -- and again, the choices made in Remastered were appropriate to the context.
