TFF - The Good

Very good observations and an interesting article.

Aristoteles' approach considered the human nature. Simply put: Why should we expect anyone to make a sacrifice for people we do not know, people we will never meet and people that will never learn or value the sacrifice made on their behalf ("the many"). We care about the people closest or more/most familiar to us ("the few").

Bob

 

I'm struggling here. While I don't hate the movie I'm finding to difficult to pick the 'good'.
1. The rocket boots are cool. Yes I know they couldn't really work like that but I think Star Trek could do with a few more cool things. At least Abrams does that right.
2. The uniforms are OK.
3. I like Chekov getting to sit in the Captain's chair.
4. I like the part of the movie where Spock demands the Klingons help until the end of the movie. I think the gathering at the end of the movie is much more in the spirit of TOS than the hatred showed towards the Klingons in ST6 by the TOS command crew.
5. I like Sybok's sacrifice.
6. McCoy's secret pain was OK

 

I agree with all the great scenes everyone mentions here. But the bulk of the film revolved around Nimbus III, and it doesn't look like anyone has anything nice to say about that plot. That whole story was crap, IMHO. And why the film is generally panned.

 

I don´t think the plot is any worse, than that of the previous movies. After "Remake of The Changeling", "Khan wants to avenge himself upon Kirk at any cost", "Let´s steal the Enterprise and undo Spock´s death" and "We´re having some fun in 1986 San Francsico and bring whales to the future to save Earth" the "Quest for God" doesn´t strike me as particularly bad.

Every Trek movie has its plot holes and bad or boring moments, but to me TFF is one of the more enjoyable. In that regard I agree with what has been said in this thread already. But of course, YMMV.

Mario

 

Laurence Luckinbill as Sybok is one of the movie's great strengths for a number of reasons.

-He makes Sybok a complex and interesting character. He plays a Vulcan unlike any we'd seen before or since, one who embraced his emotions but wasn't a wild near-animal lunatic with the absence of the Vulcan disciplines. That's something I'd like to see explored further.

-Sybok is not a true villain, inasmuch as he's not evil, but misguided and certainly misled by malevolent forces. What he realizes what's happened, rather than deny it, he turns on the being who's been lying to him.

-Luckinbill conveys Sybok's convictions effectively. Sybok truly believes what he preaches, even if he's being manipulated himself.

 

Nobody's mentioned this yet, so I will:

KIRK: "And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by."
McCOY: Melville.
SPOCK: John Masefield.
McCOY: Are you sure?
SPOCK: I am well-versed in the classics, Doctor.
McCOY: Then how come you don't know "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"?

 

The complete quote, Spock to Sybok:

"You are my brother, but you do not know me. I am not the outcast boy you left behind those many years ago. In that time, I have found my place. I know who I am. And I cannot go with you."

This always gets me right there.

 

Oh absolutely, another great little scene for the three of them

 

Great to see people thinking about the positives of this film for once...

The Bridge - I love the re-designed Bridge in this film, it evoked a high tech Starship C&C and felt much more a progression of the TOS set. Theres nothing much I didnt like in this sets design especially the chairs they used and the the Captains chair is one of my favourites from the entire show / movies.

The Shuttle - The new shuttle design is brilliant and much better than the one from TMP and features in my top 3 shuttles (currently this, the TOS and the Into Darkness designs in no particular order).

The Phasers - Lets get the last production design 'like' out of the way, the Phasers Shatner brought in for this flick look like they mean business in a way no other Phaser has before or since. I really hope once DST bring out their STIII Phaser they follow up with a STIII - VI Communicator and this Phaser (preferably with removable power packs) as they would look epic next to my ITD QMX Phaser and my childhood TNG & TMP/WOK toys.

The Character Moments - For a film which is fairly well slated it has some great character moments which have been previously mentioned in this thread. The interactions and character bits during this film are great, Scotty smacking his head non withstanding.

Its a shame the problems with the writers strike and ILM being busy with ROTJ were just 2 of the stumbling blocks with this film, but it still delivered a fun adventure and tried to give the audience the 'Trek message' that so many repeatedly say are needed in the films.

 

The stereo on that scene always impresses me; instead of it all being center channel, the voices really do come from the parts of frame they are each in, noticeable back as far as the laserdisc. Lots to love about TFF's sound mix.

 

ILM was doing GHOSTBUSTERS 2 & INDY 3, plus the pseudopod and the at-time-of-release-unseen tidal wave for THE ABYSS, along with bits for several other films plus a ridefilm.

But they still could have done TREK, and I think it was more about the dollars than the availability (which was the same issue on TUC till the studio decided saving a mil on VFX was not going to be worthwhile, given what had happened on TFF -- and based on the figures HARVEY posted awhile back indicating TFF actually cost more FX-wise than the ILM shows.)

 

This movie on VHS was my first real Star Trek viewing. I fell in love with Trek because of this film. Though could you imagine how epic this film would have been if Paramount gave Shatner the okay to make the film he wanted?

-Sean Connery as Sybok.
-A much darker film where they find (and defeat) the Devil himself, not fake-god.
-Kirk literally fighting demons and rock monsters hand-to-hand.

I always wondered if the true reason we never saw Kirk's pain was because we don't have the run time for that? Small sampling we have: Gary's death, Sam's death, Miramanee's death, David's death, Spock's death, Enterprise' destruction, etc...

Exploring Kirk's pain would be an hour-plus of death and horror beyond comprehension.

I digress. Even with the issues present in this film, it is one of my favorite Trek outings.

 

How could they have done Trek V with that workload? They only had so many motion control rigs and the optical printers were always a bottleneck.

 

Yep...that's some workload.

 

A lot of it has to do with the balancing act ILM has always done, sharing some resources while directing other unused ones towards the project at hand. This was more prevalent in the 90s when you had traditional and CG, but all you need to do is look at TWOK, where they'd ship the vista camera down to L.A. for a half-day to shoot the genesis bubble cave, then send it back up to ILM for whatever they needed it for on POLTERGEIST or ET.

Also, TFF was DESIGNED for most of the work to be done in-camera, even if at the last minute Par got cold feet on doing the God stuff that way (have never figured out why, unless they thought it'd put them back behind schedule again after Shatner had gotten them caught up.)

ILM had already gotten a slight taste of the non-comp in-camera route on TVH with mixed results (whales were awesome, but the BoP under the bridge not so great, with the one big shot of that having to be redone as a not so great optical.) The other part of all this is that ILM KNEW HOW TO DO MOST OF THE WORK ALREADY - they had largely managed to solve issues of shooting the E (even if it didn't look as good as Trumbull's work) and comping it, which clearly was not something the TFF VFX folk had a clue about.

ILM had more optical printers than anybody I think (by way of comparison, the company Ferren used for opticals, The Optical House, had exactly ONE, and because they had to wait forever for Ferren's model photography place to actually get their custom mo-con camera, they couldn't even start shooting those elements till February, I think, leaving no time for learning curve considering the movie was coming out in June.)

The ILM 4-head one Edlund had built for EMPIRE got broken up into two separate printers a few years later, so they usually didn't have a huge backup. The ABYSS work was mostly CG, so that wouldn't have been a major factor on TFF, although they might have used CG for some of the barrier and God planet stuff, but they wouldn't have NEEDED to do so.

There's a bit more to the ILM issue here (which is more about the money and inclination than the resources), as the story has been that Paramount fully expected to be able to reuse a bunch of stock elements and shots from previous films, but most of those couldn't be accessed (except I guess the two cuts that ILM DID do for the film.)

I assume the elements were AT the vfx vendor, so that suggests somebody didn't look too hard, since at least one shot in TUC was an unused leftover from TVH (the rather crappy 'zooming into camera at warp' shot that turns up around the time Kirk & Spock talk about being obsolete is an exact match for the shot described in a mag at the time , probably AmCin, as one of two warp shots done for TVH -- the other being the one that is IN that movie.) If they were all at paramount and couldn't be located for TFF, that sounds like some serious self-sabotage.

 

I never paid attention to that - a good reason for me to watch the movie again.

 

STAR TREK V didn't need ILM, they weren't the only FX workshop, in town. A director is more than the guy shouting "Action!" he is the supervisor and manager of the movie and Shatner wasn't dilligent with his follow-through, because of his incompetence. Had he been, the problems in the pipeline would've been identified and worked-around, or otherwise corrected, early. As for TFF's budget, it was at least as much as TVH had. But everybody loves Shatner and tries to excuse his revealed incompetence during the making of his movie. Captain Kirk can do no wrong ...

 

Yes! This! Although at first I thought you said "I disagree," at which point I became confused because I thought you had begun debating yourself.

 

Do you KNOW how things work with a first-time director? You have the experienced producer folk on hand every step advising and sometimes doing a lot more. Meyer had like one meeting with ILM, everything else was Robert Sallin, the line producer, before and during and after Meyer's involvement - and that wasn't even Meyer's first film w/ vfx.

Nimoy had preprod meetings at ILM, but basically deferred all sorts of stuff to them, stuff they really shouldn't have had ANY hand in at all, like tricorders (which kind of calls into question why Ralph Winter let that happen -- perhaps Bennett WANTED the show to look more like STAR WARS, and if so, he got that in spades, unfortunately.)

On TFF, Winter admittedly let down Shatner on both production logistics (which probably falls more on Doug Wise, a vet asst director, yet there were all these foulups on location that he should have been on top of) and VFX calls.

Part of that was he and Bennett deciding to do tons more in-camera than usual, but then chicken-shitting out at the last minute, days before the god talks sequence took place, which created an even more enormous bottleneck on compositing.

The thing Bennett said afterward about Shatner being easy to con is very telling; for all his experience in the biz, he didn't know when to throw his weight around on TFF, or his pocketbook. I always go back to Meyer needing a bridge explosion redone on TWOK, and when paramount said no, he said take it out of my salary -- at which point they went 'oh no we don't want to do that, here's the money.' Shatner apparently never tried anything like that (plus they may not have believed in the film enough to knuckle under like they did on TWOK.)