I don't really think the DE is what Robert Wise had in mind in 1979 - nor do I believe he had much (if anything) to do with the changes made to the film - most of it struck me as things fanboys would choose to alter - which is why I think the technical and artistic decisions taken on the DE were so disastrous and out of place. Not to mention the lack of skill and expertise in executing them. They swapped a murky matte painting for even murkier CGI in the Vulcan and San Francisco shots. Daren Dochterman's comments in the making of featurette that "you can't tell what you're looking at" in the original shots would make more sense if you *could* tell what you were looking at in their replacements. The shot where Spock approaches the statues is okay I guess but the establishing shot of him meditating... can anyone honestly tell me that muddy incoherent mess is an improvement over the epic shot of distant volcanoes and mountains and massive moons in the sky? I know its not a terribly realsitic matte painting in the original shot but I can definitely "tell what I'm looking at" more than in that shot's replacement.
I also really don't think the new San Francisco shots are a particular improvement over the originals - the still photo panorama they used for a backdrop to Kirk's tram is lifeless and static - at least the matte painting establishes some kind of mood and reminds me of classic American landscape paintings. Then there's the tram station landing itself which has this odd extension to the one side with a TOS shuttle taking off - nice idea but again, horrible execution - the shuttle has a strange flickering border which is visible even at the low resolution of the DVD transfer. That kind of thing is distracting whereas the original shot has no such distractions or faults to break the illusion (except probably if you're really looking, static painted figures alongside composited moving ones look a bit odd) but they weren't fixed in the DE either so one wonders what the point was.
The elimination of the computer voice was a major mistake IMO - it really did lend a futuristic element to the proceedings and without it the ship seems somehow more lifeless and bland. The old red alert klaxon too lent much more tension to the atmosphere and was pretty realistic - you want to get people's attention with an alert siren, and you get much the same thing on any real world vessel when general quarters is sounded. The ship just seemed to be rendered very bland and TNG or Voyager in feel and I think it did a lot of harm to the dramatic impact of the film. I just can't see how this is something a director of Wise's considerably talents would have wanted.
Then there are the awful edits made to the vger cloud sequence - Jerry Goldsmith's score is allowed to really take flight in this section of the film and to just chop sections of it out along with the staggeringly beautiful imagery is criminal. TMP is one of those films that *needs* its deliberate and slow pacing to really get under your skin and have an effect on you. I know they didn't make it that much shorter but then, why bother at all, especially when it has such a disastrous effect on the flow of the musical score. They don't lop sections out of Beethoven's Ninth in the middle of a chord or phrase, so why lop sections out of Goldsmith's beautiful score?
Then we have the Wing Walk which to my mind is perhaps the only sequence that really needed fixing and I do actually think it works better in its DE form but I think the Enterprise CG model linmited as it was by both budget and available computing horsepower of 1999/2000 when the work was done, was just not quite up to the task. They could easily have taken still photos of the studio model (which they had access to) from the appropriate angles, paint out the "A" in the registry and colour correct to match the original TMP paint scheme - it would have looked a million times better and been cheaper too. The original shots probably would have been done exactly this way in '79 if they'd had time to finish that sequence.
But I happily take the blu ray release with this one truly disastrous shot than the DE with its dozens of annoyances but very few actual deficiencies attended to, along with its truly appaling print and lack of any form of cleanup or colour stablization.
I also really don't think the new San Francisco shots are a particular improvement over the originals - the still photo panorama they used for a backdrop to Kirk's tram is lifeless and static - at least the matte painting establishes some kind of mood and reminds me of classic American landscape paintings. Then there's the tram station landing itself which has this odd extension to the one side with a TOS shuttle taking off - nice idea but again, horrible execution - the shuttle has a strange flickering border which is visible even at the low resolution of the DVD transfer. That kind of thing is distracting whereas the original shot has no such distractions or faults to break the illusion (except probably if you're really looking, static painted figures alongside composited moving ones look a bit odd) but they weren't fixed in the DE either so one wonders what the point was.
The elimination of the computer voice was a major mistake IMO - it really did lend a futuristic element to the proceedings and without it the ship seems somehow more lifeless and bland. The old red alert klaxon too lent much more tension to the atmosphere and was pretty realistic - you want to get people's attention with an alert siren, and you get much the same thing on any real world vessel when general quarters is sounded. The ship just seemed to be rendered very bland and TNG or Voyager in feel and I think it did a lot of harm to the dramatic impact of the film. I just can't see how this is something a director of Wise's considerably talents would have wanted.
Then there are the awful edits made to the vger cloud sequence - Jerry Goldsmith's score is allowed to really take flight in this section of the film and to just chop sections of it out along with the staggeringly beautiful imagery is criminal. TMP is one of those films that *needs* its deliberate and slow pacing to really get under your skin and have an effect on you. I know they didn't make it that much shorter but then, why bother at all, especially when it has such a disastrous effect on the flow of the musical score. They don't lop sections out of Beethoven's Ninth in the middle of a chord or phrase, so why lop sections out of Goldsmith's beautiful score?
Then we have the Wing Walk which to my mind is perhaps the only sequence that really needed fixing and I do actually think it works better in its DE form but I think the Enterprise CG model linmited as it was by both budget and available computing horsepower of 1999/2000 when the work was done, was just not quite up to the task. They could easily have taken still photos of the studio model (which they had access to) from the appropriate angles, paint out the "A" in the registry and colour correct to match the original TMP paint scheme - it would have looked a million times better and been cheaper too. The original shots probably would have been done exactly this way in '79 if they'd had time to finish that sequence.
But I happily take the blu ray release with this one truly disastrous shot than the DE with its dozens of annoyances but very few actual deficiencies attended to, along with its truly appaling print and lack of any form of cleanup or colour stablization.
