trevanian said:
Genesis Trilogy starts high, then aborts, as Nimoy-directed Trek is for me, Drek, as the guy rarely knows where to put the camera or how to move it, and for me, he got the alltime worst Shatner moments in SFS (which is saying a lot.)
Nimoy isn't Wise, he's not even Meyer, but he's no Shatner either. Competent but no auteur. His films are as good as their scripts; which is why TSFS is a better movie than TVH.
By way of comparison, TFF, in spite of its faulty premise and spotty execution, had its heart in the right place, and as a result it registers as highly as anything else in trek cinema for me. All the time I had WANTED to spend with the main characters in the first film (and didn't get to, though we got other splendors), I got in spades on TFF. They weren't the same characters by then, but the actors had the same chemistry, which made up for so much else that went wrong.
TFF certainly has some strong character moments. The Yosemite teaser in particular. It's also got Goldsmith, who, even though he's basically phoning it in, does by default a much better job than Rosenman's TVH score. That's why in some moments I deem it better than TFF, but then I am known to reverse my judgement. There's more or less in the same ballpark.
I thought TUC was a downright offensive conclusion to the series, considering how it seemed to undo so much I had come to respect about the leads.
You mean their intolerance? I liked that. It partly came out of nowhere, but also made sense given the events of TSFS - and the idea of a bitter old guard learning to shed their prejudices made for a good character arc. It's a Meyer film, though - bleeping lights, and Shakespeare quotations to the point of incomprehensibility (well, Melville the first time round, but still...). The title is sheer spite - 'The Undiscovered Country', an allusion to death in Hamlet's famous 'To be or not to be' solilquoy, was his original title for TWOK. The title's significance would be obvious in that film, with its prominent themes of aging and death. He never liked the studio mandated correction, so for his second
Star Trek film, and then constructed a rather flimsy pretence to do so - having Gorkon suddenly use the term to refer to peace, and not to death.
But Christopher Plummer has a solid turn as a scenery-chewing villain, David Warner is good in his small role as the Klingon Abraham Lincoln, and the thinly veiled geopolitics are deftly handled and blended with action-adventure.
I'd put TWOK and TUC at a tied but joint second best of the
Star Trek films, a respectable distance from TMP.
