Christopher said:
The DE is definitely better. The version that showed on theater screens in 1979 was never meant to be the final version. It was an unfinished cut, one that would never, ever have been released if a rigid contract hadn't forced the filmmakers to release it to theaters on an absolutely fixed date. It was a rough, temporary edit that was meant to be tweaked and trimmed once all the effects footage was done. It had incomplete effects, with some shots missing and other shots replaced by filler (such as the lengthy close-up of the UFP seal on the floor to replace what was supposed to be a shot of a shuttlecraft in flight). It had a crude, temporary audio track that was always meant to be replaced with a better one. By all creative standards, the film should never have been released the way it was. It wasn't finished yet.
That's why the DE was made -- because TMP was the only film Robert Wise ever made that didn't get to theaters in the form he wanted, and he was finally given the chance to complete the post-production and editing work that was interrupted the first time. The makers treated it more as a work of film restoration than "updating" or whatever. What they did was to try to complete the film in a way that was as close as possible to how it would've been completed back in 1979 if Wise had had the time to get it right. Pretty much all the new FX shots were shots that were storyboarded and planned back in '79 but couldn't be finished in time, and were made to look as much as possible like they were made using 1979 techniques. The sound-effects track was mostly assembled from elements that were recorded in '79 and intended to be mixed together into the final audio track of the film. The editing was done based on Wise's and Roddenberry's notes from '79.
As such, I consider the DE to be the only proper version of the film. The theatrical version is an unfinished form, and the ABC-TV version is that unfinished film with extra clutter laid in with little regard for whether it makes sense. The DE is as close as we can get to the film that should have been released in 1979.
Beg to differ on nearly all points. There are plenty of storyboards showing different versions of Frisco and Vulcan that are nothing like what is in the DE, and the same goes for the wingwalk. It is a very selective representation of old boards that they are invoking to say that these are all old unrealized '79 concepts in the DE.
There are boards (and full concept art) showing angles that were not employed in either version, and for the most part they're superior to what was designed or redesigned by the SharpLine folk and Foundation. TGT has linked to various pieces of SF art in the past, and the 13 minute promo film for TMP (which I have on super-8) has got a useable (not any worse than what is already in theatrical TMP, and loads better than the lowrez crap in the DE) close shot of the shuttle tram flying overhead against clouds that certainly was ready and could have been cut in to replace the lengthy floor shot if Wise had chosen to do so.
This promo film (which is a longer version of the long trailer on the de disk) was completed months before the feature, so there's no question that plenty of stuff was finished and discarded (like Yuricich's vulcan shots, which were replaced or messed with by some other party for the theatrical release and discarded entirely for the de.)
If the sound mix was so preliminary in the theatrical release, then why have 'finishing touch'-like near-subliminal stuff like the sound of birds and wildlife on the rec deck? That is the kind of thing you do when you are FINESSING a soundtrack, not just laying down the gross general sounds. On the other hand, the DE soundmix is ... just fucking awful.
I'm definitely with TGT in being of the opinion that the DE is a cut-rate version of what Wise might once have wanted, filtered heavily through the SharpLine mindset (the editing may reflect SOME of GR and Wise's notes from the era, but if you've read as much about TMP as I have and talked to as many people who worked on it as I have, you'd realize there are a tremendous number of notions that were jotted down or blueskied), and filtered through the minimal dollars Paramount allotted for a project that should have probably been done with at least four or five times the money expended. Geez, go look at the final cut of BLADE RUNNER if they screen it theatrically in your area. More beautiful than before, and that is really saying something.
The cg ship shots in the de are pretty modest and certainly lack the presence of the original shots.
The other thing folks say is that the DE is warmed up the way the DP intended, that the video releases prior to dvd didn't reflect the theatrical release. Well, take a look at the 1979 calendar folks, that shitty cold look is right there, just like it was in the theater, like the shot of Kirk and Bones on bridge just before the wormhole.
This picture was shot with some pretty silly notions photographically, like using soft light directionally, usually in an unflattering direction, which ain't the way to make aging actors look good, and is actually very distracting and downright stupid, if you figure the light is coming from the floor most of the time, which don't help when you are trying to read a report (unless you are standing on your head when you do it.)
If you consider Wise and his DP did ANDROMEDA before this, it is strange, because TMP looks like somebody watching ANDROMEDA and then tried to duplicate its style but failed miserably, with the costuming matching walls thing and the overreliance on diopters. But it all works in ANDROMEDA and looks like crap in TMP. So you've got bad theatrical decisions and bad decades later rethinks ... what's definitive about any of these versions?
The ships look fine..it's the rushed matte work that hurts the scene.
