TMP - from hater to avid fan…
- Thread starter Warped9
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The final version of that shot in the 2022 DE also looks... weird, too. It looks far too much like CG, and the effects of the dissipating cloud fade away too fast. Really clashes with their original objective of trying to look like 1979 effects.
Pluto's orbit is 40 AU in diameter, so twice as big as that. That's very insane. 2AU is past the orbit of Mars into the asteroid belt.
While I admit I prefer TWoK for its superior pacing, characterisation, and its banging score, I think that the flaws and plot holes in TWoK do stand out more as you get older, whereas as you come to admire TMP's attention to detail even more. Of every Trek movie, it's the one that feels the most credibly science fiction.
There is plenty of characterisation in TMP, it's just that it's more subtle, and the characters are less sympathetic than in TWoK. The score is entirely on par with TWoK and I think the Enterprise and V'Ger flyovers are important parts of the emotional journey for the characters and for the viewer. I would not want to see them shortened any further.
I do prefer the extra character scenes in the SLV to the point where I made my own hybrid version of the DE with the extra SLV scenes. I think each of the characters get to contribute in their own niche with a smattering of their established characterisation from TOS but many of those moments are so organic, they may not register.
The only bit that drags for me is the final scene at V'ger's core. The characters spend too much time looking at flashing lights and listening to V'ger clucking. If they shortened that by 5 minutes, I would not miss it.
The only things I would have liked to see would have been:-
- A scene where Chapel and McCoy actually speak directly to each other
- A scene where Sulu, Uhura, Chekov and Rand interact together to evoke some TOS camaraderie between the more junior crew
- Uhura assisting Spock on the V'ger signal instead of Decker
- Rand in the second half of the movie, either manning the engineering station or taking over Ilia's station
- Rand on the bridge with Scotty and Chapel at the end
- A landing party following Spock inside V'ger to try and inject a bit of action
- Either trim or use CGI on the little rubber dude on Epsilon IX
It's a beautiful movie with incredible effects. An under-appreciated gem.
There is plenty of characterisation in TMP, it's just that it's more subtle, and the characters are less sympathetic than in TWoK. The score is entirely on par with TWoK and I think the Enterprise and V'Ger flyovers are important parts of the emotional journey for the characters and for the viewer. I would not want to see them shortened any further.
I do prefer the extra character scenes in the SLV to the point where I made my own hybrid version of the DE with the extra SLV scenes. I think each of the characters get to contribute in their own niche with a smattering of their established characterisation from TOS but many of those moments are so organic, they may not register.
The only bit that drags for me is the final scene at V'ger's core. The characters spend too much time looking at flashing lights and listening to V'ger clucking. If they shortened that by 5 minutes, I would not miss it.
The only things I would have liked to see would have been:-
- A scene where Chapel and McCoy actually speak directly to each other
- A scene where Sulu, Uhura, Chekov and Rand interact together to evoke some TOS camaraderie between the more junior crew
- Uhura assisting Spock on the V'ger signal instead of Decker
- Rand in the second half of the movie, either manning the engineering station or taking over Ilia's station
- Rand on the bridge with Scotty and Chapel at the end
- A landing party following Spock inside V'ger to try and inject a bit of action
- Either trim or use CGI on the little rubber dude on Epsilon IX
It's a beautiful movie with incredible effects. An under-appreciated gem.
It's awful. The only reason it's not my least favorite thing in the DE is the Officer's Lounge scene lasts longer. (And how did they screw up the tram station? It's a finished shot, fer crying out loud!)
I heard someone (Fein or Matessino?) say that the second go round took less of the approach that the 01 version did: "Make it look like they did it in 1979." Which of course was a mistake. It was a noble goal and one that really kept the TMP
E from straying into Star Wars SE territory.It always feels to me like I'm bashing on the DE. I love the DE. It's my go to version. (The 01 was not.) It's just that it's so dramatically marred in some weird ways.
But Matessino made "2 AUs in diameter" sound like an actual sentence in the 22.
Pluto's averaged orbit is just under 40 AU in radius, not diameter.
Ah, thank you. I looked up a chart of planet AU from the Sun, didn't phrase it right.
TMP had, in effect, two directors: Robert Wise and Doug Trumbull.
Wise let Trumbull direct the entire sequence of the travel pod approaching the Enterprise, and Trumbull also directed Spock's journey into V'Ger and subsequent mind meld. In addition, due to the pressures of time, Wise basically just inserted Trumbull's effects sequences into the film unedited, so Trumbull's approach and vision had a very significant effect on the final film.
The pace of the film, which may here decry as "slowing down the story," was a very deliberate approach by Trumbull. To use an overly cliched phrase, it is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the reasons I adore TMP. And the attempts to "correct" it in the DE only make the film worse, IMHO. Not every film has to move fast. TMP is designed to project a sense of awe and wonder and it does so marvelously.
"This sequence was all about arriving at the Enterprise and cruising around it and doing the series of reveal shots. As you approach, you have to look through this drydock to the Enterprise which is docked inside of it so you never quite get to see it. ... The shuttle comes around and it turns and it faces the Enterprise from the front. That's the big reveal shot. And that was where Goldsmith cut lose with the most beautiful music cue ever. And you get to see the Enterprise in its full glory."
"I wanted it to be this beautiful, epic, spectacular sequence that had no dialog, no story, no plot. Everything stops. And let the audience just love the Enterprise. I wanted everybody to buy into the beauty of space and the beauty of their mission and the beauty of the Enterprise itself. And just have everybody get out of the way and let that happen, which was something I'd really learned with Kubrick on 2001 -- stop talking for a while and just let it all flow."
-- Doug Trumbull
Wise let Trumbull direct the entire sequence of the travel pod approaching the Enterprise, and Trumbull also directed Spock's journey into V'Ger and subsequent mind meld. In addition, due to the pressures of time, Wise basically just inserted Trumbull's effects sequences into the film unedited, so Trumbull's approach and vision had a very significant effect on the final film.
The pace of the film, which may here decry as "slowing down the story," was a very deliberate approach by Trumbull. To use an overly cliched phrase, it is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the reasons I adore TMP. And the attempts to "correct" it in the DE only make the film worse, IMHO. Not every film has to move fast. TMP is designed to project a sense of awe and wonder and it does so marvelously.
"This sequence was all about arriving at the Enterprise and cruising around it and doing the series of reveal shots. As you approach, you have to look through this drydock to the Enterprise which is docked inside of it so you never quite get to see it. ... The shuttle comes around and it turns and it faces the Enterprise from the front. That's the big reveal shot. And that was where Goldsmith cut lose with the most beautiful music cue ever. And you get to see the Enterprise in its full glory."
"I wanted it to be this beautiful, epic, spectacular sequence that had no dialog, no story, no plot. Everything stops. And let the audience just love the Enterprise. I wanted everybody to buy into the beauty of space and the beauty of their mission and the beauty of the Enterprise itself. And just have everybody get out of the way and let that happen, which was something I'd really learned with Kubrick on 2001 -- stop talking for a while and just let it all flow."
-- Doug Trumbull
NCC-1701 was as much a star of the show as any of the actors. I got exactly why Trumbull shot it that way.
Raw footage is to be edited.
So you missed the entire point of my post, then? It wasn't raw footage at all. It was directed and edited by Trumbull with Wise's permission. The sequences were as designed and were the pace they were deliberately.
I missed nothing.
It was deliberately paced by Trumbull.
Wise said he would have cut it down, had he had time. Did you miss that?
It was that hard release date that was a significant factor in why we got the imperfect film that we did.
Directors are not always the best judge of their own work. Nick Meyer, Leonard Nimoy, and William Shatner all wanted to do things to their films that would have made them worse.
I do agree with Nick Meyer's oft repeated phase that "art thrives on restrictions." The pressures of time often result in a better product than endless tinkering does.
In this case, Trumbull wasn't just a visual effects artist. He was a director in his own right who was trusted by Wise to actually direct several sequences. The fact that Wise may have directed them differently doesn't make them "raw footage." The sequences were deliberately put together as they are. If Wise had chosen to then go in and cut them down, he would have been mistaken, IMHO.
But, then again, I'm one who, while loving both films, thinks that TMP is superior to TWOK, so I always assume my opinion is in the minority.
It's basically a rough cut that plays like a bunch of raw footage strung together. It just doesn't know when enough is enough. He tried to show the whole tedious pod maneuver in real time. The only cuts are to change the point of view. There are essentially no cuts for time. In referring to it as raw footage, I was exaggerating for effect (though perhaps ill-advisedly). Granted going into the cloud is much, much worse.
The only reason these edits had to be accepted was because otherwise they would have missed the deadline. They were not considered satisfactory by Wise.
To cast Wise in the same league as a director as Meyer, Nimoy, or Shatner is utterly ridiculous.
By the way, Trumbull received no credit on TMP as any kind of editor. In fact, IMDb lists zero credits as any kind of editor for Trumbull. I'm aware of his CV. I've enjoyed films he worked on including some he directed. Pacing a scene was not his forte.
No, they weren't. In several interviews, Trumbull and Wise both said they had dropped in lengths of blank leader in the workprints in the mad rush to get to the finish line during editing, and the order was to "flop it, crop it, or drop it" in order to fill those sections of leader.
What we got were "finished" effects shots in so far as Trumbull and Apogee did all their final compositing, but they were far from the fine edits Robert Wise wanted to accomplish. He simply had no time to trim the movie down any further than what audiences saw in December of 1979.
On the topic of directing? Trumbull only handled the revised Spock Walk sequence in August of 1979, once again because Wise did not have the time to direct the insert shots of Nimoy while handling the millions of other post-production headaches the production was dealing with. He was not responsible for directing additional sequences.
Wise had final cut. That was in his contract. Given the crunch, he trusted Trumbull to get the job done. But I seriously doubt that Trumbull actually edited those sequences he shot. There's no question that Wise would have pared the film down if time had permitted.
A big factor regarding that etched-in-stone deadline was that editing on film is a lot different than the nonlinear editing that is now the norm. Notably, once the soundtrack was locked for a given reel, you were stuck with that unless you had the time to recut all the audio, which was separate tapes from the film.
A big factor regarding that etched-in-stone deadline was that editing on film is a lot different than the nonlinear editing that is now the norm. Notably, once the soundtrack was locked for a given reel, you were stuck with that unless you had the time to recut all the audio, which was separate tapes from the film.
Yup. Wise always said TMP was the only time in his career that he didn't have time to even preview a picture before release to fine-tune it. Paramount blind-booking the film and locking it into that release date was a real kick to the proverbial nuts.
I just don't agree. And that's fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, as Scotty said and Captain Koloth agreed. But I find nothing even remotely tedious about the scene. Granted, Goldsmith's score really helps elevate the scene, but I find the imagery to be beautiful as well. It is the first time, as Trumbull says, that we really got time to love the Enterprise. And I think the refit Enterprise is one of the most beautiful miniatures ever designed for a film.
I also like Trumbull's "first person cinema" approach, where we are not looking over someone's shoulder through the entire sequence. It also helps make the images sharper and clearer since there is less compositing. One thing I really find jarring is when it does switch to a shot from inside the travel pod looking past Kirk and Scotty out the window and the image is much less sharp because of the extra layer of compositing.
Wise had the opportunity to revisit the edit for the Director's Edition. That was the point, in fact. But while he chose to make trims to the V'Ger cloud sequence, he didn't touch one frame of the drydock travel pod sequence. He and his team made some very dramatic changes to other parts of the film, but they left that sequence alone. Why do you think that is? (I don't mean that rhetorically, I'm legitimately asking.)
That was not my intention at all. I was simply pointing out that all directors sometimes make bad decisions. I think Wise was far and away the best director of the TOS film directors. In fact, again going against popular opinion, I think Meyer and Nimoy are both overrated as directors. The former because I think he tries too hard to break the mold of what Trek is and goes off the deep end; the latter because I think he shoots things too much like a TV director.
Shatner is not overrated as a director because no one rates him highly.
But in some ways, I think he is actually superior to Meyer and Nimoy. Sure, he had really bad judgment about the story, but when it came to actually shooting the film, he shot it the most cinematically of anyone since Wise. Save for the visual effects, it really looked like a movie. (He was significantly helped by having the talents of Andrew Lazslo and Jerry Goldsmith, of course.)Trumbull himself said he directed the travel pod sequence, and the style has his fingerprints all over it. He could be wrong. I don't know. But that's what he said.
I need to double check the call sheets and editor’s script I’ve got in my files, but I don’t think that timing works out based on the record. IIRC, the live action elements with Shatner and Doohan were filmed by the First Unit (main production) at least a month before Trumbull was brought onto the production during filming on the original Memory Wall sequence.
Wise directed all First Unit shots during production and the initial spring 1979 post-production shoots of the Klingon Bridge, Epsilon 9, and the SF Tram Station.
Trumbull would’ve been Second Unit during the post-production phase, typically responsible for inserts and special angles for VFX that don’t require the full cast or Director to shoot.
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