Everybody always talks about the Enterprise flyby, but nobody ever seems to talk about another long sequence with very little dialogue: the close-in V’Ger flyover where the Enterprise is a speck by comparison, and V‘Ger is a landscape covered by distinct features. I’ve always enjoyed this sequence (and like where the music gets weirdly “barbaric” as we pass over the huge energy spheres in V’Ger’s midsection — no snickering, please), but I can easily imagine it being considered “another boring sequence”. What do people generally think of it?
TMP V’Ger flyover
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
Oh, if only Kubrick had directed TMP.
I've seen plenty of people talk about it?
It's often the part of the film where my interest starts to ebb, especially if I'm watching it at home (TMP really benefits from being on the big screen). I at least enjoy starship porn enough that the E flyby's alright, especially if I haven't watched it in awhile, but the V'Ger flyby is so abstract that it could basically be anything.
Some people feel the updates to the film that revealed V'Ger in its entirety took away from the sense of wonder, but for me and others V'Ger was so abstract to that point that it was nice to finally get an overall sense of what it looked like just so we could wrap our heads around it.
Yeah, count me among those. I get where you’re coming from, but I liked that V’Ger was filmed in a way that literally made it bigger than you can see, emphasizing the seemingly alien/weird aspect as something that humans can’t quite get. The updates turned V’Ger into basically just a big stick.
But V'ger was always a big stick.
Shame it wasn't possible to release both versions simultaneously and let the viewer decide which they prefer.
I get the appeal of V'ger remaining enigmatic, but for me it was so enigmatic that it became an abstraction rather than a real thing, at least until the end sequence.
I think it's a marvelous sequence. I've rarely seen anything so successful at conveying a sense of alienness and wonder. It's one of the only sequences in the Trek movies that really feels like it's about discovering the unknown, even if it's in the context of facing an existential threat. And it was very well-executed, with terrific miniature work and lighting effects, and of course Goldsmith's music. (Although the background lighting created by a laser beam sweeping through smoke looks very dated in retrospect, since that was a trendy effect in the late '70s and '80s.)
The thing is, the film had to be sent to theaters unfinished due to the inflexible deadline, so what we got was a rough cut. Rough cuts tend to be longer than they need to be, because they start by putting in everything, and then the director and editor decide which parts are expendable. It was always Robert Wise's intention to trim down the long FX sequences, and Goldsmith specifically wrote the V'Ger cloud and flyover cues to have a lot of repetition in them so that they could be easily trimmed to whatever the final sequence length turned out to be. So the leaner version of the sequence in the Director's Edition is closer to what Wise would've done in the first place if he'd been allowed to finish editing the film in 1979.
I agree. I appreciated being able to put the sequence in perspective, to understand that what the Enterprise flew over was one of the six identical sides of the ship. It was good to pull back and see an overview of the whole thing, to see how it all fit together.
I don't like things to remain abstract and mysterious. I like to have my questions answered, to understand as much as possible. I guess that's why I'm not that fond of Kubrick's 2001, which pointedly explained nothing; I preferred Arthur C. Clarke's prose version, which explained pretty much everything. (The two were really a very odd pair of collaborators, given their opposite approaches.) I guess you could say I want to "learn all that is learnable."
The thing is, the film had to be sent to theaters unfinished due to the inflexible deadline, so what we got was a rough cut. Rough cuts tend to be longer than they need to be, because they start by putting in everything, and then the director and editor decide which parts are expendable. It was always Robert Wise's intention to trim down the long FX sequences, and Goldsmith specifically wrote the V'Ger cloud and flyover cues to have a lot of repetition in them so that they could be easily trimmed to whatever the final sequence length turned out to be. So the leaner version of the sequence in the Director's Edition is closer to what Wise would've done in the first place if he'd been allowed to finish editing the film in 1979.
I agree. I appreciated being able to put the sequence in perspective, to understand that what the Enterprise flew over was one of the six identical sides of the ship. It was good to pull back and see an overview of the whole thing, to see how it all fit together.
I don't like things to remain abstract and mysterious. I like to have my questions answered, to understand as much as possible. I guess that's why I'm not that fond of Kubrick's 2001, which pointedly explained nothing; I preferred Arthur C. Clarke's prose version, which explained pretty much everything. (The two were really a very odd pair of collaborators, given their opposite approaches.) I guess you could say I want to "learn all that is learnable."
What was so danged important about that self-imposed deadline?
From The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, p. 204: "In March, 1979, a meeting was held in which the studio offered [Douglas] Trumbull virtual carte blanche if he would get the work completed by December of that year, a film release date to which Paramount was committed, having accepted advances from exhibitors on promising delivery for the Christmas holiday market." And this was after the production had already suffered delays, with Trumbull brought in to redo the effects after Robert Abel & Associates' work was deemed unacceptable. Missing the promised Christmas-season release date would've been too costly for the studio, as well as for the theaters, who would've had a gap in their release schedule at a crucial time.
So it wasn't a "self-imposed" deadline, but a studio- and exhibitor-imposed one.
