TMP's Transporter Accident on Loop is the Stuff of Nightmares

No, you are correct I love nemesis, it's in the middle of the pack but only because I love TMP, TWOK and the kelvin films more.

 

I don't dislike Nemesis as much as most people seem to. Every Trek movie has good and bad points.

 

The pictures shown up-thread look more like publicity stills than actual production pics. They certainly dont seem to correspond to the positions either person is in during this sequence in the actual film.

 

I liked Nemesis too, apart from the dune buggy segment.

 

Yeah, Nemesis for me is definitely somewhere in the middle. TMP, TWOK and FC are my 3 favorites, in that order, while Insurrection and TFF come in last place (though I always point out I don't hate or even dislike any Star Trek film, I have them all and have watched them all numerous times). All the ones in the middle seem to fluctuate for me. Number 4 sometimes could be TUC, sometimes it might be Beyond (my favorite Kelvin film, yeah, I really like to go against the grain).

Yeah, I admit that was an eye rolling moment. I wasn't a huge fan of the B-4 angle of the movie overall.

I did love the battle sequence with the Scimitar. At one time I thought I might have liked having a fleetwide battle, a la DS9 which apparently they had planned but had to abandon due to the budget. But you know, I think I prefer it as is. It helps concentrate the ferocity of the battle, whereas with a fleetwide battle things would become diluted. Finally a movie that shows us all the Enterprise can dish out, including little used phaser banks on other parts of the ship. And the collision scene was one of my favorites. The sound effects were well done also.

 

I wasn’t too keen on the sound mix, actually: too much dynamic range range for my taste and I kept fiddling with the volume.

I wonder how would have been in a theater, can’t remember why but I missed it somehow.

 

My wife hates it when I watch Nemesis. She's always yelling "Can you turn that down?"

How can you turn down such an incredible battle sequence. She just doesn't understand

I saw it in the theater but can't remember too much about the sound quality in the theater I saw it in.

I do recall after seeing it I thought it was a decent enough film. I was actually quite shocked to read about the vitriol the movie engendered when I started reading about it online years later. I knew it wasn't a blockbuster or anything, but I thought it was a middle of the road Trek film. But then to this day I still don't get it

 

And why doesn't every Romulan ship have Counselor Reman on board, wearing cool shades. Let's see Spock seduce the Romulan commander then.

 

Looking at the untreated images - particularly the poses - I wonder if the original plan was for some kind of slit-scan effect, as in this blog post:
https://nofilmschool.com/2016/11/how-to-create-2001-slit-scanning-effect


There's a hint of it in the final product although thankfully the overlying swirly energy effect covers it up. Douglas Trumbull most definitely knew about slit-scan photography although without computer assistance the kind of images above would have been difficult to pull off in motion. Still, as a kid it scared me and made the film feel more "grown-up", although in retrospect it's just padding.

On a tangent, it made me wonder about something else. TMP was supposed to be a more mature, less camp version of Trek, which raises the question of why Starfleet was so keen that Captain Kirk himself intercept a vast, hostile alien starship of unknown origin? We know now that his crew managed to talk with V'Ger and work out what it wanted, but at the beginning of the film all Starfleet knows is that they're in the way of what amounts to a giant killer space torpedo.

The universe of e.g. "The Squire of Gothos" and "Who Mourns for Adonis" is fundamentally incompatible with TMP, so what did TMP-era Starfleet expect Kirk to do that Decker couldn't?

 

The sequence was shot many months before Trumbull came on board, and so was shot for techniques that ASTRA/Robert Abel & Associates were planning. I've spoken to Richard Taylor about this, and while I recall how he planned to do the transporter beam, I forget what he said about the accident deformation. I'll have to go back and watch the recording of the conversation to refresh my memory.

 

Thank you for doing this