Well, don't forget that they did go with a feature film director for Nemesis. Nobody here seems to have liked that movie....
None of the motion picture directors were familiar with it, Baird is the only one who just approached it like a typical movie instead of a part of a larger canvas. Whatever his unfamiliarity, the movie looked great and was paced better than most of them. It's a solid action movie but not the best Star Trek.
Yes, obviously. Robert Wise wasn't familiar with Trek, but IIRC, his wife and daughter were both fans and were the ones who told him that he really needed to get Leonard Nimoy in the film. And while TMP missed the mark in a lot of ways, it does have more of an epic feel than any of the other Trek films and looks more like a big budget feature than any of the others..
Paramount apparently "owed" him a film after he did uncredited editing for them on two other pieces of crap (Mission: Impossible 2, and Lara Croft), and so we got stuck with him on Trek. Which ironically was actually the death of his directing career. Three strikes, he's out!
He absolutely is. And has been since childhood.
I've always thought that the combination of Nicholas Meyer and Harve Bennett was magical, as we saw in TWOK and TVH. Bennett wanted to respect the source material; Meyer wanted to make it his own. And some of both was needed. But I've never cared for Meyer by himself, which we got in TUC. He went too far afield with that one, IMHO.
Which honestly I think is a shame. Baird edited my favorite movie, Superman the Movie (he got an Academy Award nomination for it, too), and I thought U.S. Marshalls was decently directed. That movie had its problems, but they were more with the script than the direction. I never saw Executive Decision, but as I recall that did all right.
That's cool. I didn't know that. Glad he got the gig.
I've always liked Meyer's philosophy of "old wine in new bottles." He shook things up in a cool way in both movies he directed. I think if you're not going to bring something new to Star Trek, there's not much reason to take the job.
Still, the two silk purses preceded his sow-eared replicas. He never licked TREK to death.
He did great things with TWOK and TVH. But I really feel like he missed the mark in many ways with TUC, and that's the one that he did without Bennett. I'm not saying I don't enjoy the movie. However, even Meyer admits that rather than "bending" things, he actually managed to "break" them with that film.
Didn't seem to help Final Frontier.
They made him a cellular peptide cake for his birthday while filming, he's a Trekkie.
No, that's my point. I think Bennett and Meyer were best as a team. Either of them alone was Abbott without Costello. Laurel without Hardy. Kirk without Spock. Each had their own talents and strengths, but neither individually worked as well as the team of them together. (And I'm a fan of TFF as well.)Didn't seem to help Final Frontier.
(I say that as someone who has really come to appreciate ST5 for what it is.)
I know it's just a typo but I'm oddly tickled by the image of "Laurel and Harvey".
I was obviously thinking about the legendary pairing of Laurel Goodwin (from "The Cage") and Steve Harvey.I know it's just a typo but I'm oddly tickled by the image of "Laurel and Harvey".
