Who should have directed TMP if Robert Wise hadn't been available?

[The Salt Umpire]

TMP was the most 'seek out new life and new civilizations' of any of the Trek movies IMO. "The Human Adventure Is Just Begining"? Too many of the other movies are mostly space battles or villains run amok and that gete boring real quick. "Oh no, The Enterprise had to save the whatever...again."

 

[CoveTom]

TMP was the most 'seek out new life and new civilizations' of any of the Trek movies IMO. "The Human Adventure Is Just Begining"? Too many of the other movies are mostly space battles or villains run anok and that gete boring real quick. "Oh no, The Enterprise had to save the whatever...again."

TMP is, to this day, the only Trek film that I feel projects a sense of exploration, of awe, of wonder. Yes, they were confronting a threat to Earth. But the Enterprise was not involved in one single space battle. It was more an exploration of the unknown, a unique type of first contact, and determining a way to solve the problem.

Now, am I saying every Trek film should have followed that formula? Absolutely not! In fact, I think TWOK was the perfect second film because it went in a totally different direction. The films don't need to be cookie cutter repeats of one another. Robert Wise and Nick Meyer were both very talented directors and they both made what are, IMHO, very good Trek films.

Nick Meyer himself has said on numerous occasions, including in his memoir, that he doesn't join the chorus of people who criticize what Robert Wise did and that he respects his work on TMP.

 

[Crewman Commander]

But the Enterprise was not involved in one single space battle.

Hard disagree. "Our shields cannot handle another attack!"

 

[Cicero]

That's very nice for the general consensus. I felt that it was the most TOS of the movies, together with TUC.

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[Christopher]

I could see Richard Fleischer getting the nod. He had science fiction experience in his background (Fantastic Voyage) and was available around the same time Wise was when Paramount hired him. Fleischer didn't have a project on his slate until he was brought on to replace Richard C. Sarafian on Ashanti in April 1978.

That's an interesting suggestion. Of course, he also did 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Doctor Dolittle, and Soylent Green.

I do wonder if he would have given TMP a paranoid and dark feeling judging by the opening scenes of FV which felt furitive and secretive. He sure could film sfx, tho.

See above -- Fleischer had a pretty eclectic resume, adapting to different tones and styles as the films required. Fantastic Voyage started out as a spy thriller, so of course that part felt furtive and secretive. That wasn't about the director, it was about the story.

I think that the general consensus is that the character dynamic doesn't feel at all like TOS, at least for a significant portion of the film.

Yeah, but that was the whole point -- that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had lost something when they went their separate ways, because they needed each other to keep them in balance. So they weren't themselves at the start of the film, and they were only able to become their true selves again by reconnecting with each other. If they'd been exactly the same at the start of the film that they were at the end, there would have been no character journey.

I mean, is TWOK all that different? Kirk starts that film depressed and unhappy, even further from the Kirk we know, and has to find his way back to being a decisive leader, which he can only achieve when he's back with his old crew.

It's the same as people who complain that the Kelvin characters don't feel like the TOS crew. Of course they don't -- it's an origin story and they're a decade younger. The arc of the trilogy was about them growing into the characters we know, so of course they didn't start out that way.

TMP is, to this day, the only Trek film that I feel projects a sense of exploration, of awe, of wonder. Yes, they were confronting a threat to Earth. But the Enterprise was not involved in one single space battle. It was more an exploration of the unknown, a unique type of first contact, and determining a way to solve the problem.

Yes. I know this wasn't your point, but one reason I dislike TWOK is that it dumbed Star Trek down to the level of action movies driven by space battles, and that's been the template for Trek movies ever since. Even movies that have tried to be more thoughtful, like Insurrection, have been marred by the need to tack on gratuitous space battles. Other than TMP, only The Voyage Home managed to break the mold and tell a story that was more about solving a problem than fighting an enemy. (And it was an exploration story too in its way, since the 20th century was an alien world to the characters, and it involved making contact with an alien intelligence, i.e. the whales.)

 

[CoveTom]

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Leonard Nimoy is wrong. Actors are rarely a good judge of the works they are in. It is ironic, though, that he feels that TMP had nothing to do with the characters, because Spock's character development was at the forefront of that film.

It is an absolute logical development of his character from the series that he would go back to Vulcan to try and finally purge the humanity and end his internal conflict once and for all. But he finds he can't and he doesn't understand why. Returning to the Enterprise, reuniting with his friends (especially Kirk), and coming to understand V'Ger make him realize what he was really missing, and by the end of the film he has come to accept himself and his place. His development in TMP is why he is the man he is when we get to TWOK.

 

[CoveTom]

Hard disagree. "Our shields cannot handle another attack!"

That's a fair point. I guess it's more accurate to say that the Enterprise didn't do any fighting. Kirk tried desperately to avoid a battle, and Spock found a way to establish communication so that they did not have to fight.

 

[DonIago]

Yeah, but that was the whole point -- that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had lost something when they went their separate ways, because they needed each other to keep them in balance. So they weren't themselves at the start of the film, and they were only able to become their true selves again by reconnecting with each other. If they'd been exactly the same at the start of the film that they were at the end, there would have been no character journey.

I agree with you on this, but it's been my understanding that one point of criticism that some level at TMP is that the characters don't feel like their TOS selves. Whether that's intentional or not isn't really the point, though one can use that to argue that the criticism isn't valid.

Perhaps a more nuanced take would be, "The characters don't feel like the TOS characters, and while I appreciate that they're not meant to, at least at the start of the film, the lack of chemistry is a reason why I feel I didn't appreciate the film as much as I might have."

It's not that different from critics who argue that TMP doesn't have enough action, where one could counterargue that TMP isn't supposed to be an action film.

I honestly don't know where I land on this personally.

 

[Cicero]

Leonard Nimoy is wrong. Actors are rarely a good judge of the works they are in. It is ironic, though, that he feels that TMP had nothing to do with the characters, because Spock's character development was at the forefront of that film.

Nimoy was also an accomplished director and producer of popular films, including The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country. I don't think it's very likely that both the cast and the general public were wrong about the movie (particularly when most of the complaints are about writing, pacing, and excessive use of effects).

I've also seen rumors that Robert Wise was unhappy, but I've never found a source better than Nimoy's implication in that interview. He doesn't seem to have had the control he wanted over the film.

It is an absolute logical development of his character from the series that he would go back to Vulcan to try and finally purge the humanity and end his internal conflict once and for all. But he finds he can't and he doesn't understand why. Returning to the Enterprise, reuniting with his friends (especially Kirk), and coming to understand V'Ger make him realize what he was really missing, and by the end of the film he has come to accept himself and his place. His development in TMP is why he is the man he is when we get to TWOK.

I was introduced to the later films (and then TOS) before I saw The Motion Picture, and never thought his film character was anything other than a logical progression from the series.

The Vulcans of the series also don't strike me as likely to purposely help his efforts to purge his human half from himself. I thought that their approach in The Voyage Home was much more likely.

We see in both "Amok Time" and "Journey to Babel" that traditional Vulcans are logical, not unemotional.

 

[Christopher]

Leonard Nimoy is wrong. Actors are rarely a good judge of the works they are in. It is ironic, though, that he feels that TMP had nothing to do with the characters, because Spock's character development was at the forefront of that film.

It is an absolute logical development of his character from the series that he would go back to Vulcan to try and finally purge the humanity and end his internal conflict once and for all. But he finds he can't and he doesn't understand why. Returning to the Enterprise, reuniting with his friends (especially Kirk), and coming to understand V'Ger make him realize what he was really missing, and by the end of the film he has come to accept himself and his place. His development in TMP is why he is the man he is when we get to TWOK.

Yes. If you think about it, Spock's emotional epiphany in TMP is the only status quo change in the Prime timeline movies that isn't reversed, other than things that happen in the final film in a series like Sulu or Riker getting his own captaincy. Spock's death was reversed, the Enterprise's destruction was reversed (or at least they got a new one, jus as the TNG crew did later on), Saavik's addition to the crew was reversed, Kirk's promotion to admiral was reversed, Data getting his emotion chip was reversed. For decades, the movies backed away from any permanent change or growth in favor of reversion to the mean. But Spock's life-changing experience in TMP actually was life-changing. Even after his death and resurrection, Spock remained serene and comfortable with his emotions in every subsequent appearance (with the partial exception of "Unification," which I felt wrote him too much like his old emotion-denying self from TOS).

I agree with you on this, but it's been my understanding that one point of criticism that some level at TMP is that the characters don't feel like their TOS selves. Whether that's intentional or not isn't really the point, though one can use that to argue that the criticism isn't valid.

Perhaps a more nuanced take would be, "The characters don't feel like the TOS characters, and while I appreciate that they're not meant to, at least at the start of the film, the lack of chemistry is a reason why I feel I didn't appreciate the film as much as I might have."

The difference is, the characters in an ongoing episodic series at the time had to remain the same from week to week, but a standalone story like a movie movie ought to be about characters going through change and growth. So either you start out with the characters the way they were in the series and change them into something different, or you start out with them different and show them finding their way back to the people they were. Since TMP was based on what was going to be the pilot for a new series, it went the latter route.

If you think about it, this is a recurring pattern in Trek pilots. Both "The Cage" and "Emissary" start with the lead character lost and depressed, on the verge of giving up, and in the course of the story we see them finding themselves again through their response to the crisis and becoming the leader they would be going forward. In these more serialized times, the first seasons of both Discovery and Picard had arcs about their main characters starting out in bad places and growing into more assured leaders. And of course the Kelvin movies had that arc as well, particularly the first.

So I think if people complain about TMP not appealing to them because it has that same structure, it's because they're just setting the wrong expectations. They wanted another routine episode where the characters felt like themselves throughout, but it wasn't a routine episode, it was a pilot for a new series, whether on TV or the big screen. And so it had the structure of a pilot, telling a story about the characters finding their place as they went.

 

[DonIago]

^Isn't that still a frequent point of dissension regarding the Trek films, though? Some people want them to feel like a continuation of their parent series without significant change (and sometimes consider it a positive if the movies feel like extended episodes of their parent series), while others want them to break away from the status quos set by the series?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

How about Harlan Ellison? Barring Roddenberry himself....

Ellison wasn't a film director. No studio would have given a neophyte a gig like that.

I am mildly curious what an Ellison Star Trek film would have been like. I've read his I Robot script. I thought it was interesting but not commercially viable. An art house sci-fi film.

 

[PumpkinSpiceFoodCube]

Jack Smight.

He'd already had one sci-fi blockbuster recently ruined by a studio, and might have known how to work around them to get his vision on screen. He was familiar with directing sci fi with both Illustrated Man and Damnation Alley. Airport 75 and Midway were useful experiences, too.

He'd directed Nimoy and Shatner in separate episodes of Twilight Zone.

 

[Christopher]

^Isn't that still a frequent point of dissension regarding the Trek films, though? Some people want them to feel like a continuation of their parent series without significant change (and sometimes consider it a positive if the movies feel like extended episodes of their parent series), while others want them to break away from the status quos set by the series?

But as I said, a film like TMP is like pilot episodes such as "The Cage" and "Emissary." Every episode entails a character journey, but in older episodic series, it was generally the journey of a guest character while the leads remained the same. But sometimes it's a journey for one of the leads, and that's more likely to be the case in a movie, or a pilot.

 

[Mage]

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I respect that, but in the end it's about what we fans feel and think. And we're all right because we all take different things from the shows and movies.
TMP has THE core of what TOS was all about for me. Do I need to justify to this to anyone? No.
Do I appreciate you sharing something that most likely mirrors your thoughts? I totally do.
But just because Nimoy felt this way, it doesn't make him the be all end all of this discussion.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Kirk's promotion to admiral was reversed.

As a fan of fighting sail fiction, I'd have liked to see Kirk acting as an admiral, in command of a squadron, at some point in the film series, but I'm not sure that really lends itself to the Star Trek format, and reducing Kirk's rank back to Captain feels like an acknowledgement of that reality.

 

[Etbj SMY]

Ellison wasn't a film director. No studio would have given a neophyte a gig like that.

Perhaps if he had helmed a TJ HOOKER episode or two, like that other guy, William Something....

 

[Christopher]

As a fan of fighting sail fiction, I'd have liked to see Kirk acting as an admiral, in command of a squadron, at some point in the film series, but I'm not sure that really lends itself to the Star Trek format, and reducing Kirk's rank back to Captain feels like an acknowledgement of that reality.

TMP would have made more sense if Kirk had been the admiral in command of the mission while Decker remained the captain in command of the ship, the same way it worked with Kirk and Spock in TWOK. And yes, it would've been neat if he'd been in operational command of an entire task force of smaller ships staying behind to defend Sol System while the Enterprise went ahead to reconnoiter the Intruder, instead of implying that Earth had no defense beyond an orbital grid and a single unfinished starship.

Perhaps if he had helmed a TJ HOOKER episode or two, like that other guy, William Something....

It was actually ten episodes, which is more directing experience than Nicholas Meyer or Leonard Nimoy had before their Trek movies.