Tag Archives: Douglas Trumbull

Reassessing Star Trek: The Motion Picture

I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture again. This time I watched the DVD, which contains the movie as completed by the director.

For those who don’t know, it was one of those movie projects from hell. It started off as a TV series pilot episode, went through half a dozen scripts, was turned into a movie, was turned back into a TV series, then got sold as a movie and had to be completed in an unfeasibly short amount of time. There wasn’t time to pre-screen it, and Paramount wouldn’t let it be edited after the premiere, because they thought that might suggest a lack of confidence.

The special effects were state of the art for 1979, using such amazing things as lasers and fiber optic cables. In those pre-computer days, many scenes needed to be composited from six differently exposed pieces of film. The wormhole sequence not only required exposure times of several minutes per frame for the wormhole effect, it also required that every single frame of live action be hand-rotoscoped…

The end result was that special effects went way, way over budget, and big chunks of movie (including dialog) had to be cut because they couldn’t afford the time or money to complete the corresponding effects.

For the DVD release, Robert Wise has managed to restore most of the missing dialog, and trim some of the excessive dialog-free sections he wanted to trim after he first saw the completed movie himself at the premiere. Scenes on Vulcan have new cheese-less scenery. The result is… well, it’s better, but it’s still not wonderful.

Paramount should certainly be commended for trying to do it right. Robert Wise was an experienced SF director who understood cinema composition. Alan Dean Foster knew how to write a screenplay. Isaac Asimov consulted on the science. And Douglas Trumbull had created the effects for 2001 and Silent Running. Yet ultimately, it’s the movie’s towering ambition that ruins it. It clearly wants to be Star Trek’s version of 2001, yet it never quite makes it.

The sequence of Kirk and Scotty approaching the Enterprise in dock recalls the docking sequence of Kubrick’s epic; yet this one had me asking why the hell they had to fly the length of the ship three times, and why they couldn’t just get on with the movie. The V’ger slit scan effects are just Douglas Trumbull’s stargate sequence revisited with the addition of motion control cameras. Even the theme of man transcending into a new level of being mimics the end of 2001.

There are still some rough edges, too. When the Enterprise is in the wormhole, it was all too apparent that only Ilia (Persis Khambatta) was bouncing and jiggling in her seat to make it look like the ship was shaking. Granted, she’s the only member of the cast I’d really want to see jiggling, but that’s not the point… The point is, Kubrick would have made them do another fifty takes if necessary, until they got the scenes right.

Much as I like widescreen aspect ratio, there are also some technical issues caused by the state of the art in Panavision in the late 70s. Some shots had to be composited to get around depth of field problems, leaving blurs across parts of the bridge. In a couple of scenes, the background shows crewmembers who are obviously a little too still—they’re optical stills!

While the original theatrical release emphasized special effects too much, the Director’s edition tries to please the hardcore Star Trek fans a bit too much, I think. It becomes way too much like an extended TV episode—which isn’t entirely surprising, given its history.

The summary: If you’ve seen the movie but not seen this version, it’s worth seeing, in much the same way that the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner is worth seeing. If you’re not a Star Trek fan, do yourself a favor and skip it.

It’s a wonder I bother renting movies

Another incredibly elaborate SF movie dream last night.

The premise: Three friends driving home late one night try to take a shortcut. They take a wrong turning and enter an unmarked tunnel. It seems to be unfinished construction work. They reason that it must come out somewhere, and decide to follow it. After a long while, they are surprised to find some kind of checkpoint, like the US-Canada border station, where they can park their car and enter… where?

Curious, they park and make their way in. They discover an entire underground city, apparently a completely separate civilization. Although the people speak English, they have their own currency, their own peculiar social and political conventions, and so on. These people apparently visit our world from time to time, but mostly live in theirs.

The three friends make their way in, and try to blend in and see what’s going on. They soon discover that while the place is mostly inhabited by humans, it is seemingly run by a race of humanoid, possibly alien, insects. The humans are fully aware of this and apparently comfortable with it; humans and insects work alongside each other in positions of authority, though it seems that the ultimate authority is always insect. Perhaps the aliens do a really good job?

Our friends separate, and one of them discovers that all is not as well as it initially appeared. Unknown to the human population and its insect rulers, a sub-species or cult of the insects is making plans to take over. The cultists are gradually replacing people with insect doppelganger, in the usual sci fi manner. The rest of the plot was interesting but convoluted, involving philosophical questions of whether a duplicate can be a close enough duplicate that it unintentionally begins to pick up the attitudes and values of the original. Rather Philip K. Dick, really, and a cut above the usual way this theme is treated.

Interestingly enough, I dreamed that I was watching all this in a multi-screen cinema. Supposedly the movie was directed by Douglas Trumbull, who was now working with synchronized multi-screen presentation… So there were parts of the movie where I could turn around and see what was happening in a different direction.

The attention to detail was amazing. All of the vehicles in the underground city had a slightly alien quality to them, the buildings were futuristic—even the houses—and there was a hexagonal, insectoid quality to the layout of the streets.