Star Trek: The Motion Picture [Director's Edition]
(2001)
Review
by : Eric
Barker
Starring:
William Shatner (Capt. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy
(Spock), DeForrest Kelley (McCoy)
screenplay: Harold Livingston
screen story by: Alan Dean Foster, based
on TV series Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
produced by: Gene Roddenberry
directed by: Robert Wise
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In 1978,
after a decade of corporate hedging, hemming and hawing, and
in the wake of Star Wars’ incredible box-office success
over at Fox, the brass at Paramount Pictures finally greenlighted
a big screen version of the Star Trek TV series. In
typical Hollywood fashion, they immediately set about doing
everything right and wrong at once, sparing no expense to
get the original crew back on board (Leonard Nimoy was an
especially tough sell, what with his phobia of pointed ears
and typecasting), hiring the finest directing talent and visual
effects personnel that producer Gene Roddenberry could find,
and then committing themselves and everyone connected with
the project to a near failure by setting an impossible release
date and sticking to it.
The resulting
film, Star Trek -- The Motion Picture (1979), may have
been a box-office smash, insuring that the life of the franchise
was renewed, but it was also an artistic mess, a dull, lumbering,
pretentious grab-bag only a die-hard Star Trek fan could really
love, filled with ponderously long effects shots that seemed
to have no narrative point and climaxing in a disappointing,
pseudo-cosmic statement about technology and the-meaning-of-life.
Like a joke that takes too long to tell, Star Trek -- The
Motion Picture has always been something to endure with
a frozen smile rather than to actually enjoy. (It wasn’t until
the next entry, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982,
that the series regained its adventure footing and became
dependable entertainment again.)
Most of the problems with that first film have now been rectified
in a new double-disc DVD package, a well-made and sometimes
beautiful reconstruction of the filmmakers’ original intentions
called Star Trek -- The Motion Picture: The Director’s
Edition. Paramount has finally allowed director Robert
Wise to revisit the movie and, assisted by a new team of editors
and digital effects artists, he has completely dismantled
it, excising scenes he never liked, restoring scenes that
lend small but important bits of character development, tightening
the story and the pace in general, and finishing the visual
effects, many of which have never been seen before. Add to
all of this a new sound mix, which was not done properly the
first time around, and Star Trek -- The Motion Picture
has become an entirely new film: appreciably quicker, a little
bit deeper and much more suspenseful, with a nicely mounted
sense of wonder as it moves toward its climax.
The new version also answers a question that has been nagging
-- at me, anyway -- for a couple of decades: how could Robert
Wise -- the incredibly versatile showman who edited Citizen
Kane (1941), who won two directing Oscars in the sixties
for making the last of the big budget Hollywood musicals,
and who had previously made some of the smartest examples
of science fiction/fantasy in movie history (The Day the
Earth Stood Still, 1951; The Haunting, 1963)...how
could that Robert Wise have delivered such a mediocre Star
Trek movie to begin with? The answer comes as no surprise:
Paramount hired him (the part they did right), and then proceeded
to treat him like some untried kid or journeyman hack they
could force into doing whatever met their needs of the moment
(a.k.a., the part they did wrong).
While Mr. Wise joined the production as a consummate professional,
dedicated to collaborating with Roddenberry and the actors
in making Star Trek come alive on the big screen, the
studio really didn’t care what he did, as long as he kept
all the competing egos in check and made a splashy movie to
go into theatres during Christmas week. But the film was clearly
a huge logistical effort that would require a longer production
schedule than the executives had anticipated. As the release
date approached, Paramount refused to back down, ordered some
substandard opticals to fill in the unfinished gaps, and wrested
Star Trek -- The Motion Picture from its makers’ hands
as soon as Wise finished his rough cut, hurrying the movie
into release without the usual sneak previews or audience
testing. In effect, we have been looking at an incomplete
movie for the last twenty years.
All of this and more is revealed on the DVD commentary track,
although Mr. Wise, ever the gentleman, refrains from saying
anything bad about anyone. Still enviably sharp-witted at
the age of 88, he seems to derive enough satisfaction simply
from being given the opportunity to polish the final super-spectacle
of his illustrious career, and rightly so. The finished product
speaks for itself, a complete Star Trek -- The Motion Picture
that, while still no cinematic masterpiece, has at last become
the respectable opening chapter of a big screen series that
it should have been all along.
This version unfolds quickly, with the jaunty confidence of
a veteran storyteller at the helm. Often, what Wise and his
new team of collaborators have changed is subtle, making judicious
trims in scenes that needed to move faster or slight alterations
in reaction shots between characters in conversation, but
the effect is often striking. With all distractions and hesitation
gone, it is possible to see the dramatic risks Wise and the
actors invented for a group of familiar characters who needed
to grow. Captain Kirk’s ambition and egocentrism, for instance,
which had always remained buried in the fifty minute television
episodes, rarely if ever examined, here charges to the surface,
revealing his deeply conflicted nature and threatening the
very ship he loves. And Mr. Spock’s loneliness, his continuing
search for a personal identity that will not compromise Vulcan
philosophy and tradition, has never been more sharply conveyed,
his struggle to remain aloof from his old pals shaping much
of the film’s tension.
The revised visual effects are fantastic, at once darker and
more detailed, revealing layer upon layer of a cosmic puzzle
that becomes wondrous and frightening as the drama unfolds.
Even if you know what lies at the heart of the film’s enigmatic
MacGuffin, V‘y‘ger (pronounced vee-jer), the scenes of the
Enterprise crew moving further and further into a vast, unknowable
“space cloud” have gained impressive weight in the director‘s
cut, particularly in the use of new shots that clarify the
sense of scale involved. For that matter, the greatest improvements
made for this edition of Star Trek -- The Motion Picture
are in the action of the second half, which has always been
a confused muddle. The director and his associates have reorganized
the later scenes and tweaked the effects until, finally, the
characters have something meaningful to look at, inserting
visuals that justify the performances Wise coaxed out of his
actors while making the V‘y‘ger cloud into a very specific,
dazzling environment.
Of course, the journey still has the same unsatisfactory punch
line, but the careful attention to detail and story beforehand
now gives V’y’ger a bitter-sweetness worthy of similar outcast
creatures the Enterprise once encountered on prime time TV.
In fact, with the film’s overall improvements in place, the
revelation of who and what V’y’ger really is comes much closer
to evoking that feeling of homecoming for which Wise, Roddenberry
and the cast were obviously aiming.
It’s amazing what a competent director can do with a few extra
bucks, a few extra months, and the right to final cut. Given
the original version’s box office performance, there was obviously
a large enough market for Star Trek in 1979 that it
wouldn't have mattered what Paramount finally gave to the
audience (Star Trek -- The Motion Picture was the number
three box office attraction of its year, grossing almost three
times its outrageous $35 million budget). But in terms of
film history, the new Director’s Edition is likely to become
the final word on a movie that has long worried its director.
Mr. Wise can rest easy now: Star Trek -- The Motion Picture
is sure to take its rightful place as the penultimate spectacle
of an eminently distinguished Hollywood resumé .
Notes:
THE RESUMÉ : Robert Wise was born in 1914 and grew up in Winchester,
Indiana. A film editor by the age of 19, he eventually supervised
cutting on a diverse group of comedies and dramas, including
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), My Favorite
Wife (1940) and Citizen Kane (1941). Wise became
a director in Val Lewton’s low-budget, horror film unit at
RKO during the forties, then graduated to A-list productions
in the fifties, often acting as his own producer. A great
craftsman, the mood of his work ranges from deftly executed
family entertainment to gritty film noir. He was President
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1985-1988.
The best of his 40 films as a director:
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
The Body Snatcher (1945)
The Set-Up (1949; Critic’s Prize, Cannes Film Festival)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956; with Paul Newman as boxer
Rocky Marciano)
I Want to Live! (1958; with Susan Hayward as death row inmate
Barbara Graham)
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
West Side Story (1961; Best Picture Oscar)
The Haunting (1963)
The Sound of Music (1965; Best Picture Oscar)
The Sand Pebbles (1966)
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
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