All I can say is, why can't they ever get it right?
This new version is blurry as hell compared to the last release of the theatrical-ish version, both for special effects and people shots, and maintains a ton of the funky nasty artifacts like matte lines around ships that people didn't want to see. The new effects are sometimes okay, sometimes complete garbage, and sometimes surprising for their absence in favor of the originals.
- The Klingon aft torpedoes are still blacking out the ship wierdly and just generally still don't look like the forward torpedoes.
- Vulcan looks great, though the initial pan-down from a night sky makes no sense when the sky's brown with a sun in it in the next scene.
- San Francisco and the bridge are fixed a bit better than some of the prior errors, though the TOS shuttle is a really bad paste job (you can see the pixel lines). Apparently northern California's covered in a glacier, though, judging by the blue icepack on the horizon.
- As others have noted, the new V'Ger is rather comical looking with its bright colors and excessively glowy bits, but the over-the-ship view of the asteroid destruction in the wormhole is fine. For the wormhole torpedo shot, they did try to make use of the original practical effect of the red light tracing the torpedo away from the launcher, coloring it blue, but this only serves to call out the lack of torpedo reflection on the hull in the next scene.
- And, of course, we have the Kirk-Spock-McCoy "please sit down!" lounge scene. In the original, we have them in a small room with an extra non-existent window resembling the other eight of the rec deck, with a receding starfield outside suggesting this window is on the other side of the ship from the rec deck.
For the 2001 Director's, they simply changed the starfield to suggest the rec deck area, and added a visible nacelle outside in the proper angles and such to fit, and just sort of skipped over the extra window problem because it was never gonna work with the window from the set. Okay, fine. But for this new version, they tried to digitally remove the window and its wall and fake in the four rear windows of the officer's lounge below the bridge . . . and failed miserably.
The blurry actors look like they were hand-matted in a hurry, their heads and bodies and faces changing shape against the immaculately-crisp starfield quite distractingly. The idea of showing nacelles wasn't left behind, so they tried some wierdly blurry static images of the nacelles that appear to be too small and too far apart. Moreover, their orientation only serves to demonstrate that the starfield is receding off to starboard, not dead behind the ship. The hell?
- The final scene of the V'gergasm, becoming a donut starburst (later replicated for Tin Man in TNG) that leaves the Enterprise behind, gets completely screwed up, here. They include a dead-on rear shot of V'ger that basically looks like someone pasted a schematic on the screen atop some added lighting and poor attempts to replicate the assorted shards of light, and it is then whited out before the original donut starburst effect appears. It's so bad it rips you right out of the scene.
- And, as always, nobody can stop screwing with the sound. Gone are the classic "BANH-BANH-BANH-BANH-BANH" alert sounds and the male computer voice saying things like "NEGATIVE CONTROL AT HELM" or "INTRUDER ALERT" or "MALFUNCTION ... MALFUNCTION". Instead, we get generic dull noises that don't fit TOS, lead-in to TWoK, or anything, and since dude's not there talking we actually lose information from the movie . . . the tractor beam that pulls the Enterprise in sets off a tinny alert noise that seems peculiar, at first. And I'm not entirely certain, but it seems like they had to record, otherwise lift, or possibly fake Walter Koenig saying "intruder alert" to make Probe-Ilia's arrival scene work.
At best, the noises are similar to NX-Class sounds, but with even less character.
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I think what needs to happen for the inevitable next iteration of TMP is that a complete list of stuff to be fixed needs to be created, with indications of what scenes to keep or toss, as well. (I'm a bit of a completist, myself, but YMMV).
And for crying out loud, either keep the old noises or faithfully recreate them.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: just sort of skipped over the extra window problem because it was never gonna work with the window from the set.
One positive from all of this is that, IIRC, I was today years old when I realized something.
See, the travel pod docking scene features windows . . . the one with the guy peeking out and the one which had the 'falling set' issue which they actually fixed for this version.
While looking carefully at the ship's varying blurriness and sharpness in different shots (those not due to the original camera work), I just now noticed that those windows don't exist on the model.
So, the 2001 DE folks just ignoring the window problem is the right call, from a consistency perspective.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
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