The collector's edition that was released a few years back was almost better than seeing it in the theater. That's how good the remaster is. The Enterprise looks prettier than she's ever been.
Oh gods, the Enterprise is just plain gorgeous in Wrath of Khan! And you're right, the Collector's edition is really well done.
Speaking of which, I understand that the Original-Cast movies are being released on blu-ray this month. I'm wondering if they'll be releasing the Director's Cuts of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan? (The Director's Cuts of both movies are significantly better than are the theatrical versions, I think.)
I got the first season of TOS on blu-ray a few days ago. It's kind of spotty. On some of the episodes, the prints look fantastic; on others, there's still a lot of dust and noise. (On the commentaries, they admit that they spent more time cleaning up some episodes than others.)
The show looks really good in HD, and the CG Enterprise is absolutely beautiful! The "improved" special effects are nicely done -- nice-looking without being too obviously different from the original effects.
Cheers,
Michael
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
This thread is making me want to go and see Wrath of Khan.
Go with that impulse.
It's that good? Keeping in mind that I think TOS is pure cheese.
For what it's worth, I didn't care for the franchise when I went to see it in the theater in 1982. (My friend and I had intended to see something else--I forget what--but it was sold out.) We were so blown away by it that we turned right around and bought another ticket to see it again.
We ended up seeing it a total of ten times in theaters and could quote the entire thing between us. "Star Fleet has kept the peace for over a hundred years. I cannot and will not subscribe to your interpretation of this event!"
In a good movie, nevermind arguably the best Trek movie, full of good, stirring emotive lines, this is just one of them. I mean, right up there with "No. I am your father."
This thread is making me want to go and see Wrath of Khan.
Go with that impulse.
It's that good? Keeping in mind that I think TOS is pure cheese.
I happen to think it is a classic. I will say that The Undiscovered Country is still my favorite Star Trek film of all time.
Here is how I would now rank my favorites.
The Undiscovered Country
The Eleventh Film First Contact
I will also say that I want to see how J. J. Abrams and his creative team would interpret Star Trek involving the TNG cast. I think he could do great things with that era.
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Allan Glenn. 1984-2005 RIP
Under no circumstances should Quentin Tarantino be allowed to befoul Star Trek.
Here's a great little article by Andrew Leonard about utopian economics in the new Star Trek movie.
Quote:
The scene comes early, when a pre-pubescent Spock is undergoing the formidable educational process inflicted on all Vulcan children. We see and hear him say the words "nonrival" and "nonexcludable" (and we can imagine his computer tutor nodding encouragingly).
And then we move on, without explanation. To my children, and, I imagine, to most Trekkies, the moment was just one more jargonistic outburst in a franchise that has always delighted in excessive indulgence in meaningless techno-gibberish. But the economists in the audience all started high-fiving each other: Whoa, who could have expected a shout-out to economist Paul Romer's breakthrough paper, "Endogenous Technological Change," [pdf] in a "Star Trek" movie? Awesome!
Kirk, who was literally still in the academy at the time, was promoted to Captain of the Federation flagship Enterprise by the time of the movie's ending. No matter how well he performed on his first mission, it simply defies belief that he'd be promoted through three full degrees of rank and placed in charge of the Federation flagship.
That was one of the things that bugged me, too. Didn't like Nero, either and didn't get his singular motivation. But I guess that's the way it is with "hero/villain" movies, it's bigger than life.
I found all the characters to be fairly shallow and I didn't really care much about them.
Two of my biggest beefs:
The design of Nero's mining ship - can someone tell me why it looked like a hundred-tentacled steel frame squid?
The fucking lens flares and reflections were driving me fucking nuts.
Yeah, I noticed as we were shown the inside of the ship the first time that they liked those little circle plates with electricity playing across them almost as much as the Borg did. Made me wonder for a moment if the Borg were actually going to be involved somehow.
I suppose it makes some sense for a ship from late in the old time line to incorporate Borg tech.
Seriously, I was concerned about the engineering and wondered why all that stuff was necessary and if the tentacles had a purpose. Plus, it was always so dark in there.
Sure, it was from 120+ years in the future, but to be able to defeat over 40 Klingon warships and shortly thereafter, at least 7 Federation starships? It's not like a modern supertanker would stand a chance against an 1880's-era pre-Dreadnought battleship, after all, much less a fleet of them.
Maybe the comic series explains why it's so well-armed, as well.
Even so, the Kelvin survived its firepower for quite some time, and George Kirk seemed to have done some serious damage to the thing when he rammed the Kelvin into it. So how come a whole fleet of Klingon warships weren't able to stop the thing?
***
Warp speed in this version of "Trek" seems to be pretty quick. Travel time from Earth to Vulcan seemed to be -- what? -- an hour or so? Nero's ship traveled from Klingon space to the heart of the Federation in less than a day (without being detected, no less).
Given how quickly ships seem to travel in this version of "Trek," and that a hostile ship could show up in orbit and start shooting with little or no advance warning, an entire fleet of enemy starships could drop out of warp at any moment and devastate a Federation planet in no time flat. So how come neither Vulcan nor Earth seem to have any kind of planetary defenses?
Granted, Nero's ship was Romulan, and may have had a cloaking device of some kind, but the movie nonetheless demonstrates that ships travel quickly in this version of "Trek," and that Starfleet seems to be very thinly-spread. As such, it seems downright astonishing that Federation planets don't have all sorts of orbital and/or ground-based defensive installations to knock down attacking starships, or at least delay them until friendly ships can arrive.
This movie did hew to the old "Trek" saw that subspace transmitters and transporters are ridiculously fickle devices that won't function whenever there's even the teensiest bit of electromagnetic radiation in the vicinity. (Since every star is an enormous generator of electromagnetic radiation and since every starship carries at least one big honkin' matter/antimatter reactor, it's a wonder that subspace communications and transporters ever work!)
Cheers,
Michael
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
And they destroyed Vulcan!! In the process, literally billions of Vulcans were killed (and Spock's mother, too). As Spock pointed out, only a few thousand Vulcans survived, and Vulcans are now "an endangered species." Since the plot hinged on time travel, I kept wondering how they were going to "fix" that, but they didn't.
Didn't you notice that all the Red Matter was destroyed in the final fight? Couldn't time travel without it. That's the very same reason the older Spock is still around at the end, helping Vulcan establish a new colony.
Yes, I noticed. But since going into the black hole created by the Red Matter was how Nero and Spock wound up traveling through time in the first place, I figured the Enterprise would likely wind up traveling through the black hole at the end, and "fixing" the timeline.
In any event, the point is that they left the Vulcan genocide intact, instead of coming up with a way to "fix" it.
That's part of the reason I felt the ending was unsatisfying. Everyone was way too upbeat, considering they'd just witnessed what was almost certainly by far the biggest mass-murder event in history.
Actually, that is one thing I liked about the ending. The fact that there was no reset button to undo the destruction of Vulcan to me makes the ending stronger than if it was undone. While the genocide of the Vulcan race was certainly horrible, I think the scene would have been ultimately cheapened if it had been undone during the course of the movie.
I agree fully.
That was fucking AWESOME, and while I agree with many of y'all's quibbles, I still And I'm a fan born of the TNG/DS9 era.
I loved the nods to the original series, too. Whether it was a throwaway line - "I'm givin' her all she's got!" or the expressions of the actors, it was a nice nod to the fans.
Of course, I saw it in IMAX on a 60-foot-wide screen with a 12,000 watt digital surround sound.
There was a scene right toward the end that reminded me of a scene in the Star Trek-like farce, Galaxy Quest, where the Galaxy Quest ship, under attack by very similar spikey guided weapons, headed straight for the larger attacking vessel, swerving at the last second, causing all the spikey bombs to hit and blow up the attacker's ship instead. That's not what happened in Star Trek, but it appeared to me to be similar just for a few seconds. Anyone else see that?
Re: Star Trek XI
Dingfod. You should not make such hateful and prejudicial comments.
Re: Star Trek XI
And I'm a fan born of the TNG/DS9 era.
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