Today marked the release day for one of my personal most-anticipated discs — the Star Trek: The Motion Picture — The Director’s Edition. I picked it up at lunch, then made it through the rest of the day until I could get home and watch it.
Part of the reason I’d been awaiting this release of the first film in the Star Trek series is that for the first time, we are being shown the completed film. Usually when a film is being made, the director assembles a rough cut which is shown to test audiences. Their reactions, coupled with anything the director might notice as he watches the rough cut, serve to guide the director and editor in assembling the final cut of the film. Unfortunately, the schedule for ST:TMP was so tight that that crucial final step was never taken — the film had to be done by a certain date, and so the final edit was never performed. Also due to time and budget constraints of the time, many of the special effects sequences had not been completed. Essentially, what we’ve seen for the past 22 years has been no more than a rough cut that director Robert Wise was not happy with, but it was all there was time for.
In 1998, Robert Wise was approached by Paramount to see if he was interested in finally revisiting and finishing the film. After some initial trepidation he agreed, and after months of curiosity and speculation, the final result is finally available on DVD. Not just a new edit of the film, a team of restoration artists and CGI artists have worked with the director to carefully enhance some effect sequences, complete others, and create an entirely new 5.1 sound mix utilizing the original source elements from the film.
The end result is, quite simply, incredible. While the new cut incorporates new effects sequences and some scenes that had previously been inserted for the television version, Mr. Wise has also taken out some scenes and tightened others to create a new version that is just slightly longer than the original, but has a much more finished feel to it. The effects shots are doubly impressive, in part because they’re so seamlessly integrated into the body of the film, that I didn’t even notice many of them until they were pointed out in a documentary! The artists working on the new effects sequences worked very hard to match the style of the original effects, only creating sequences that could have been created in 1979 had there been time, and even working from the original storyboards rather than dreaming up ideas that might be ‘cool’, but not true to the original vision. Suffice to say, I was not merely impressed by this new version of a film I’ve been watching for years, but flat-out floored. I’ve never harbored the disdain for this film that many other fans have, but it’s always been obvious that it had some serious problems. Now, however, it has finally been completed, and we can leave the dubious honor of being the worst of the series to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
In addition to the outstanding work done on the film itself, Paramount has finally released a true Special Edition DVD, rather than the movie-only editions for the rest of the series. The movie disc contains two feature-length commentaries. The first is an audio commentary with director Robert Wise and others, and the second is a text commentary (presented in the form of yellow subtitles) written by Michael Okuda, long-time graphic artist for the series and Trek-tech geek extraordinaire. Both commentaries are packed with information, but the text commentary is my personal favorite. You need to be a bit quick to read some of it, but there’s a great sense of humor permeating the track that makes it a lot of fun (my personal favorite bit — as Kirk is explaining to Scotty that there is something approaching Earth and the Enterprise is the only ship within reach, the commentary pops up with, “This seems to happen a lot — it almost makes one wonder if the other ships stay away when the Enterprise is in town, in case something happens!”).
The second disc contains three documentaries ranging from about 15 minutes to about half an hour. The first covers the road from the initial concept for the series ‘Star Trek — Phase II’ that was to be the flagship show for a Paramount based TV network (years before UPN appeared) to the beginning of production on ST:TMP. The second covers the production of the film, and the third explores the work done to create the new Director’s Edition. It’s a bit of a bummer that little time is given to the problems that led to the unfinished film being released and the subsequent reactions, but the three documentaries still cover a lot of ground, and are well worth watching. All of the theater and television trailers are included on the disc, as well as a huge collection of deleted scenes (documenting scenes deleted from the original cut, scenes that were included in the television cut, and one section that collects all the pieces that were trimmed in the making of the new cut).
All in all, an absolutely incredible set, and one that does the die hard Trek geek in me proud.