Year 50 Day 73

My wife and I in a nearly-empty movie theater.

Day 73: Movie time! We went off to see the latest Mission: Impossible film, and really enjoyed it. Tom Cruise may be a rather bizarre personality, but boy does he (and the people he works with) know how to put together a great, big, ridiculous, summer action movie.

Fun fact: This is the first movie I’ve seen in the theater since Star Trek: The Motion Picture!

(Of course, that was the 40th anniversary re-release of TMP, back in September 2019, not long before the pandemic shut everything down. But still! It’s an entirely true statement!)

For the mask-conscious: At this point, there were only two other people in the theater, and we were having some pre-movie snacks. Once we were done with those and more people came in, our masks went on. Even then, there were fewer than 10 people, including us, in this showing. Early Friday matinee showings are great, even for opening weekend movies!

Original Audio? Commentary? Why Not Both?

I’m watching the new 4K restoration of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and one of the nice things about this release is that not only are there commentaries, but there are subtitles for the commentaries (this is a very rare thing, unfortunately). So I can watch the movie with the original audio, but pop on the subtitles for one of the commentary tracks to read that as I watch.

At which point Prairie looks at me and says, “Oh my god, you’re such a nerd.”

Yup.

🖖

[From Usenet: 2.18.99 0000]

[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.tv.star-trek.voyager Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

  1. THE MUSIC WAS LACKING BIG TIME! Music is a powerful tool to help a movie have depth, feeling and emotion. The music could have been so much more deep and could have added so much more to the feeling of the movie.

I’d have to watch it again (hurrah for VCR’s) to really make a judgment, but there was at least one instance where it really caught my ear. During one of the shots of the shuttle approaching the borgplex, there were a couple low, twangy notes like someone plucking two of the lower strings on a piano. Caught my ear mainly because the last time I can remember hearing that theme used was in ST:TMP as the Enterprise is making its entrance into V’ger. Visually similar shots (though the one in ST:TMP was much more visually impressive (okay, and about half an hour longer) than VOY:DF’s borgplex entrance), good use of old themes. Which brought another thought into my feeble little brain. In advance, please forgive me if this has been hashed and re-hashed many times over in the past, I just subscribed to these groups after watching VOY:DF.

Has anyone ever thought much of the possibility that the planet that transformed the Voyager probe into V’ger was the Borg home planet, before they got to the point of striking out on their own and assimilating everything that sneezed twice in their general direction? The general purpose seems to be very similar — it’s not that big a step from “learn all that is learnable, collect all the possible knowledge in the universe, then merge with the creator” to the Borg’s assimilation of other species and knowledge bases into their own. Additionally, it was hypothesized in ST:TMP that the Voyager probe had fell through a black hole to this ‘machine planet’, been repaired/reprogrammed there, and sent away. Mix in a little time distortion along with the black hole, and V’ger could have been sent on its voyage back to Earth long before the Borg advanced to a point where they could move out on their own, and still have time to fill its databanks and make it back home. Just a thought…would be interested to hear if others have explored this line of reasoning. Would love to see it explored in a show at some point, but that may just be fanboy drooling (grin).

Incidentally, what happened to all the knowledge that V’ger transmitted to Earth?

And while I’m at it, I suppose I could throw in the Transformers homeworld/Borg homeworld parallels, too…. Are there any? Probably…I’m just blowing smoke out of my ass at this point, but if I can think of it now, it’s probably been beaten to death before now…