The best thing Paramount has done for this release is putting together a team that knocked the reboot out of the park. I got this one later than usual, but now that I've finally gotten through the whole thing, I'm pretty impressed. I can confidently say that Paramount has done about as much as they can to make the original, non-Director's Cut versions of the Kirk & Spock Star Trek movies look as good as they can. I have to qualify my previous statement with "at this point," since we've seen another example last week in Lionsgate's Terminator 2, where different encoding technologies can cause strikingly different resulting pictures as users have hotly debated on the Home Theater Forum. From my 5.17 post about the prior week's Paramount releases:
"The biggest thing going around on this release has to do with Digital Noise Reduction. Fuel was added to the fire as review copies were delayed in getting out to the press, which some theorized to be an indication of Paramount hiding something. Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits is better qualified and has a better setup to examine this kind of thing than me, which he did in a recent installment of My Two Cents. I should note here that a delay in disc replication to keep up with demand and meet street date was the culprit behind the late discs, not a conspiracy.
"In short, those with ultra-high-end setups with screens the size of a house may notice a softer look to these releases than would be ideal, but the vast majority of us on screens 52" and under won't. Frankly, the production values many of the movies were shot with resulted in soft focus and jagged edges around matte paintings and optical effects. As a Picture Quality expert friend put it on his way out the door to Fry's the other day, 'DNR or no, $60 is more than worth it.'"
I don't want anything to scare off people eyeing it for purchase, these movies look amazing. The original effects in The Motion Picture look as beautifully lousy as they could. The Wrath of Khan looks better than ever after a full restoration, and The Search for Spock is the most notably improved in terms of cleanup of all the movies. The Voyage Home occasionally looks like PAL video, which will look odd to some US, NTSC-trained eyes, but existing elements may have made a PAL master the best available. The Final Frontier looks better than many would say it deserves (with a little of the PAL effect), and The Undiscovered Country (my favorite of them all) looks gorgeous.
Sundry things I like most about the set are the unified menu structure (common categories for featurettes) and packaging that clearly denotes new features. With the exception of the Starfleet Academy...things...on each disc (more on them in a moment), I find all of the featurettes generally worthwhile. As much time as I have spent with the set, I haven't listened to all the commentaries or rewatched all the carried-over featurettes from old releases, but I've watched all the new stuff and have bits here and there on holdovers.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
I looked up from doing some dishes to find that the first 30 minutes of this movie bored my wife to the point of sleep. By the time they got to the starship porn of Scotty & Kirk flying over to the Enterprise, she was done watching it. I really can't blame her. I've long agreed with Harlan Ellison's nickname for it, "The Motionless Picture." I've been a Trek fan most of my life, but I'm not a blind worshipper. There's a reason this movie is virtually ignored ever after in series canon.
The new Commentary with Michael & Denise Okuda, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and Darren Dochterman is lively and informative. Frankly, it's more entertaining than what's being said on the screen for me at this point. The most interesting thing about this installment is that the story of its making is steeped in the revival of the franchise. When it was made, there were a ton of contingency plans in case Star Trek: Phase II came into being as a second TV series, including casting decisions. The Longest Trek: Writing The Motion Picture [HD 10:44] digs into this and all the uncertainty surrounding this ten years-on movie adaptation of a cancelled TV series. The Special Star Trek Reunion [HD 9:37] is made up of a few of the many, many fans who made up the big crowd scene where Kirk addresses people as if Caesar. Some helped save the show from cancellation (Bjo Trimble, among others). One of them is James Doohan's son Christopher, who mentions having a "larger role" in "the new Star Trek movie." I don't see anything credited on IMdB...what happened?
I didn't bother getting a timestamp on how long Starfleet Academy: The Mystery Behind V'Ger is. It's the kind of thing you expect to find in an exhibit of Star Trek: The Experience, where an actor is dressed like a Starfleet crewmember, describing very earnestly how some piece of series history happened. I avoided all subsequent installments. This is the kind of thing that make you go "geez guys, this makes Star Trek a nerds-only thing." It did make me wonder why we haven't heard any Aussie or Kiwi accents in any Trek that I can recall.
Also included are 8 minutes or so of Deleted Scenes as well as previously available featurettes.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
As I wrote about here, I was in the bait-and-switch audience that thought we were seeing this and got treated to the new movie over a month out. Subsequently, a "make-up" screening of Khan happened at the Ritz. I'd never seen it on the big screen, and I'm glad I finally did. I was more happy that it was Ashley's first viewing of it. This Blu-ray is the vast majority of people will get to seeing a pristine print of Khan.
Ricardo Montalban passed recently, but not so soon that they couldn't get Khan director Nicholas Meyer to record a short Farewell: A Tribute to Ricardo Montalban [HD 4:44]. Even though Meyer's words are clearly scripted, I don't know if anyone could have realistically held it together going off-the-cuff. He's quite sincere in his admiration and respect, rightly noting that the many who love Ricardo for Khan never knew him for his full potential.
There's a new Feature Commentary with Nicholas Meyer and Manny Coto, who exec produced the fourth season of the loved and hated Enterprise. Coto is best known as a fierce devotee of the series who oversaw tying the prequel series in to the beginning of the Original Series. As with the series itself, he's also loved and hated by fandom. Collecting Star Trek's Movie Relics [HD 11:05] covers Trek's most avid collectors who seek out props and whole sets that they house in massive rooms. These guys must be independently wealthy. James Horner: Composing Genesis was my favorite of the featurettes on this one, shedding some light on Horner's thematic intentions in a score many know almost as well as the movie.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
This is the one movie in the set that shows the greatest evidence of picture quality improvement aside from Khan. It looks stunning. Detail is great, especially when it comes to depth of field in outer space scenes. Ashley mentioned that Search for Spock got so dark and tragic in places she was glad it ended on the slight up note that it did. As with other titles, over two hours of extras are carried over from the 2-disc DVD.
New to Blu-ray featurettes are more plentiful on here. ILM: The Visual Effects of Star Trek [HD 13:50] covers more than just this movie, as other new featurettes on the set do. Spock: The Early Years [HD 6:22] is a short interview with the actor who played "Cave Sex with Saavik" Young Spock. The Star Trek & The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame piece has a title that indicates exactly what it talks about. I got distracted while watching it and missed the last few minutes. It's not terribly engrossing. Most notable is the new Feature Commentary with Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor, who both started with Star Trek during the days of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, going on to later create the wildly popular Battlestar Galactica reboot. I've never seen Galactica (I'll get to it), but I know the best years of DS9 were under Moore. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm very eager to as soon as I have time.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
For part of my childhood, this was the only Trek movie I had on tape. As a result, I can still remember much of the movie verbatim. As with all of them, I watched it through with Ashley with no commentary on the first time, and even I forgot exactly hen certain bits happened in sequence. Speaking of, the Feature Commentary with Orci & Kurtzmann (2009 Trek writers) is the most enjoyable "fan" commentary track I've listened to in a while, with Roberto (as I recall) saying this was the first Trek he saw in theaters as a kid. Their affection for Voyage Home is genuine, and their keen, articulate minds thankfully don't allow them to slide into "oh dude that was awesome"'s separated by fifteen minutes of silence at a time.
Star Trek: The Three-Picture Saga [10:13] is hands-down the most worthwhile of the new-to-disc extras, covering the building nature of the narrative in II, III, and IV. They also mention the biggest plot hole in the series: Chekhov wasn't on the Enterprise for the original appearance of Khan. Speaking of Russian Davy Jones, Pavel Chekhov's Screen Moments [HD 6:09] gives Walter Koenig a few minutes to be grateful for the additional scenery he got to chew in the fourth movie. The Star Trek for a Cause [HD 5:40] piece is a glorified Greenpeace commercial, which considering the subject matter of the movie, I can roll with. Again, the two plus hours of original SE bonus features are included as well.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
The most underrated 1 hour, 45 minute episode of the original series also happens to be the first Trek movie I saw theatrically. My dad took me, expecting it to be great. My dad's English wasn't quite as good as it is now, twenty years later, so I was doing a lot of hushed translating. By the time my Cuban father caught on that it was about a charismatic, bearded revolutionary leading people on a fool's quest, he was done with watching it and took a nap. I'd poke him when he'd snore, but otherwise it made for a pretty serene viewing of a movie I didn't think was that bad at the time.
I still don't think it's worthy of the outright hatred directed toward it. There's no way expectations could have been any higher after the II-III-IV trilogy. Ashley was surprised that people hated it so much, in the same breath acknowledging the others were better. The Okudas, Reeves-Stevenses, and Daren Dochterman provide new Feature Commentary again here, as they did on The Motion Picture. It's like they got Odd-Numbered duty, relieved on Search for Spock by Ron Moore. Star Trek Honors NASA [HD 9:58] is a quick bit about how the franchise and the organization have influenced each other. It was a little heartbreaking to see James Doohan so feeble in Hollywood Walk of Fame: James Doohan [3:10]. The slapstick bit he has in the movie that's ruined in the trailer is one of the first things I think of when this movie is brought up. It's better than I remembered it.
I can't help but wonder what Shatner's Director's Cut looked like and what this one was really like behind the scenes.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Nicholas Meyer made the most interesting, enjoyable, and rewatchable pre-reboot Trek movie of them all. It seems like everyone loves Khan all night and all day, but this one's my favorite. It's aged better than the others too, thanks to higher quality production values and more current visual effects. Meyer's Commentary track here (from a previous edition) is still one of my favorite Trek series yack tracks.
The carried-over extras (again, a couple hours worth) are good, but I particularly liked the new To Be or Not To Be: Klingons & Shakespeare [HD 23:04]. David Warner's line about reading "Shakespeare in the original Klingon" makes me smile every time. The featurette is a pretty meaty look at a regional theatre group staging Hamlet in Klingon. The only other new extra aside from the Commentary with Larry Nemecek & Ira Steven Behr is Tom Morga: Alien Stuntman [HD 4:57], a look at a guy who kept getting work (allegedly) because he made sure his costumes had his name stitched in them.
Star Trek: The Captains' Summit
The biggest exclusive for fans of the original series and/or The Next Generation is the seventh disc in this set, which features a 70-minute roundtable discussion between both series' captains and first officers that is moderated by Whoopi Goldberg. Talking about it too much would spoil it, but I can at least say that the mustache Patrick Stewart wears in it (grown for his role in Macbeth) looks odd at first but you get used to it over the course of the thing.
Final Thoughts and BD-Live
Blu-ray tech-specific features include BD-Live and a hyperactive variant of the pop-up info track called Library Computer. It's as if the script of each movie became sentient and could Twitter-style spit out a link/blurb on every term, person, place, or ship that is discussed. I could only take it for so long. I admire whoever's job it was to implement that. They've also added a "make your own trivia quiz" feature called Star Trek IQ, where you upload the quizzes to BD-Live.
The set's producer, KingMedia, has done a great job. There are literally days of good material to watch or listen to here. Fans who've pored over the prior releases still have a mountain of new extras and commentaries to comb through, and the movies look dramatically better than I've ever experienced most of them. The picture quality nitpicks are just that. When one sees these titles in motion and not in frozen screencaps,the difference is remarkable.
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