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ST - Star Trek

Gaith

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^ I hadn't even thought of that! But, I think I like my idea better. A First Contact without "we must draw the line he-eagh!" is no First Contact at all. And, to lose the EMH cameo (among so many other great moments)?

0*z6mvoDhr_lXJ2hkX.jpg


Cutting out the Queen, IMO, would result in no great moments lost, and a tightened pace, to boot. The lack explanation for Data's facial damage in that last shot, as well Picard's absence from the climactic bits of the third act, would really be the only downsides to such an edit I can think of offhand. :D
 

hbenthow

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Gaith said:
The lack explanation for Data's facial damage in that last shot, as well Picard's absence from the climactic bits of the third act

Maybe problem #1 could be fixed with a deepfake.
 

Gaith

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^ Perhaps, but it wouldn't bother me personally. Picard would still have his line about breaking the toxic gas canisters, so one could assume Data just got sprayed with the stuff... :p
 

Gaith

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Actually, I just had another thought: one could simply cut all of the Queen's scenes before Picard meets her/re-learns of her existence. (As well as the gratuitous snapping of her mechanical spine.) That way, her introduction would be a jarring WTF moment, but it wouldn't place the audience in the awkward position of knowing about a major character Picard is completely unaware of, and I do kinda like Data's evil fake-out, as well as his line about considering the Queen's offer for "0.68 seconds." (Though the ensuing line about how that was "an eternity" must be cut.)

Really, it's all the seduction stuff between the Queen and Data I despise the most. We've already seen Data distracted/corrupted by emotions in Generations and "Descent," so those angles are dull rehashes, and while Krige's performance is alluring in an unusual and kinky way, the fact that she's freaking Borg means no being in their right mind would want to cozy up to her. Ergo, Data's evident attraction and fondness for her can only be interpreted as A) his emotion chip going haywire, B) nonsensical writing in service of giving Spiner someone to smooch, or C) both.

Conclusion: now that I really think on it, the Queen's appearance might be partly salvageable. Indeed, it arguably even provides some context for why the Borg kidnapped Picard and gave him a new name in the first place. That said, her subsequent appearances on Voyager ("Dark Frontier," "Unimatrix Zero," and "Endgame") were pretty naff, so cutting her entirely wouldn't be the worst loss, either.
 

TM2YC

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Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
I've never disliked 'Insurrection' like some fans did and I still enjoy it. The action and excitement is dialed way back from 'First Contact', it's going for more of a "prime directive" themed TNG TV approach instead. The action that is there is adequate but the character stuff and humour around the crew rediscovering their youth is delightful.  Some of the jokes probably go too far but if you watch all the silly deleted scenes, it could've been much worse. I particularly enjoy the rekindled relationship between Riker and Troi and the tentative friendship the boy from the village develops with Data. Even back in 1998, the early CGI FX looked off and obviously the entire climatic sequence where they didn't get around to replacing the blue-screen is embarrassing. The village set looks terrible, it might have been forgiven on the TV show but in widescreen HD it's woefully inadequate. You can see the brushstrokes of the paint on the chipboard looking buildings (even in medium shots) and the bridge looks like it's borrowed from a low rent theme park. It's the polar opposite of the 'Lord of the Rings' Hobbiton set (a similar romantic idyll) from just a couple of years after, which looked expansive, lived in and richly textured. Riker piloting the Enterprise himself is cringey enough but when he pulls out a manual joystick to fly the ship, you want to hide your face in shame for the movie. The Picard character is taken further down that action hero road, Patrick Stewart almost immediately strips down to a vest to show off his ripped old man bod. You can't fault the casting of F. Murray Abraham as the antagonist. 'Insurrection' has a lot of flaws but I forgive a lot of them because I'm invested in these characters and the premise is interesting and about upholding the ideals of Star Trek. Yay! Jerry Goldsmith once again does sterling work on the score.

 

Gaith

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^ About those sets: Wikipedia reports they were in large part made of styrofoam, and had to be hastily rebuilt after unusually heavy rains.

 
TM2YC said:
the entire climatic sequence where they didn't get around to replacing the blue-screen is embarrassing.

I don't know what you're talking about. The effect is seamless!



... Holy crap: some crazy hack fraud is remastering the classic Plinkett reviews to HD!! They've done Gen/FC/INS and TPM/AOTC so far:


 
TM2YC said:
Riker piloting the Enterprise himself is cringey enough but when he pulls out a manual joystick to fly the ship, you want to hide your face in shame for the movie.

The look that Trill gives him, though... should've earned the movie a PG-13 right there. (Yes, this is the last PG Trek film, probably ever.) Yowza!

image.jpg


... Wait: that actress died of chronic alcohol use last year?! Terrible. :(

I was still a young lad when Insurrection came out, young enough not to mind its kid-friendly tone... heck, I could practically have played the kid Data befriends myself. I got it on VHS, and fondly remember several moments/scenes, but haven't watched the whole movie in forever - and perhaps it's best that way. Going in a lighter direction after FC was both understandable and admirable, and they even acknowledged the losses of the Dominion War, which most general audiences wouldn't have heard of, pretty well. The script's key flaw is really that surely on a planet with Earth-like gravity, Starfleet would simply have made a deal to set up rehab centers away from the Ba'ku village, and everyone would have been fine. :p Though I agree, from memory, that the Jerry Goldsmith score is amazing.

I read the unpublished Michael Piller book Fade In about the movie's development a few years ago. And, from the time of the movie's release, I had a copy of the quite handsomely produced behind-the-scenes paperback The Secrets of Star Trek: Insurrection. Every large franchise flick should be lucky enough to get such a tribute. My favorite part was perhaps this awesome pic of the mains' stunt doubles: :p

Insurrection-stunt-doubles.png
 

hbenthow

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Gaith said:
... Holy crap: some crazy hack fraud is remastering the classic Plinkett reviews to HD!! They've done Gen/FC/INS and TPM/AOTC so far:


I've been hoping for years that someone would do that. Hats off to Blue Copter for being the one to finally do it.

3pl2es.jpg


Unfortunately, on the flip side, this means that RLM isn't getting any of the ad revenue (if there is any). Maybe if Blue Copter could contact RLM, they would be able to upload the remastered versions to their own channel?
 

asterixsmeagol

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TM2YC said:
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
I've never disliked 'Insurrection' like some fans did and I still enjoy it. The action and excitement is dialed way back from 'First Contact', it's going for more of a "prime directive" themed TNG TV approach instead.
I don't really understand why people don't like Generation and Insurrection. They aren't very cinematic, but they really do feel like part of the TV show; more so at least than First Contact (which I like) and Nemesis (which I don't).
TM2YC said:
Even back in 1998, the early CGI FX looked off and obviously the entire climatic sequence where they didn't get around to replacing the blue-screen is embarrassing.
You're absolutely right that the blue-screen is ridiculous. I don't know why they didn't at least put a simple starfield in or something like that since they're in orbit. Maybe put the planet in one or two shots?
 

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The blue walls are not a bluescreen, and there are no missing effects.  My reasoning: 1. You can see the blue-light color scheme elsewhere on the Son'a ship.  2. The scene was shot with a greenscreen for set extensions.  The blue walls were shot without tracking markers, a must-have for the roving camera in the '90s.
 

TM2YC

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Uncanny Antman said:
The blue walls are not a bluescreen, and there are no missing effects.  My reasoning: 1. You can see the blue-light color scheme elsewhere on the Son'a ship.  2. The scene was shot with a greenscreen for set extensions.  The blue walls were shot without tracking markers, a must-have for the roving camera in the '90s.

49992323582_43599079bc_o.jpg


Yes you are almost certainly right. I did notice that the Son'a ship bridge had some blue lit panels but thought they'd been missed too.

I guess the production meeting went like this:

Set Designer - "Here is my design for the Son'a ship:

maxresdefault.jpg


Producer - "But it looks exactly like a pile of cr*p???"

Set Designer - "No, it's supposed to look like a pile of cr*p."

Producer - "Ohhh, I see. Here's some money then."

:D

You'd think somebody on the experienced production team would've said "Hang on guys, isn't that the same shade of blue as bluescreen? won't that look unfinished? Can't we use a different shade of blue, or a lighter/darker blue?". I was wrong to blame massive incompetence, when it was just regular strength incompetence ;) .

<hr style="border: 1px solid white;" />

I wish bluescreen concerns were all that was wrong with the next one...

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
As far as I'm concerned, this goes off the rails immediately with the choice of a heavily serifed font for all the opening titles. As far as I know, 'Nemesis' is still the only Star Trek TV show or film in the franchise's 53-year history to use a strongly serifed font for it's titles... madness! This movie is set in the future, not the middle ages!!  :mad: :D After the titles there is a horrifying scene showing Romulans being melted alive. Then a total change of gears over to a sequence where Picard is laughing and joking, breaking his crew's balls and then getting into some extreme-sports dune-buggy driving. Later he insists on having a joyride in an alien shuttle (despite not understanding the controls and Data having explained that he does), then duel-wielding phaser-rifles like he's Rambo. I started to wonder if this film and it's direct sequel, the new 'Star Trek: Picard' series are about an alternate universe Picard? Much like that series, I reckon a lot of the faults with 'Nemesis' are down to Patrick Stewart having too much creative control and too big an ego by this point. I don't put as much blame on co-story-writer/star Brent Spiner, as he probably had some nice rough ideas in concept. I don't put all the blame on Director Stuart Baird like some of the cast have. The film is directed just fine and it looks quite nice but he's never worked as a Director again.

Having Picard's clone Shinzon played by Tom Hardy, who looks nothing like Stewart, was a ridiculous idea. If Stewart couldn't be bothered to perform both roles, they should've abandoned the script right there. It's made worse with the decision to have Shinzon act like, sound like and be made up to look exactly like Dr. Evil. There had been 2-3 Austin Powers films before 'Nemesis', so I don't know how the production team didn't realise, I'm sure every audience member did. The mind-rape scene by Shinzon on Troi is as distasteful as it always was. Thankfully Picard is kidnapped/beamed-away before he could complete his bit of dialogue ordering a crying Troi to get mind-raped a few more times, just so he can get some intel to use against Shinzon. There is a deleted scene of her getting violated a second time, so it could have been even worse I suppose. Worf's character has finally been reduced to a plot device. A dumb, irrational, hot-headed Klingon who is there to make the other crew seem more rational, or to act as irritable comic-relief. At the point when I was thinking "Oh, the story is nearly over" I checked and the movie still had 45-minutes left to go. This last section is mostly one big, loud, boring space battle.

Is there anything positive? I'd forgotten how good some of the FX look (this was my first HD viewing), the long opening shot flying through space and then sweeping down onto the Romulan senate is still impressive. The Data/B4 plot-twist is really well executed, resisting the temptation to tip the audience off. It's nice to see Riker and Troi finally get hitched. I liked the little reprise Jerry Goldsmith does of his epic space-dock music, although it's indicative of how far the ambitions of this franchise had declined that he's only allowed 23-seconds of footage to score, instead of the 4.5-minute canvas he was given in 'The Motion Picture'. I watched the acres of deleted material on the blu-ray, which are mostly character scenes (I believe they are only a fraction of what was trimmed). I think the film is fundamentally flawed but I'm sure a much better cut could've been achieved if they hadn't sacrificed many of these scenes to fit in more overblown action. It's just a shame they are so low-resolution and unfinished. 'Nemesis' is the equivalent of the Bond movie 'Die Another Day' (also from 2002, along with 'Attack of the Clones'). Films so bad that they killed off their respective franchises for a number of years... except the TV show 'Enterprise' had managed to slip out the year before the coffin was nailed shut.

Note to future self: Do not be tempted to watch this ever again... it won't get better. Re-watch the first three NextGen movies instead, you really like those ones.

^ Having said that I'd be curious to see a "workprint" fanedit, that swapped much of the space battles for all the deleted scenes, in whatever visual state they could be presented in.



With the 'Nemesis' nightmare over, I'm going back to my "happy place"... Season 2 of Voyager on Netflix.
 

asterixsmeagol

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Uncanny Antman said:
The blue walls are not a bluescreen, and there are no missing effects.  My reasoning: 1. You can see the blue-light color scheme elsewhere on the Son'a ship.  2. The scene was shot with a greenscreen for set extensions.  The blue walls were shot without tracking markers, a must-have for the roving camera in the '90s.

Huh. I guess you're right. So it's not an accident or lack of funding, just a terrible choice that looks like an accident.
 

Gaith

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TM2YC said:
Having Picard's clone Shinzon played by Tom Hardy, who looks nothing like Stewart, was a ridiculous idea. If Stewart couldn't be bothered to perform both roles, they should've abandoned the script right there.

Agreed. Why not a Romulan-recruited Mirror Picard? That none of the 13 films and counting have touched on the Mirror Universe is kinda bonkers to me. (Though I know Discovery has dabbled with it.) That said, I remember finding the final space battle pretty exciting, and I really liked the semi-flirtatious banter between Picard and Commander Donatra. A shame that wasn't followed up on...
 

Malthus

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Speaking of Romulans, mirrors and things that seem bonkers for never having happened...

w9p9Psg.jpg
 

Uncanny Antman

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asterixsmeagol said:
Huh. I guess you're right. So it's not an accident or lack of funding, just a terrible choice that looks like an accident.
TM2YC said:
You'd think somebody on the experienced production team would've said "Hang on guys, isn't that the same shade of blue as bluescreen? won't that look unfinished? Can't we use a different shade of blue, or a lighter/darker blue?". I was wrong to blame massive incompetence, when it was just regular strength incompetence ;) .

I totally agree.  Whatever their reasons were, the smooth blue was a terrible choice.  I could see it being okay if the movie were made decades earlier, before bluescreen tech was widely known by the general movie-going audience, but a late '90s movie?  Pure stupidity.
 

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The first look at the animated comedy show Lower Decks is out...


Even-Worse.png


Kidding! It’s just as bad as I thought it’d be. :dodgy:
 

TM2YC

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^ Well at least this time it's meant to be silly. The Holodeck waste removal gag does address a problem with the whole Holodeck concept that was always too disgusting to contemplate :D .
 

bionicbob

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It is always a bad sign when a long running series or franchise descends into self-parody.

I would rather watch THE ORVILLE -- a comedy with heart and classic Trek allegory.

I much rather see a "serious" animated Trek series.  One of my favourite new animated sci-fi series is Star Blazers 2199/2202, and would love to see Trek go in this direction cartoon-wise.  

Seriously, with animation there is no limits.  You don't have to worry about budget or actors aging.  You could set an animated series post-TNG and have characters from TNG, DS9 and VOY are working together.   Or go the Star Trek Online route, which has done some amazing storylines.  Or go back and wrap up Enterprise.   The possibilities are endless.

Instead we get this....   :dodgy: :s :(
 

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^ Hear, hear. This looks like it could easily be a lame-o live-action comedy a la Powerless. The animation format is clearly a matter of budget, not necessity.
 

asterixsmeagol

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I was looking forward to Lower Decks and this preview looks exactly like I hoped it would. Sorry it's not what you want.
 
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