Regarding Star Trek TMP

[McAvoy]

Something I was thinking about listening to one of those retrospective videos on YouTube and got me thinking.

We all know about the making of Star Trek TMP. We all know how slow the movie really is and flawed it was.

It got me thinking how would I fix the movie. Then I thought, the story itself isn't that bad. Yeah, we could tweak the script so the Kirk, Spock and McCoy dynamic is better presented. I would have definitely not made Kirk look incompetent, but if I would do that I would at least present the reason why Kirk was the better choice for this mission over Decker.

But overall, I think overall you could easily trim the movie down. Like eliminate the failed transporter scene, I just don't see that scene really adding anything. I would definitely trim down the fly by scenes and especially the scene where Spock's ship docks with the Enterprise. That scene basically stops the whole movie waiting for that ship to dock.

The one thing I probably wouldn't change is the whole fly by scene of Kirk flying around with Scotty seeing the new Enterprise. Only because I do love the scene but at the same time I realize that also slows down the movie.

What you do differently? Would you scrap the whole movie and do something different? Or would you do something I mentioned like tweak the movie here and there. Edit the movie etc.

[clearspira]

With the power of hindsight, this film fits beautifully into Kirk's mid-life crisis invented for TWOK. He takes over the ship from the man most familiar with the ship that he handpicked for the role himself, gives himself a (de)promotion to captain, nearly gets the ship blown up because he no longer understands how the phasers work, nearly gets the ship blown up by ignoring Scotty about the warp engines, and is clearly retrospective when McCoy in his usual subtle way points all of this out to him. And regarding the transporter scene, it says a lot about Kirk's current state of mind that he pushes away the transporter chief in his usual ''I am the big man'' way that always worked for him in the past... and he fails horribly.

I wouldn't scrap the film. A few adjustments to play on this just a bit further and it works well as a story. And cut down a lot of the scenes by half.

The second obvious improvement to me would be giving us a better introduction to Ilyia. The whole ''my vow of celibacy is on record'' bit is so ridiculed because it fails show don't tell. We are never really shown why this is such an important thing for her to declare this upon her introduction. Either drop the whole bit or have her (or another member of her race so that we maintain sympathy for her) borderline sexually assault someone in the corridor to prove why that is needed.
There is also an irony in the fact that all of those horrible rape-y sex pheromone aliens that we got in the likes of The Orville or Star Trek Enterprise were at least a very good example of why you would want a crew member to say upfront ''i'm not like those members of my race that you've heard about. I'm the nice one.''

And then once we've done that, we can set about actually giving her a story. Ilyia herself, gets very, very few scenes before she dies and is replaced by a boring android version of herself that has no emotions and talks in stilted sentences. Brainwashing seems as if it would have been far more interesting than what they ended up doing.

[stryke]

With the power of hindsight, this film fits beautifully into Kirk's mid-life crisis invented for TWOK. He takes over the ship from the man most familiar with the ship that he handpicked for the role himself, gives himself a (de)promotion to captain, nearly gets the ship blown up because he no longer understands how the phasers work, nearly gets the ship blown up by ignoring Scotty about the warp engines, and is clearly retrospective when McCoy in his usual subtle way points all of this out to him. And regarding the transporter scene, it says a lot about Kirk's current state of mind that he pushes away the transporter chief in his usual ''I am the big man'' way that always worked for him in the past... and he fails horribly.

Dang, never thought of that before, but you're right that does fit really well.

I think the aim is to get it down to 2hrs and it'd feel a lot tighter and less bloated than the curernt 2hr23. I wouldn't want to lose the transporter gone wrong scene thouh as it's genuinely nasty and one of the most memorable moments in the film.

[Nealithi]

I think I disagree with Clearspira on this one. TWOK shows Kirk getting old and a bit indecisive which he made mistakes. That movie did its job well and does not need help.

I do not think these scenes work well for Kirk because of one thing. Change who does them to Stiles. Suddenly it is no where near okay. Damn near villainous in the incompetence. If you want to preserve Kirk as a hero and show Decker as knowing the new tech better. Have a different admiral push for the Enterprise to get out of dock and cause the transporter accident. Kirk then shows up in the aftermath, takes the stack of commands from the admiralty and tosses them down a trash chute.
Let Kirk tell Decker he does not know the Enterprise now, but Decker is not seasoned to handle the admiralty. So he is taking command, Decker will be his second to assist him with what he does not know. And Kirk can show him how to be a starship captain.

After that we need to trim a few scenes. The looking at the crew looking at special effects needs to go, it really does not add to the story. Kirk brings in McCoy as he needs his own support network on the ship. He mentors the new faces while demonstrating how a crew works together. This will be the tie in for the next movie. Kirk educating the next generation of crews. Near the end when they find out what V'ger is, McCoy needs to roll his eyes and say. "Another one? How many of these probes are we going to have to handle?"

One point for the making of the movie I do not understand. Why were the costumes made so difficult to get into and out of? I really don't see anything a tailor could not have done and still been functional.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Yeah I don't think the story is that bad. I think the main thing that materially drags the movie down is the influence that 2001 has on it. The movie was made on the directive condition that Star Wars made a lot of money. And really, Star Trek doesn't do that bad when it does either adventure or fantasy. Yet they made it incredibly introspective and it is mainly I'd guess directed badly with too much time to take most any scene in with the way the melodrama is paced. At least as far as I remember, I've only seen it like 2 or 3 times.

I agree Kirk is arrogant here, and I've brought it up here despite how limited of seeings I have. I don't believe there's much actually challenging him, so I kind of agree that it is a nice ramping to what he goes through in the second and third movie.

[Nobody700]

Here's my thing. I care not for Decker. This film depicts Decker as in the right, and (I wanna clarify this is zero on the actor being a convicted pedophile, I am ONLY talking about his character, who I believe is NOT a convicted pedophile) while he is right... I just do not care for Decker. He's plain and actually annoying to me. When he confronts Kirk, it's not as a captain who has to deal with an admiral who thinks he can run the ship because he used to be Captain. That is a VERY interesting role reversal for these kind of stories, because we WANT to be on the admirals side... and we can see how that is a bad thing. But the problem is, Decker is such a wimp about it he comes off as whiny even though he's right, and Kirk slapping him down makes him look so damn weak. Fixing Deckers character would be a major fix to the film. Make him more assertive to Kirk and the old guard, but friendly and kind to his regular crew. Kirk can challenge that and point out Decker is, himself, as biased as Kirk is about his crew, and the two NEED to work together. Decker knows more of the ship, Kirk this situation, and so the two defer more to the other after a tense argument where both realize they are being myopic about the other. Deckard learns to respect Kirk as a captain, and Kirk same to Decker.

Next, VGer. We already had VGer with The changeling, so remove it being Voyager. Instead, VGer is just a robot god who comes to the universe and eradicates life in its way because it itself is changing, and is afraid of change because its been the way its been for billions of years. The ultimate tool of Logic, falling apart because of a single emotion, and as a machine, thinks in binary. Emotion bad, ergo, remove emotion. Spock can teach it instead, that the height of Logic isn't the lack of emotions, but to temper them, and so VGer fuses with the bald lady to become a symbiotic being that has compassion and logic to it.

Next... cut the film down by 40 minutes. There, better film.

[clearspira]

Here's my thing. I care not for Decker. This film depicts Decker as in the right, and (I wanna clarify this is zero on the actor being a convicted pedophile, I am ONLY talking about his character, who I believe is NOT a convicted pedophile) while he is right... I just do not care for Decker. He's plain and actually annoying to me. When he confronts Kirk, it's not as a captain who has to deal with an admiral who thinks he can run the ship because he used to be Captain. That is a VERY interesting role reversal for these kind of stories, because we WANT to be on the admirals side... and we can see how that is a bad thing. But the problem is, Decker is such a wimp about it he comes off as whiny even though he's right, and Kirk slapping him down makes him look so damn weak. Fixing Deckers character would be a major fix to the film. Make him more assertive to Kirk and the old guard, but friendly and kind to his regular crew. Kirk can challenge that and point out Decker is, himself, as biased as Kirk is about his crew, and the two NEED to work together. Decker knows more of the ship, Kirk this situation, and so the two defer more to the other after a tense argument where both realize they are being myopic about the other. Deckard learns to respect Kirk as a captain, and Kirk same to Decker.

Next, VGer. We already had VGer with The changeling, so remove it being Voyager. Instead, VGer is just a robot god who comes to the universe and eradicates life in its way because it itself is changing, and is afraid of change because its been the way its been for billions of years. The ultimate tool of Logic, falling apart because of a single emotion, and as a machine, thinks in binary. Emotion bad, ergo, remove emotion. Spock can teach it instead, that the height of Logic isn't the lack of emotions, but to temper them, and so VGer fuses with the bald lady to become a symbiotic being that has compassion and logic to it.

Next... cut the film down by 40 minutes. There, better film.

I agree about Decker. He is a very soft, milquetoast kind of guy that is not suited to this plot at all. We needed someone like Riker - who apparently was based on Decker who was based on some unused character from Star Trek Phase 2. That's why both characters have a long lost girlfriend.

Also, Decker's actor is a pedo? God damn. First i've heard of that.

[hammerofglass]

I hadn't made the connection until now but Captain Shaw in Picard really is just Decker done better. And the admiral trying to displace him is ironically enough Riker.

[clearspira]

I hadn't made the connection until now but Captain Shaw in Picard really is just Decker done better. And the admiral trying to displace him is ironically enough Riker.

I think Shaw is probably one of the best characters to come out of PIC - at least concept wise. The best moments in Star Trek have always been taking these utopian, post-scarcity, progressive, otherwise very tolerant humans who want for nothing and showing that they are, in fact, still human. That there is and always will be a conflict between nature vs nurture.

Gene understood this in TOS (or at least he allowed his writers to understand this) but at some point between TMP and his TNG years this seemed to be erased from his mind.

And in Shaw's case, that humanity is expressed in his survivors guilt. We saw this briefly with Sisko but Sisko is an incredibly strong willed man with a kid to look after and a whole planet that he was tasked to protect. Shaw did not have those morality anchors to keep him in check. It is said that he was in fact just a guy who rose through the ranks by being a competent engineer just doing his job rather than being one of these savant Starfleet officers who can make rocks into replicators. And one day, whilst flying his beautiful ship with synthahol on tap and a holodeck to play in, the Borg came wearing Picard's face, wiped out his crew and left him alive to carry on without anyone giving a shit. No ''in the future we accept death'' nonsense here. It wasn't strictly Picard's fault but that is the image that Shaw sees whenever he closes his eyes.

We can sympathise with this character - whilst also acknowledging that it has left him as a broken asshole who deadnamed Seven and treated Picard and Riker like crap. I think Shaw would have made for an excellent DS9 character. The problem with PIC is that there is so much darkness that his potential just kind of sunk into the rest of it.

Shaw is Decker done better. He is also...



This man done worse. Both engineers, both have similar backgrounds as everymen, both have survivors guilt, both have their bigoted sides. The difference - as with Sisko - is once again morality anchors and the fact that they did not let their hate consume them.

[Durandal_1707]

Best way to improve TMP is to make Dr. McCoy already on the ship when the transporter accident happens so he can point and say "See? I told you!"

In seriousness, though, TMP has a built-in design flaw, in that it reuses the plot of a one-hour TV episodes and tries to pad it out to the length of a feature film. There's no real "quick fix" for that. In a lot of ways, TWOK was the fix for TMP; it also started by revisiting a TOS episode but then did something different with it instead of just following all of the original story beats.

I certainly wouldn't remove things like the slow ship flybys. Those are pretty much the only thing that give TMP a unique identity. The 1701 never looked so grand before or afterward, and my understanding is that it evoked a lot of emotions in the audience during the original screenings.