Nobody700 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 5:06 am
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.
Yeah, he's the dad from Seventh Heaven, which the kids who played his... pointed out he was very weird to them off set and he confessed he was a pedophile and tried to get with them.
Again, this has nothing on Decker as a character, who just has no life or energy to him. His fight against Kirk is rightly called by SF Debris as Kirk slapping him down, and Bones needs to change Kirk's mind. I GET the intent, but the way its done, Decker gets no respect from the crew or the audience.
Science Fiction is a genre where anything can happen. Just make sure what happens is enjoyable for yourself and your audience.
Durandal_1707 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 2:05 pm
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.
If I recall someone measured how many minutes where there was no one talking whether it's staring at a scene or something or the flyby scenes and it was like 43 minutes. Someone here might be able to locate that. I know some scenes lasted longer than one minute of no one speaking. Doesn't sound like much but that is long for a movie.
I think even a basic edit where they try to cut down on those non-speaking areas would speed up the movie.
Decker I think is fine in concept. He was supposed to be the next captain of the Enterprise and Kirk took it from him. That is fine. Ilia is also fine in concept especially for the final scene for V'Ger merging with its creator through the Ilia drone/probe clone and Decker. Maybe drop the whole Deltan super sex thing as that just sounds like too much of a Roddenberry thing and has no point to the story.
One scene I would either remove or fix that always bugged me is when Kirk goes after Spock he leaves through hatch on the Enterprise. You always can easily see the whole set edges and honestly you don't really need to see Kirk leave the Enterprise as the next shot shows him moving away from the Enterprise in the distance. We already established Spock left the ship anyway. So we don't need to see what Kirk is doing as he is obviously going after Spock anyway. Yeah I get it, that scene is at best 10 seconds long.
There's definitely a resemblance between the narrative disposition of the characters, and that kind of thing is common through Trek. Really it's Picard that's doing the same thing as Kirk in exploiting higher channels to commandeer the vessel.
