A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Reviewing  Star Trek: The Motion Picture  is one of those “some say the glass is half-empty, some say it’s half-full” conundrums. Robert Wise’s final science-fiction film is a decent film in some respects, but a dull, even cold and soulless one in others. Greenlit by Paramount Pictures in a bid to compete with 20th Century Fox’s  Star Wars,  the film was  Star Trek  creator Gene Roddenberry’s second and last theatrical production. He didn’t write the screen story (Alan Dean Foster’s ‘In Thy Image,” the treatment for a pilot episode to a canceled TV series titled  Star Trek: Phase Two  was the movie’s starting point), nor did he write the screenplay (Harold Livingston wrote a partial script that was added on to during filming). But he sure loaded it with many of his favorite  Star Trek  tropes and saddled it with an unnecessary amount of pretentiousness and a cold, sterile look that is the antithesis of the television show that begat...

What was the worst Star Trek movie, and how would you have made it better? As a  Star Trek  fan who has every  Star Trek  film (six with The Original Series cast, four with The Next Generation cast, and the three Kelvin Timeline movies), I’d have to say it’s a three-way tie between: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Star Trek: Nemesis Star Trek Into Darkness How would I have made them better? With  Star Trek V,  the fault is not in who directed the film - William Shatner - but rather the story that Harve Bennett, David Loughery, and Shatner chose to tell. Clearly, pitting the  Enterprise-A  against a heretical Vulcan who is on a quest to literally meet God was a horrible idea; maybe having Kirk and his crew go off on a deep-space mission of exploration and discovering that the Organians have mysteriously vanished and a Klingon warlord is preparing the Empire for a second war against the Federation would have been better. Anothe...

(C) 2008 Paramount Home Entertainment Pros:  The few great Trek films are included; extras are mostly nice Cons:  If you have the two-disc Collector Editions, you don't need this! Although I've come to love the DVD (Digital Video Disk, or Digitally Versatile Disk) format ever since I purchased my first in the spring of 1999, there's one particular sales technique involving the admittedly-useful and versatile format that has made me somewhat annoyed with the various movie studios - the seemingly endless re-release and repackaging of popular films such as the  Alien  franchise, the Jack Ryan film series and the  Die Hard  series. All right, I confess: sometimes it's good that studios will backtrack and improve upon a "bare-bones" first edition of one of my favorite movies, particularly DVDs that lacked such extras as director's commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes featurettes. I tend to like those bonus features; as an...