StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The field uniforms. I always thought they were smart and sensible and vaguely reminiscent of the British Desert Rats.



I swear, TOS-era Starfleet just looked and acted tougher than the TNG pajama brigade. And that goes for the starships and their commanders too.

That's from ST V? Seriously... that looks kinda of... awesome. Maybe not 'hardcore', but it seems almost as though they're making an actual effort at looking like a military unit. I think it might be the guy in the left foreground sells it...

Hmm... what's the guy with the long, tube-like thing?

You're looking at what bankrupted the movie.

Shatner had a whole slew of interesting ideas for the movie's look and story. He's the one who pushed for new equipment, but he didn't take into budget cuts and ended up not having enough cash for the grand finale.

If he had had a bigger budget - or even the one that was originally agreed - and if he had had someone looking over his shoulder to stop him making the rookie mistakes he made, STV could easily have been the highlight of the series. As it is, it's a good idea ruined by executive meddling and penny-pinching. The striptease and the bad 'humour' were bolted on to ride on STIV's success.

Honestly, who wouldn't have wanted to see Kirk storming into hell, phasers akimbo?

Also Shatner got way screwed over by the effects company.

Uraniun235 wrote:Also Shatner got way screwed over by the effects company.

He should've gone for the ILM B-team. At least they had a reputation at stake.

ILM was totally booked out for 1989, with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Back to the Future II (and III) and a couple of other films I can't remember. The only way they would work on TFF was if it was put back to early 1990, which Paramount wouldn't agree to.

Mind you, Shatner and Harve Bennett still made a really dumb choice with Ferren & Co. There were plenty of good Hollywood effects outfits they could have gone to, and they went for the cheap option.

The most frustrating part of TFF was what they got right.

I love the new phasers, the shuttlecraft, and the Spock-Bones-Kirk stuff. Even the ambassadors aren't too bad. But Shatner really didn't give a rip about continuity, apparently, which introduced all kinds of weirdness (like the Enterprise having 78 decks numbered in reverse, or being fast enough to get to the center of the galaxy in no time flat). Even that wouldn't matter if the movie were good enough, but it's just not. The ending falls flat, the main conflict is not compelling, and the sequences where Sybok apparently brainwashes Kirk's crew into turning against him are not handled with nearly the proper gravitas.

What was even more frustrating was that in terms of handling his visuals and action scenes, Shatner was actually a far better director than Nimoy. On the other hand, he lacked the ability to step back from Kirk and look at the whole picture and had ideas that were really above both the budget and his own station as a director, which was really a fatal combination when you consider the other problems that TFF experienced.