otto@whuxle.UUCP (George V.E. Otto) (06/22/84)
My major criticism with ST III is that it had enough material for an hour-long episode, and it tried to fill about 2 hours with it. As a result, there were several parts of the film that to me felt like taffy, i.e., stretched out to fill more time than they should have. Hence they dragged. This may well be the result of Nimoy's directorial debut: sensing how long a scene should take is probably acquired by most directors through many smaller projects before hitting the "big time." There were certainly many interesting elements to this film, but when I left the theatre I was left with the feeling that there wasn't much story there. It was a stretched TV episode, not a full-length feature film. If I am only going to get to see a new story only every 2 years or so, I want to see more than this! There were also several small touches that bothered me. In the original TV show there was a "committee of believability" that screened the scripts to see that the actions were believable, i.e., would be reasonable in light of the characters' knowledge and personalities, and the physical and political systems the action was carried out in. I belive that the existance and activity of that committee helped the TV show maintain a high standard of internal consistency that was one of its strengths. However, there were several scenes in the movie that I think would not have passed such a committee if it existed today. One example was the "Model T breakdown" of the Excelsior. Two others were the references by Sarek in Kirk's room and T'Lar on Vulcan to something "not being logical" when a viewer could almost instantly think of reasons why the given act could be given logical justification. It almost seemed as if the use of the word "logical" was expected of Vulcans, whether or not it was used in any meaningful or correct sense. This, in fact, was one of the most surprising failures of Nimoy as a director, since he more than anyone else should have been aware of the nuances of playing Vulcans. Another aspect of the film that frankly bothered me was again the result of an unfavorable comparison with the TV show. With the show they had an electrical wizard (whose name I have forgotten) who did an absolutely top notch job of wiring up light sequences that made the Enterprise control panels actually look as if they were *doing* something. After a button was pushed, complex patterns of console lights would dance across the indicators on the given panel. It wasn't clear just what was supposed to be going on, but the feeling of complex mechanisms at work was always present. Unfortunately, the control panels in ST III seemed to be the reverse: trivial light sequences that seemed more organized around the idea of "let's have lots of lights" without regard for any realism of display. One sequence particularly caught my eye: four red panel lights -- all in a vertical row -- lit up, then they went out as four yellow panel lights went on next to them, and these went out as four green panel lights next to them went on. Such display overkill! It reminded me off seeing an elevator display panel in which there are *four* lights that showed the elevator was on floor 6, then four lights that showed it was next on floor 5, etc., as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 *6* 1 2 3 4 5 *6* 1 2 3 4 5 *6* 1 2 3 4 5 *6* then 1 2 3 4 *5* 6 1 2 3 4 *5* 6 1 2 3 4 *5* 6 1 2 3 4 *5* 6 then 1 2 3 *4* 5 6 1 2 3 *4* 5 6 1 2 3 *4* 5 6 1 2 3 *4* 5 6 You get the idea. With the time they have to do a full-length film I would expect that they would do a *better* job with such details, not a worse one! At any rate, each of these problems individually probably wouldn't seriously detract from the quality of the film, but in combination, for me at any rate, the effect was to reduce what I had hoped would be an excellent film into one that left me feeling a little flat. George Otto AT&T Bell Labs, Whippany ------------------------