>>Star Trek: Insurrection: It tried. It really did. And it had
>>its moments, and excepting Robert Wise's recut of The Motion
>>Picture, it's the best of the odd-numbered films; that is to say,
>>the characterizations are on-target, and it even had a sense of humor,
>>just that the plot wasn't there.
>
>I like the Director's Edition of TMP too, but the new
>sound mix always throws me off - I've seen the VHS version so many
>times that its sound mix is pretty much ingrained in my neural
>pathways. I suppose that's an advantage I had; I never enjoyed the original cut of TMP, so the only times I watched it (after my first cognizant viewing of the film in my early teens) were as background on cable. I know enough of the film to know why I don't like it (and to go on about the pacing problems and things of that nature), but I'm not so familiar with it that I experienced any kind of dissonance on watching the Director's Edition; I was able to walk into it (so to speak) fairly close to tabula rasa.
>As for Insurrection, it paid for itself in my video collection
>with just the line, "I have an odd craving for the blood of a live
>kolaar beast." :)
As I've said, Insurrection has its moments, mostly by way of clever dialogue and character bits, but as a story it doesn't fulfill its promise. A shame, really; with those kinds of themes, it promised to be a much more fascinating film than it ended up as. (The Final Frontier also had a tremendous amount of promise, and failed even more spectacularly; at least Insurrection was still entertaining.)
Another tidbit: there's rumors running around of Paramount doing special editions of the other Trek films, and while I see them doing new sound mixes and maybe cleaning the film up, I don't see them recutting the other films. Shame, really; some of them could probably be made significantly better with some tweaking. Ah, well; one can hope.
-- Sean --
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