Star Trek: Reunion

TM2YC shared preview clips of this edit as he overhauled The Motion Picture from stem to stern. It was fun seeing how each scene got many patches, color grading and new FX added. How would they all play when the finished version assembled them all together?

Pretty great it turns out. The biggest changes are in the first two thirds of the movie where unneeded scenes are cut and others reshuffled to fix continuity. The narrative skips along smartly (& bet you never thought "skips along smartly" when you thought of The Motion Picture before). It's a real pleasure to see the colors looking so vibrant and natural. All the new button sounds are a gas, a lot of fun, and add to the story which, let's face it, is mostly on the bridge.

Star Trek Reunion has many tiny changes that you'd hardly notice on a casual viewing but they add up, like an Adywan edit, on a subconscious level. The movie has never looked better and the narrative is less like a vapid "serious" drama and more like a Trek episode.

There's not much to criticize. Personally I would like to see even more trims to the last third of the movie, which is still a little slow, talky and corny. Some of the added FX are more successful than others but they're all up to 1970s level of quality. Mostly the video and audio edits are spotless and flow without effort.

My top rating for audio/visual quality is about improvement to original footage even though some shots are unavoidably in lower resolution. I'd give the original movie a 5 or 6 for enjoyment so Star Trek Reunion is a starship sized upgrade in that department.

This is an edit that I've had on my hard drive for many years, yet for some reason never watched. Well, now I have & it's as technically well crafted as any TM2YC fanedit.

However, I think it could've been pushed one step further, since a lot of shots of special effects for the sake of special effects still exist. For example, Spock is still shown sensing V'Ger out in space, so that likely could've been used to cut around some of the longer shots of the Klingons firing on it.

I also don't completely agree with the removal of the "is Spock still loyal" subplot. When he's on the ship, it's properly conveyed by the crew that, even for Spock, Spock is being uncharacteristically anti-social. That subplot (and the payoff of Spock's single tear) feel organic to Spock's arc. Similarly, I could've stood to see Kirk being a little more argumentative. Kirk's protective of the enterprise & is out of practice, so likewise dealing with those character tics plays well into Kirk's arc.

All in all, I probably prefer BionicBob's version since it gets us to Ilia's assimilation faster, but as a movie-length edit. this was pretty good. It's a TM2YC edit, after all, and the technical acumen injected into the movie is worth the watch alone.

Haven't watched TMP in years (decades!) but this was so much less painful than the last time I watched the extended director's cut. In fact, the virtues of this movie are on full display, including the delight at getting the cast back together, the lavish production design, groundbreaking score and the stunning visual effects. TM2YC's editing highlights each of these and makes it easy to see how this was Roddenberry's vision for an entirely new Star Trek series. With how different it is from the rest of the film series, it's tempting to view TMP as a non-canonical hiccup, but this edit makes it impossible to reject the film outright, particularly with how much its tone shares with early seasons of The Next Generation (which also borrowed liberally from the abandoned Phase II series). If, like me, your favourite TOS character is Bones, there's a lot to love here, with his more caustic lines from the original version stripped away in favour of good old fashioned irrascibility.

I'm in a very rare minority where I actually like Star Trek: The Motion Picture for what it is, slow pacing and all. Naturally, I was intrigued by the idea of a fan-edit with superior color grading and much faster, smoother pacing, and luckily, it does not disappoint. Star Trek: Reunion moves at the perfect pace and without sacrificing essential narrative and character moments. It certainly looks beautiful as well and the editing, once again, is terrific. Absolutely the definitive version of this particular film.

I'm torn with reviewing this edit because I really don't want to be negative about something that obviously took lots of hard work and time. However I did want to give my opinion on the edit and so I decided to write this up. First off, this is the best "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" has ever looked. It even surpasses the bluray release. There are some issues with the added sound effects and score being slightly louder than the original but it's not a dealbreaker.

My problems with the edit are the same as with the initial release, it's tedious and not very interesting. It's like watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" but with Star Trek characters. Thankfully the over-long beauty shots of the Enterprise are trimmed down. I know this is a divisive movie and I just happen to fall on the negative side I guess. I was hoping this shorter edit would turn me around but it didn't. Like I wrote before, it looks awesome and is not as long so if you like the original this will probably be your preferred version. If you didn't care for the storyline this might not be for you.