How Star Trek: The Motion Picture made the voyage home (to 4K)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a benchmark film for multiple reasons. Not only did it revive the Trek franchise ten years after the cancellation of The Original Series, spawning what we’d now call an “expanded universe” of stories across a variety of other formats (film, TV, and more), but its 2001 arrival on home video with a Director’s Edition opened the floodgates for home video as a second-chance opportunity to revisit, expand, or in this case just complete a film that was never released to the filmmakers’ satisfaction. Director Robert Wise (West Side Story) may have been out of step with the prevailing cultural winds of 1979 when he agreed to helm The Motion Picture just two years after Star Wars changed everything about blockbuster moviemaking, but looking at the film in 2022, it’s clear that his gallant, meditative opus simply needed some extra time to connect with audiences.

Paramount Home Video recently formalized that time warp with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture—The Director’s Edition—The Complete Adventure, which includes a 4K UHD remaster of the film that makes history yet again, like it did in 2001, and way back in 1979. The 2001 edition featured what were then cutting-edge special effects, but 20 years later, they’re not just outdated but unable to be replicated, which is why only the film’s theatrical cut was previously released in HD. Going back to the original camera negatives, producer David C. Fein and his team meticulously reassembled every element of the film down to the smallest details, enhancing moments that might have lacked color, brightness, or energy in earlier editions, and uncovering others that even long-standing Trek fans never noticed.

Fein spoke to The A.V. Club about how the film was compromised in ’79 by production woes and a rushed theatrical release and about why Star Trek: The Motion Picture—The Director’s Edition marks the overdue completion of the original project. In addition to pinpointing some of the tiny details that help round out Wise’s vision, Fein discusses technological advances that made this cut achievable only after some 43 years, and hints at the wealth of additional material that may be available to examine in some future release.

David Fein: What’s unique about The Motion Picture is it’s not really a special edition or a different cut. It’s the first time the film was finished. Even our DVD version from 2001 was still just an evolution to finally getting it to film level. Because there were things we couldn’t do in color grading for home entertainment. But looking at [Close Encounters Of The Third Kind], Spielberg had scenes he wanted to put in but couldn’t do it because of the time. And eventually they had the collector’s edition of Close Encounters because it brought it back to what Spielberg’s original focus was. That’s probably the closest to where we’re going with the movie.

But Star Trek: The Motion Picture is not, “the film went into the theater this way and it was done.” The film never reached a full finished point until now. And there’s so many wonderful benefits we’re able to accomplish now that we weren’t able to even conceive of in 2000 in telling the story. And I’m thrilled, because we even found some answers to problems that we discussed but never really had a good solution for back then, and certainly a couple of happy accidents that worked better than I would have imagined.

AVC: Can you give me some examples of those happy accidents? And were there elements you wanted to leave alone, or just shine up a little bit?

DF: Well, the Paramount archives did an incredible job of pulling and archiving every piece of material that they had. [But] transferring those and being able to re-composite them digitally, I never realized how soft they were merely because of the rush [to complete the film back in 1979]. The dubbing was so low quality, to go back to the original camera negatives of each effects element and then re-composite them, they’re stunning. [But] there’s one story point that concerned me that I almost don’t want to tell you, because it never worked before. Something we did has such a subliminal moment to it that I think if I drew attention to it, I’m afraid it wouldn’t work as well.

AVC: You’ve whetted my appetite far too much not to tell me. Please keep going.

DF: Maybe in a month after people have a chance to look at it, we’ll connect again and I’ll tell you. But unique to this version, having the entire film available in negative form, just about every shot has been touched in some way to enhance it or to make it work. And working from camera negative as opposed to any other format, there’s this striping space where you have audio on 35mm film. There’s also picture if they don’t hard matte it, and there’s at least one moment in the film where something’s happening on the right-hand side of the screen, and it was good but it wasn’t feeling as powerful as it needed to be. And that’s when Scotty is talking to the other engineer about “why did the captain order self-destruct?” There’s another crewman who’s standing there working on it [who reacts like,] what did he say? Recognizing that he’s going to die, too. And it just helped to amplify it.

The other thing I was going to say is that there’s two places in the film where, forever, what you see on the screen is ‘what’s happening.’ It’s always been that way. But there’s two places now where what you’re seeing is more of a dream moment. The first one is when Ilia reaches out and touches Chekov and says, “I can stop this pain.” That scene had an importance because it’s what made her different on the bridge for the V’Ger probe to grab her. But this is different from even the DVD version, and she says “I can stop this pain” and she touches him, there’s a moment where the music comes up, but everything else disappears. The bridge sound effects, everything, all goes away. And it’s this psychic moment between him and her, where the world just melts away. And it’s that personal, and it amplified the importance of it. And then when he says “thank you,” it comes back into the real world. So it’s like this little dream, but it helped tell that point of the story and helped amplify her importance.

AVC: The era in which the first version was made did not have the technological complexity to zero in on those subtleties. Where was it necessary to take a little creative license to kickstart some of those ideas that weren’t as clearly articulated in the original film, without knowing if Robert Wise would have approved?

DF: The first thing that pops to mind is the color grading, because the original film had literally four days to color grade the film. They didn’t know what effects would be in there or what scenes would be in from beginning to end, so they had to leave a basic flat grade so that if something came in, they could quickly fit it into the edit. [But] the film needed dynamic range to draw you in, to get that scope of what we were looking for, and when we were doing the original project, Bob suggested, “what if we didn’t just compress that information down, but we expanded the delivery format?” And he implored me to absolutely use every tool available to tell stories. And he didn’t know what Dolby Atmos was—it didn’t exist! But now we’re sitting in this room with V’Ger [going] “BOING” over you in the Atmos mix, and now the sound helps tell the highs and lows of the story.

[Also], there’s still some long shots that felt long in the 2001 version to some people—but now you need that as a recovery moment from the highs. And that light probe on the bridge is so exciting, because now we have HDR. We know it’s so bright that people had to cover their eyes on the bridge, but now it’s bright enough to give you more of that experience. And it’s just going to improve as technology improves. And that makes me more excited than ever before, that we haven’t reached the potential that is actually on this disc—even in 4K.

AVC: There have always been retroactive changes—or explanations to those changes, like the Klingons in Star Trek: The Motion Picture were the first ones that had the ridged foreheads. Were there any changes or enhancements that you worried you shouldn’t do because it might affect Trek canon?

DF: We had our edit mostly locked from the 2001 [version], so I don’t think there would be anything that would take away from the narrative. If anything, effort was just focused on making the story work. There are key decisions that just work better now. The moral [of the story] itself was still ahead of its time, in that technology without humanity is cold and can’t move further into reality. At the time, the greatest technological advancement was a touch-tone! I think now the moral would affect them more if you just gave them what the story is now, because it relates more now. We all have cell phones. And if you took all social media away from it, it wouldn’t mean anything. So now the message has changed, or caught up to today’s reality. But it didn’t need my help.

AVC: Collector’s editions like this are more rare than ever—this is sort of the exception that proves the rule. How much is left to explore about this film or the Original Series cast Star Trek films, that fans wouldn’t know about?

DF: I started my career as a special feature archeologist, which is what I’ve always called them. And there’s always more material. I mean, we transferred so many hours of material that we can never present it all. There’s deleted moments or deleted scenes. And even this project hasn’t scratched the surface on what’s out there. I think every film, every project has so much more that could be told. The question is if there’s going to be enough motivation to have someone want to go back and do all that extra work—and whether or not there’s going to be financing for it. It’s nice that with streaming, there is opportunities to have no limitations in space, but then there’s always time and budget, whether or not it’s there.

I’m always going for the coolness factor. One example on this project was “cave Spock.” That’s something that I knew about for years and everybody I spoke to, including Nimoy’s family, never knew that there was the cave Spock stuff. So I knew that was going to be fantastic. There are surprises in everything, and there is no limitation except that many, many times studios have thrown out or don’t have the same material. There are still thousands of photos that no one’s ever seen on this film. On every film. But no, we’re certainly not at the end of possibilities.

There’s deleted moments that could change a whole film. And that’s where it’s important that you have the alternate cuts, because the theatrical cut, many people fell in love with the film as a theatrical [experience]. When it became the special longer version, that’s what introduced people to the film [on TV]. That has a place for them as well. That’s why it’s included in the Complete Adventure. And now we have the Director’s Edition, where everyone should just watch it as the definitive version. But the only limitations are when there’s nothing that exists at all, on any of the movies. But even then you can get people’s current perspectives on where the film stands today, based upon the past. It’s all a matter of creativity, ingenuity, and thinking about what could be created—even out of nothing. I’d love to see a hell of a lot more on all the films.