..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Directed by Nicolas Meyer
One of the best of the Star Trek motion pictures has been reissued by Paramount as a two-platter Widescreen Collection title, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Special Collector's Edition (06773, $20). Although the 1991 film was made by people who don't know much about Star Trek (Why in the name of Kahless would Klingons have any interest at all in Hamlet, except as an example of how spineless Earth people are?), they do know a thing or two about pacing, suspense and entertaining viewers. Using the crumbling of the Soviet Union as an inspired analogy, the narrative has right wing interests on both sides attempting to prevent a détente between the Klingons and the heroes. The heroes are framed for one assassination and exiled, and have to escape and return to prevent another assassination that will throw the two groups back into war. Nicolas Meyer directed the film, from a script written in collaboration with Denny Martin. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley star, with Christopher Plummer as the primary villain.
Paramount initially release the film on DVD in 1999. The letterboxing on the Special Collector's Edition has an aspect ratio of about 1.95:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback, and the framing is very different from the framing on the earlier effort, masking picture information off the top of the image and adding picture information to the bottom. Either composition works, but the image is also centered vertically, while the image on the older version was set a little high. The color transfer is improved as well, although the differences are mild. Fleshtones are slightly less pinkish and other hues are a touch crisper. On the whole, the presentation looks very nice. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has a number of engaging separation effects and plenty of power. The 113-minute program has an alternate French audio track in standard stereo, optional English subtitles and a trivia track that explains how specific minor effects were achieved as well as supplying all sorts of other arcane information about the film.
Meyer and Martin supply a commentary track, talking a lot about developing and tweaking the story, and the difficulty they had conforming to the Star Trek rules. "[Creator Gene Roddenberry] felt that in the future, there would be no conflict, that everything would be resolved. It's very hard to write drama with no conflict whatsoever, and that was always a conundrum in all kinds of Star Trek writing assignments." They also analyze the process of creating a work in collaboration with others. "One can say this about collaboration. It's either going to be heaven or hell, but it may not be the heaven you imagine or the hell you imagine. And by this I mean, if you are sitting in a room, working with somebody that you get along with too well, the collaboration may suffer from the lack of critical introspection. Your best collaborator may not be somebody that you like, or that likes you, but he may be somebody who appreciates you and brings out the best." There are gaps in their talk, and some of their presumptions about Star Trek are frustrating, but their digressions are always worthwhile ("I hope that 300 years from now we come up with a better way of keeping ourselves warm in cold weather than animal fur."; they also suggest that the collapse of the communist system began with Chernobyl) and combined with the subtitling track you get a reasonably comprehensive idea of how the film was put together.
The second platter contains a number of documentaries, and almost all of them are highly satisfying. There is a 26-minute piece about the parallels between the film's story and the fall of the Soviet Union, but it is more about how Star Trek uses fantasy and science-fiction to bring fresh perspectives to reality. It's an ideal supplementary piece, embellishing your understanding of both the film and the world around you. A collection of a half-dozen featurettes are gathered under a 'Play All' option that runs 57 minutes in total, examining, with a good deal of depth, specific aspects of the film's creation, as well as supplying a workable overview of the production.
Meyer is featured extensively in that collection, but there is also an additional 9-minute collection of what are probably interview outtakes with him, going over all sorts of fascinating insights about directing and about his take on doing Star Trek. Don't miss what he has to say about Shatner: "Some actors are better on take one and some are better on take ten. Some feel their way toward where they're going in take after take and some nail it with a certain spontaneity right off the bat. With Bill, Bill got better the more you did it, because I think there was always a temptation or an instinct, I don't even think he thought about it, to play it with a certain attitude. 'I'm Captain Kirk, I'm the hero, I'm the main guy.' I found that the more you did it, he would become sort of bored with striking those postures, and eventually he would just deliver it. He would just behave. So I would just do it until he stopped reflexively projecting an image and just started being and getting in the moment. That was hard for him."
Shatner and Plummer had known one another back when they were both Canadian stage actors, and although they don't appear together in the piece, there is a nice little 5-minute he said/he said interview segment recalling the good old days. There is also an excellent 21-minute piece about Klingons-it's better than anything that's been done on the TV boxed sets-along with a 5-minute segment that looks at actors who have played more than one character in the series, a 6-minute segment about the prop room, a very nice 13-minute tribute to Kelley, 44 minutes of thoughtful interviews that were conducted during the shooting of the film (Nichelle Nichols speaks about Dr. Martin Luther King encouraging her to play her character), a 5-minute teaser Meyer shot for a convention, two trailers, a 3-minute montage of enjoyable behind-the-scenes footage, and still frame storyboard presentations for several scenes.
June 29, 2004
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