I had every intention of doing some kind of big feature for this new Blu-ray release and tying it in with the recent reboot. I was going to rank the original six films or rank all 11 Star Trek films, but timing killed it. The set arrived late and other things took priority. On top of that, my opinion of these six original films hasn’t changed much since I first saw them so many years ago. Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home remain my two favorite and the other four only hold a passing interest. If I were to rank the remaining four films I would probably say it would go as such: Undiscovered Country, The Search for Spock, The Motion Picture and finally The Final Frontier. However, my seemingly passing interest to this point is not indicative of this set, but simply due to my disappointment in not being able to do something bigger in celebration of this set’s release. In short, I love this set and anyone interested in Trek should give it a once over.
Having already told you where the six films rank in terms of one another there isn’t a whole lot more to say about the films without wasting a ton of your time, but on the whole I would say this set of six films includes four solid films, one that is nothing more than a two-hour episode of the original series and another that is almost unwatchable. The Blu-ray presentations are fantastic and each coming with a Dolby TrueHD audio track makes it all the more better. Of these six films I only owned the Wrath of Khan (only film in the set completely restored) and Voyage Home DVD editions and hadn’t seen the other four films in a long, long time. As much as I have watched Khan and Voyage over the years I honestly don’t think I had ever watched the other four more than once. I couldn’t remember anything that happened in the original motion picture, my only knowledge of what goes on in Search for Spock came from the title and vague recollections of the other two existed simply because I had seen them more recently. Watching them all in order for the first time in a long time was certainly a joy and the supplemental material included on these discs is exhaustive.
This set contains seven discs made up of the six film, their supplemental material and a seventh disc containing what is called “The Captain’s Summit” which is a three-part roundtable interview with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes and moderated by Whoopi Goldberg.
Beginning with the special features involving the films themselves, each disc contains all the material that was originally included on the two-disc collector’s editions DVDs as well as new bonus material. Most impressive is a brand new commentary track for each film to go along with the original commentaries. This means The Motion Picture gets its first commentary while all five other films have two commentaries each.
Each disc also contains, at a minimum, one brand new featurette. Whether it be a great look at James Horner’s work on Wrath of Khan or a look at the effects of ILM as they worked on the Star Trek films from the beginning, each is a great look at the franchise. However, I would not recommend delving into all of these features at once as I tried to do for this review. It is impossible. It becomes monotonous and I learned there is a point where you can actually get too much of William Shatner’s ego, as comical as it may be. This isn’t a knock against the supplemental material, actually it is nice to see how well all the features work together making this feel like it was all made at the exact same time, but it is just too much to digest all at once.
As for that “The Captain’s Summit” disc, there’s a lot of glad-handing and a lot of Shatner. Goldberg seems to be cool with Shatner’s ego, but I just can’t imagine Frakes and Stewart didn’t want to get up and slap some sense into the egomaniac. Nimoy even occasionally has to hush him up as he obviously has more experience dealing with him. However, when Shatner admits to having never watched a single minute of “The Next Generation” it was impossible to tell exactly how Frakes and Stewart felt about the comment, but it was an unnecessary slap in the face, and speaks so loudly to Shatner’s opinion on others taking over the “Trek” mantle that it was a little bit sad. Sort of like when he’s talking about The Final Frontier, which he directed, and says it is his understanding all the films, over time, have earned the same amount of money. Do you want to be the one to tell him his film made $24 million less than Nimoy’s Search for Spock and $57 million less (over half) than Nimoy’s Voyage Home?
Obviously, everything I have mentioned so far is just part of what makes this package so great. It comes with the good and the bad, and I know I will even be watching The Final Frontier again in a Star Trek marathon one of these days, just something about this original crew entertains me to no end. So, yes, I will once again hear Captain Kirk ask the face proclaiming to be God, “What does God need with a starship?”
It seems as if “Star Trek” went from a three season campy sci-fi show, to a feature film that really was nothing more than a bloated episode of the show and finally to Wrath of Khan, which used a storyline directly from the original series and managed to turn Star Trek into a real entity, a franchise with a history that had a distinct turning point. This Blu-ray set makes watching the whole franchise a lot of fun and the supplemental material will engage you for weeks, if not months going on years.
