Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Star Trek: Captains' Summit / Evolutions
I really like the Star Trek movies ( well most of the movies, Insurrection and Nemesis are ok) but for some insane reason Paramount decided that people couldn't cope with a bit of film grain and went made trying to filter the original Trek films to remove it for the Blu-ray release and from what I understand they got rid of the offending film grain but the resulting picture quality was pretty sub-standard and in some places just horrible.
As the studios often do Paramount commissioned some new material for the two Blu-ray boxsets. one of the discs, The Captains' Summit was something I really wanted to see since I had read that it was the first time all four captains would be interviewed together, for some reason I thought this would feature the captains from each show but instead interviewed by Whoopi Goldberg were William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes and while the approx 70 minute interview was interesting I still felt slightly disappointed when it was done.
The second disc Star Trek: Evolutions was a collection of mildly interesting featurettes about aspects of Star Trek including the now defunct Star Trek: The Experience, I would've liked to see a proper documentary about Star Trek: The Experience and maybe both rides fully captured on video for the fans who never had the opportunity to take the trip to Las Vagas while the exhibits and rides were still running but I enjoyed the glimpses provided on the Evolutions disc.
I was lucky enough to pick up my copies of the bonus Blu-ray discs on eBay pretty cheaply and when I was looking there were plenty of other copies listed for sale and they seemed to be selling for pretty reasonable prices.
It looks like I'll be making do with the Star Trek movies on DVD unless Paramount addresses the issues on their flawed Blu-ray discs and do a proper restoration job on them and thats a real shame because some of the clips used on the Evolutions disc looked really nice in High Definition.