Star Trek The Motion Picture Directors Cut Remastered Trailer

Star Trek The Motion Picture Director’s Cut Remastered Trailer

Kirk, Spock, and Ilia's faces appear in a prismatic rainbow in space.

Image: Outstanding

Back in 2001, Star Trek fans were delighted to receive a Director’s Cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on DVD with enhanced visual effects. For a film that director Robert Wise originally thought was going to hit theaters — and definitely had incomplete visual effects — the remastered version of the film was a godsend. Now, more than 20 years later, Trek fans can rejoice as the Director’s Cut finally makes it to 4K Ultra HD – and that’s not all.

This includes the aforementioned visual effects, thanks to producer David C. Fein, keeper Mike Matessino, and recurring visual effects supervisor Daren Dochterman, who assembled a team of special effects experts to search the Paramount archives for the task , have been recreated in 4K . It took more than six months to assemble (or reassemble, I guess), but the result is the best-looking version of the first Star Trek film ever. Seriously, check it out:

What’s particularly cool is that this new version of the Director’s Cut includes deleted scenes from the film that were once thought lost forever. “There’s a deleted scene that we wanted back 20 years ago,” Fein told StarTrek.com. “That was Ilia and Scotty and Decker in engineering. We found some of the footage 20 years ago but there was no sound so showing the scene was really pointless. But it’s three or four scenes that people have always wanted to see. So we retransmitted the footage… and that’s what we found [director] bob [Wise] repeated the dialogue for the scene. Now this scene is included in the physical media release and others because he looped a few. And we found other key scenes that are just fantastic.”

Fans who subscribe to the Paramount+ streaming service will have their first opportunity to try this improved version, as the remastered film is released there on April 5. Not a subscriber? Luckily, with the support of Fathom Events, the film will also return to theaters on May 22nd and 25th. Can’t make it to the theater either? Well, you can buy the film in September in Blu-ray form, with a host of extras yet to be announced.

Director’s Cut or not, Star Trek: The Motion Pictures has its problems – the biggest being that it’s basically a repeat of the TV episode “The Changeling,” which only features a sentient version of a 20th-century Voyager spacecraft. Century stars – but the film has revived the franchise so thoroughly that it has led to The Next Generation and the umpteen Trek TV series that are currently on the air. It’s worth repeating, and if that’s what you want to do, this is clearly the version to check out.

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