“Young. I feel … young.”

I am older now than William Shatner was when he made Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – the film which, forty years ago, rescued Star Trek from a second cancellation and set the course for the massive franchise it’s become. Khan was a gamble; a cheaper, more focused follow-up to Star Trek: The Motion Picture designed to strip the show back to basics after the vast gray bore of TMP.

It worked beautifully, because Nicholas Meyer relied on the things that made the Trek television series work a decade and a half earlier – recognizable political or social conflicts played out on an interplanetary scale, and mirrored in the relationship dynamics of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Here, it’s a simple revenge story where the villain is more or less justified: James T. Kirk was a pretty sloppy captain in his youth, and his failure to follow up on the colony of people he abandoned on a distant planet has come back to bite him in the ass. But after some clever strategy and Spock’s tragic sacrifice – don’t worry, it doesn’t take – Kirk is left invigorated, ready to do what he does best in a new context. The film opens with our hero cringing at middle age, but ends with him feeling renewed.

I get it, pal. And not just because being a part of this year’s film festival has been one of the most thrilling and engaging experiences of my entire career – and I’ll have more to say about that at some point, I’m sure – but also because I spent the days leading up to the festival revisiting the first cycle of Star Trek movies in Paramount’s new 4K discs. The first four features – The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home – were released in a spiffy UHD boxed set last year, but for this year’s Star Trek Day (September 8^th, the anniversary of the show’s first airing in 1966) Paramount has rolled out a new set, The Original Motion Picture 6-Movie Collection, which adds the fifth and sixth films, The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country – as well as rolling out all six features in individual 4K editions for the first time.

And while last year’s box set contained the 1979 theatrical release version of The Motion Picture, both the new set and the stand-alone release offer a newly restored “Director’s Edition” that finally does justice to the alternate cut Robert Wise released to DVD more than two decades ago.

I have no illusions: The Motion Picture is not a great movie. It’s achingly slow, no one looks comfortable and the ’79 release felt somehow both massive and airless – like a blimp, maybe? – as it bobbled towards a plot that was fairly shamelessly recycled from an older episode.

And yet, underneath the stiffness and arguments about protocols (and the presence of Stephen Collins, which is another issue entirely), there’s something that still clicks about the movie. Maybe it’s just that The Final Frontier, with its shabby construction and even dumber plot, has made The Motion Picture look better in retrospect. The Motion Picture at least has a couple of actual ideas and even a little character development for Spock – whose journey back to Starfleet now feels a little heavier, thanks to a spiffed-up reimagining of his Vulcan homeworld.

A note about this particular restoration, which employs digital techniques and even some CG imagery to reshape the movie well beyond what would have been possible for Robert Wise and his team in an age of resolutely analog effects: It’s the sort of thing I would ordinarily recoil from, as I did whenever George Lucas screwed around with the Star Wars movies and insists they were always meant to be that way. The problem is that Lucas is lying to himself as well as to the audience, and the people who finished the TMP restoration more than a decade and a half after the death of its director have done this work as a sort of thought experiment, delicately nudging the movie into something that looks more like what we recognize as Star Trek.

The visual improvements are largely cosmetic – an expansion of Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco, livelier backdrops for the Enterprise windows, a more consistent lighting design for the interiors and a couple of new shots that establish the internal landscape of V’ger itself, which was previously rendered as an indistinct cloud with a little platform at the center. The new shots help us understand that V’ger is actually a thing, with visual characteristics and even a little hint of personality inside that big weird mass.

Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits went into considerable detail about their efforts earlier this year, when the 4K restoration was screened in Los Angeles in advance of its streaming debut on Paramount+. He’s more of a fan than I am – I can’t say the movie really works any better than it did in its original version, because all the money in the world can’t give that script a heartbeat. The fact that everyone’s immediately fine with Ilia being killed by that probe midway through the story remains one of the strangest choices in the entire franchise, and the fact that Persis Khambatta was given no chance to create a character whose personality we’d actually miss once she’s replaced now plays as blinkered at best, and racist at worst. Ick.

And even so, there’s certainly an audience for this new version of  Star Trek: The Motion Picture, reimagined as a movie that looks and sounds almost modern. The UHD presentation and exhaustively remastered Dolby Atmos sound mix on the 4K disc are just splendid, and far more vibrant than the streaming version thanks to the higher bitrate. (The new disc is encoded in both HDR-10 and Dolby Vision.) I’m unsure I’ll ever watch this movie again, but it’s good to know that both the new restoration and the 1979 cut are out there in the world in their best possible versions.

Oh, right, about that: There are actually three cuts of The Motion Picture in circulation now: The 1979 cut’s in last year’s boxed set, the 2022 Director’s Edition in this year’s box – it’s also the version they’ve made available individually – and then there’s The Complete Adventure, the most comprehensive release of the film available. Packaged in a double-width fold-out slipcover sort of deal, this set includes three discs in total: The Director’s Edition 4K disc and accompanying special-features Blu-ray that are available elsewhere, and a second 4K platter that contains both the 1979 cut and an exclusive edition of the “Special Longer Version” assembled for television broadcast in 1983 and released on VHS way back when – now in Ultra High Definition and, for the first time, widescreen. (Again: Not exactly essential viewing, but if you’re looking for something fans will murder each other to possess, this is definitely that.)

The discs are packaged with a lovely little book of concept art and stills, some positively charming reproductions of lobby cards, stickers and bookmarks, and a general sense that this is the final word on the subject of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Ad astra, baby.

As for the other movies, the 4K and Blu-ray discs for The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home are exactly the same as the ones in the previous set, with Wrath of Khan offering both the 1982 theatrical version and the slightly extended edition Meyer released a few years ago. The 4K edition of The Undiscovered Country also offers both cuts of the film – the 1991 theatrical cut, and the extended version released on VHS, LD and DVD (its Super 35 frame opened up to 2.00:1 for some weird reason) – in lovely scope presentations. The Blu-ray only offers the theatrical cut, though the scenes restored to the extended version are around in the supplements.

Oh, right, the supplements. If you’ve owned these movies on Blu-ray before, you’ll be familiar with all the legacy extras – exhaustive commentaries, featurettes, archival interviews, production art, fan stuff and so much more. It’s very good stuff, but we’ve literally seen it all before. If you’re looking for anything shiny and new, it’s all on The Motion Picture: In addition to the existing audio commentaries (rest in power, Douglas Trumbull) and legacy extras, the TMP Blu-ray includes a new 45-minute documentary on the film’s production, reclamation and rehabilitation over the decades, along with never-before-released effects tests, costume tests and the computer graphics designed for the bridge. We also get three brief deleted scenes that didn’t make it into any cut of the film, as distinct from the galleries of scenes deleted from the other versions.

Look, you already know if you want to buy these sets; if you already have last year’s set, grab the deluxe TMP set while it’s still around and maybe pick up The Undiscovered Country to round out your collection. The Final Frontier … eh, let’s all pretend Sybok helped us shed those particular memories. Better for everyone, really.

Okay, back to work. See you on John Street.

Later this week, assuming my head stays on my torso: Greg Mottola's Confess, Fletch and the 4K edition of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis! Because why not, really.