A lot of the problems in the original shot remain and little care has been taken to clean these up. For starters, the horta is no where near the hole when it opens. I understood the horta as “eating” through the rock, not just magically vaporizing it a metre or so in front of it. Second, as much as I like the addition of smoke, its not enough, and the red hot rock still cools unrealistically fast. The whole thing just looks painted on and its so disappointing.

I always imagined the horta rolling into a ball shape as it moved through the tunnels. This would explain the circular holes we see. A CG horta could be made to do this, unlike the original that looked like an awkward carpet. Also I’d had liked to see the part where it knocks its own egg taken out. Surely the horta should be more graceful.

For Mac users go get DivX:
http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/?prima=homewantmac

and then QT component that helps play XviD using the DivX foundations.
http://www.xvidmovies.com/mac/

VLC is a great choice if you are having issues playing for either PC or Mac.

For QuickTime and Real, get QuickTimeAlternative and RealAlternative. The *newer* quicktime & real files are the ONLY ones VLC can’t play — it has like 1000 codecs built in at the DLL level.

I was reading through the posts and was looking to see if anyone had the same feeling I did, but I didn’t see anything so let me raise the issue because I’d love to get your thoughts on it.

The hand phasers….I know we want to remain as true to the original as possible, but with the new matte paintings, planet effects, and the Horta burning through the wall (which I thought looked fantastic by the way), would it not make sense to upgrade that corny old phase effect?

I mean, the undefined lines of it and the blue “shrapnel” that is coming off the horta at impact….one of the things I love about this project is that they don’t seem to be doing anything that takes you out of the original story…it’s not too jarring. But that old effect I find now takes me out of it, especially because it provided one of the most ample opportunities for improvement.

Am I the only one that felt cheated on that? I was expecting the burn through by the Horta, but I was shocked not to see the phase effect revised.

WNBC in New York isn’t giving Trek a chance, again they started late and of course, finished late. The real shame is that the local Channel 9 station in NY (formerly UPN and now “My 9″) has a digital HD corresponding channel and could show Trek on Saturday or Sunday evenings at 6 or 7 with a latter repeat. Trek should be yanked from WNBC in New York and given a better home.

The horta wall-melt was interesting, still jarring the way they integrated the photographic imagery of the horta, but probably neither way better nor any worse than the original effect. The ship shots are still the problem areas and still mostly look like the Animated Series to me–although the last shot was a major improvement and hopefully an indication of the direction they will begin to move in after they’ve demonstrated their loyalty to the original FX shot library by recreating all those basic shots. I still wish the model were better lit and textured–the last shot at least had a nice highlight on the engineering section, and the overall design of the shot–and the way it worked with the music!–was exciting. Now I’m getting excited again…although the syndication cuts ruin one of the raison d’etres for this idea, which is to hopefully allow us to show these episodes more easily to non-fans. Why would you want to show them the episodes with key moments edited out? That’s particularly infuriating here in L.A. where it’s running in a 55 MINUTE time slot!