So there’s a whole thing with this edition. Apparently the deal is, the original movie had super-tight deadline pressure, and the version that got released theatrically was really just an unfinished rough cut. The director, Robert Wise, was unhappy with this for a long time, but oh well, that’s life for you.

Well, until the DVD era, anyway, because around the turn of the century, they let him make a Director’s Edition of the movie, one which ripped out a lot of scenes, moved some stuff around, added a few things, and redid the visual effects to be better. There was apparently pretty wide agreement that this version was better (although curiously, I never heard or read anything about it back then that I can remember, so idk), and so yay, problem solved forever.

Except that, welp, all that work they did was only done in DVD-quality, so you had new SD edits and SD effects and all of that basically unusable in modernity. So later Blu-ray editions were all of the original theatrical version, and the Director’s Edition was lost to the past. But now, in 2022, they gave Wise’s partners (Wise himself having died in the interim) money to redo the Director’s Edition in 4K HDR, and also with the benefit of 20+ years of improvements to CGI technology.

My take is that they succeeded brilliantly. Mostly, they’ve integrated the CGI into the movie in a way where it feels true to the feel of the original 1979 movie, just, y’know: better. There are a couple of places where it feels a little over-the-top, where you definitely feel like you’re watching a CGI sequence that doesn’t quite belong, but those are very short sequences that don’t significantly detract.

Because they redid almost all of the effects, they were able to go back and rescan the original negative in 4K to recomposite all the shots, rather than being stuck with scans of multiple-generations-in shots with the effects optically printed on the footage, which is how effects-heavy films worked before the days of CGI and digital intermediates — you had a lot of film elements, and you composited them together with repeated printings.

Being able to digitally recomposite the effects, and use the original negatives, turns out to be a huge deal. There’s one scene where VGER is probing the bridge where they’re using the originally composited effects, and so don’t have a scan of the negatives; this is basically a high-quality scan of the film as it was shown in the theatres — and it’s strikingly blurry compared to the rest of the movie. Really makes you realize how 4K scans of the original negatives presented digitally are doing things that film never could have done in real life.

So yeah, it’s very sharp, and even more importantly the HDR works marvelously here, with everything just looking vibrant and bright and colorful and contrasty. The sound is also great — they apparently did an all-new Atmos mix, using a lot of background sounds from later movies/TV to kind of aurally blend this movie with the “feel” of later Trek. It sounds great, and nothing sounded even slightly out of place. So all around, A++ technically. This is how the movie should look and sound.

As for the movie itself, I am apparently weird in that this has always been one of my favorite Trek movies — easily top two, maybe the absolute best. Yes, okay, the story is simple; yes, okay, the pace is stately (it takes them an hour to get to VGER, and then another 1:15 to resolve what’s not ultimately that complex of a plot). But what the movie has is impressively grandiose visuals (and if it’s cribbing from 2001 in some shots, well, steal from the best), and the right character beats. It’s extremely a Trek movie, and couldn’t work as anything else. Oh, and the Jerry Goldsmith score set the musical shape of Trek for decades.

If you hate the movie, I doubt the changes in this edition will change your mind, even if they are improvements; but if you like it, this is an absolutely incredible edition of the movie.