Star Trek: Enterprise cancelled

Saul Pincus · February 2, 2005

That's it. Come this May, for the first time since the early 70's, there'll be nothing called "Star Trek" in production for television or the big screen.

Not a bad thing, if you ask me. But I really do like where they've taken the HD format this year, lighting-wise.

Saul.

K Borowski · February 3, 2005

Thank you thank you thank you! What a terrible show. It was also the first Star Trek show in more than forty years that didn't shoot on 35mm. I think that it was terrible to begin with, but not even bothering with film must have made the "Great Bird of the Galaxy" roll over in his grave. The show cheapened Star Trek in every way. Not only were the stories bad, but the acting, effects, and format were all terrible. It was designed solely to bring Paramount money. I couldn't believe they didn't take a year off after Voyager, which would have been intelligent. Instead, they slopped together some second-rate concept and aired it. So ship that F900 back to Sony and break out the old 3-5 for a decent show!

Landon D. Parks · February 6, 2005

So ship that F900 back to Sony and break out the old 3-5 for a decent show

I think people take the film vs. HD debate way to fare. come on people!

David Mullen ASC · February 7, 2005

Only the last season of Enterprise was shot in HD and that wasn't the reason the show had problems.

In fact, I didn't see a significant change in the look from Season Two to Season Three other than with HD, some of the colors looked more saturated in the costumes (the dark blue jumpsuits were bluer), there was less grain, and there was more depth of field. Previously it had a "gritty" grayish look.

K Borowski · February 8, 2005

I'm not necessarily knocking HD or saying that that in any way inpacted the look of the show (especially watching from my SD set ;) ), but I have been pissed off for months about both the article on the show switching over to digital (which made film sound like some kind of anachronism that was only used for some silly sense of tradition by backwards directors), and the post back in August that touted the shift to digital as "boldly going", which is horseshit because they actually did it to save money. The switch to digital bothers me because I look back at the original show and what a sick, twisted deviant the franchise has evolved into. Just like with Lucas in Star Wars, Berman has turned the show from a show about morals, storytelling, and creativity into a show about digital effects and wowing TV audiences with "cool" fight scenes. I think that the show was ill-conceived from the beginning as it was something that was commercial, poorly planned, and blatantly visual effects oriented. It also had no qualms with disregarding the facts of history written by the other Star Trek shows whenver the writers felt like it (Klingon makeup, interaction with the Romulans, etc.) and it just made TOS look foolish. It looks like the Federation's technology regresses from Enterprise to the original Star Trek. I'm not saying they should do all of their effects the old optical way or anything like that, but I thought they should have done much much better at integrating this prequel into the rest of the Star Trek universe. Even wi Frankly, with the shows whole budget going into basically effects and paying personel now that film costs are eliminated, I thought that the effects would start to look realistic, but they still looked fake as all hell, and I guess were still done mostly in standard def for some reason that totally escapes me. I wish, instead of making film the expendible, they would have cut out a lot of the extraneous effects and compensated with better story telling. I am in fact a strong believer that smaller budgets bake for better Star Trek (ala Star Trek TOS and the two best movies, II, and VI). Is it any coincidence that STII, and ST VI were the best of the Star Trek movies but also had the smallest budgets? Hmm. ..