Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Spacedock scene FIXED

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is an amazing film. Not only is it still (by far) the best Star Trek film, it was the most efficient. After the huge cost overruns of the first motion picture it had to be made on almost a TV movie-of-the-week budget. Several effects shots of the Enterprise had to be reused from the first film. Notably the sequence where Kirk and party board the Enterprise from their travel pod. Using almost shot for shot from the 1st motion picture, Kirk’s pod approaches the Enterprise in “Spacedock.” However the Enterpise can clearly be seen in its refit dry dock. The glorious Spacedock Model wouldn’t be built by ILM until the next film, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. To that end I decided to recomposit the Enterprise into Earth’s Spacedock using rotoscoping and new matte paintings I created for this sequence. First Kirk journeying into Spacedock to meet Spock and his trainee crew for inspection. Then the ship powering up to leave on its fateful mission. While i’m not one to mess with a masterpiece like this film I will say the one area it may improve the film is the character Saavik. When Spock lets her command the ship out of Spacedock it is played for tension. Kirk seems very uneasy at her piloting the ship. In the original cut all the ship has to do is thrust straight forward. Now in this new version there’s a bit more jeopardy if she can successfully navigate out of the huge hanger bay they are docked in. That said there have been a few attempts at this type of sequence made by designers over the years. However none used the original optical shots of the models and relied on lower fidelity home made CG models. The refit Enterprise is one of my favorite models of all time and still looks amazing. I built this very model when I was 10 years old. It was a lot of fun to play with this model again.