To many fans and critics, the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies represent a series of missteps that never approached the heights of the show’s best moments. Part of this is because The Next Generation was at its heart a pretty cerebral show (once memorably described as “committee meetings in space”), a format ill-suited to blockbuster formula. But that argument doesn’t entirely hold, since within the series itself there were plenty of episodes–“Redemption,” “Best of Both Worlds,” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” to name a few–that allowed the characters to kick ass without fundamentally changing their natures. All of which is to say that Nick Acosta’s “Cinerama” widescreen-style renderings of classic TNG episodes (a follow-up to his previous treatment of the original series) represent a speculative glimpse into a film series that might have been, perhaps in an alternate timeline.
Acosta gave TNG the widescreen treatment live at the recent Bay Area Science Festival, stitching these shots together from camera pans of scenes originally presented in the show’s native 4:3 aspect ratio. We’ve included a few here, but check out the rest at Nerdist.