10 Star Trek Deleted Scenes You Must See
9. SLO-MO FOMO
There is already a slow-motion moment in Star Trek: Insurrection, of course. When the Ba’ku and Enterprise crewmembers are hiking to take refuge in the mountains, Picard and Anij stop for a quick tête-à-tête, which is really just an excuse for Anij to show off her Ba’ku bullet time skills. Isn’t the Briar Patch version of a hummingbird pretty, Jean-Luc? Is this going to be in the test later, Anij?
The Picard-Anij scene was also originally scripted to include a passionate kiss between the pair. All of the necessary ultra-slo-mo kit and kaboodle was brought in, and the kiss was filmed. Evidently, this bit of time dilation never made it past the edit.
Presenting the deleted footage as part of the DVD extras, co-producer/unit director Peter Lauritson explains: "We shot all these takes of them kissing and blinking their eyes in super slow-motion […], [but] it just didn’t work when we cut it together." When you watch the scene, you can see exactly why. How to put this delicately… It just looks plain weird!
Patrick Stewart is on record as having been disappointed that the kiss was cut, calling it a "studio decision" and "somewhat inexplicable". This is an odd statement in retrospect, as the reason should have been perfectly evident: the sequence simply wasn’t good enough. One of the film’s working titles was Star Trek: Where Time Stands Still, and it was probably for the best that this fact wasn’t made ever more literal.