Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Screenplay by: Harold Livingston
Story by: Alan Dean Foster
Produced by: Gene Roddenberry
Directed by: Robert Wise
Release date: December 7, 1979
Stardate: 7410.2
Mission Summary
A giant space cloud, impervious to conventional weapons but massively destructive, is headed straight for Earth. Naturally the Enterprise, fresh from a renovation, is the only ship in interception range. Admiral Kirk temporarily takes control of the ship from its captain, Captain Decker, and reassembles his old crew–including Spock, who just failed to complete the Kolinahr–to confront the cloud.
Decker’s ex-girlfriend, a Deltan named Ilia, gets commandeered as a possession vessel for V’Ger, the name the cloud seems to go by. Ilia–or what’s left of her–explains that V’Ger is looking for “The Creator” on Earth. Spock decides to do some investigating on his own, putting on a thruster suit to mind-meld with the machine. It comes from a planet full of living machines and left to search for the meaning of its creation and its existence. Kirk bluffs that he knows why the Creator won’t respond, and Ilia takes them to meet V’Ger in person, deep within the cloud, to disclose that information.
A plaque reveals that V’Ger is the old probe Voyager 6, released 300 years ago to collect data and bring it back to Earth. Kirk explains that they–humanity–are the creators. Unfortunately, V’Ger has now amassed so much knowledge that it cannot evolve. It needs a human element to think beyond logic. Decker volunteers to meld with Ilia, and V’Ger, creating a new life form that will continue exploring the many galaxies.
Analysis
When we began the Star Trek Re-Watch, I hadn’t seen many of the original series episodes since junior high, but I certainly had seen some of them over the years. I also tended to revisit the films with some regularity–all except Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I probably hadn’t seen this movie in more than fifteen years. I hoped that this excuse to revisit it would reveal hidden nuances that I couldn’t have appreciated as a teenager; perhaps I had been missing out on something truly special for all this time, and now I could finally see the film again for the first time, with a fresh perspective.
Well, it did feel like I was watching it again for the first time, because I had forgotten so much of it (the pictureless three-minute overture that opens the film made me think my laserdisc player was broken), but sadly, I determined that I haven’t been missing anything. There are many reasons why I don’t watch this movie often–not necessarily out of lack of interest or time, but because I have been avoiding it intentionally. Though I didn’t recall many of the specific events, just a scattering of images–the wormhole effect, Enterprise in drydock, Spock’s journey into V’ger–my impressions of it were spot on: This film is tedious. There are several nicknames for this movie, such as “Where Nomad Has Gone Before,” but my favorite is “The Motionless Picture.” I can’t say that nothing happens, but nothing of consequence happens, and by that, I mean nothing truly affects the characters we care about. Nothing really changes.
That’s a strange thing to say about a movie that’s ostensibly all about change. Kirk has been out of the loop and trapped behind a desk for a few years now, and he misses his command. He misses Enterprise. When he finally gets her back, he finds that the ship, Starfleet, the universe, has moved on without him. He’s forced his way back in, taken advantage of the situation–as he always does–to his own advantage, but the universe doesn’t need him anymore. Worse still, his friends don’t need him either.
Think about this for a moment. What does Kirk actually do to affect the events of this film and save Earth? Not much. He gets in the way a lot. In some sense, Kirk has been relegated to being an observer, someone who enables other people to do things. Spock tries to work his way around him to make contact with V’ger on his own, and Decker acts behind the scenes to keep him from doing more harm than good. Kirk’s sole contribution to this adventure is to rub some dirt and rust away from V’ger’s hull–something that a race of alien machines never thought to do–to reveal the machine’s true name. Spock figures everything out, and Decker sacrifices himself to save the day, while I assume that Kirk will take all the credit.
Kirk is no hero this time around. He’s just as confident and arrogant as the captain we remember, but he’s uninformed, indecisive, and surprisingly incompetent. Spock has bailed him out on a number of occasions, but this time he pretty much appears from nowhere with a magic formula to fix their warp engines, and away they go! How embarrassing for Scotty, eh?
All of the emotional weight of this film lies with two strangers, Ilia and Decker, two people we don’t really care about with a shared history we don’t know much of. It’s like trying to give back story to a couple of red shirts. Why bother when they won’t be around for long? They’re there to serve a specific purpose and nothing more. Ilia’s loss has no impact on the viewer, and Decker’s final sacrifice fails to move us, wasted on too much exposition and technobabble; and it’s what he wants anyway, and he has nothing to lose, so that isn’t much of a sacrifice. At the end of the stardate, it seems like a meaningless sacrifice, an unnecessary one–a solution born of convenience and the desire to have some flashy special effects. When it’s all over, V’ger is gone with Ilia and Decker, as if it never happened, because none of it ever mattered anyway.
This film is a tragedy of missed opportunities. One of the joys of Star Trek has always been in the camaraderie of the crew, but they’ve practically been turned into strangers to each other and viewers as well. Kirk has more chemistry with Scotty than he does with Bones and Spock; this is one of the biggest missteps of the film: it broke up the team. It ruined their legendary friendship and their comfortable dynamic.
So Kirk’s been working at Starfleet, but we don’t know why. Spock’s choice of seeking kolinahr makes a little more sense, but why did Dr. McCoy retire early? And why did they all lose touch with each other for so long? These guys are BFFs, but they haven’t even spoken to each other since they came home? Maybe they got sick of each other after five years in deep space, especially after going through the animated series, but it all rings false, and I imagine it isn’t what a lot of fans expected to see.
Though I commented earlier that this movie is about change, it might be more accurate to say that it’s a return to the status quo. It’s change in reverse. Our characters who have moved on in search of new destinies learn that they belong here, they never should have left Enterprise and their friends. Kirk regains his command. Decker and Ilia are reunited, sort of. V’ger makes it back home. I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible arc for a story.
I don’t know if there’s a term for a movie where someone puts the old team back together; it happens in a lot of heist movies. The thing that works best in those films is the fact that the characters fall back into their old patterns and bits of their history together is revealed through those interactions. The difference here is that we’ve seen most of those five years of history shared by the Enterprise crew, and little of it is evoked in TMP. And instead of being excited about their reunion, we’re wondering why they ever split up, and why things are so different between them now. Change.
Actually, McCoy has changed: he’s a caricature of himself; he hasn’t grown or changed at all in the intervening years, just as he’s exactly the same as an Admiral walking down a corridor on the Enterprise-D 93 years later. It’s just that his jokes aren’t funny anymore. (And incidentally, his usually comedic insistence that the transporters are dangerous is rather appropriate on this outing, don’t you think?) So much of the dialogue in this film is terrible, forced, and flat.
So there isn’t much going for this film. The new Enterprise is beautiful on the outside, but like the rest of the film, it is dull on the inside, just like the movie. Everything is dark, grey, murky. This is a deeply ugly film, and I’m not just talking about those horrid uniforms. I understand the director and effects were influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it doesn’t feel like Star Trek, much in the way the Enterprise-D in Generations doesn’t feel the same as it did on the small screen.
On the other hand, the plot elements TMP “borrowed” from the series are very Star Trek: An incredibly powerful alien being testing the crew turns out to be just a child. There are some elements of Nomad here, of course, but also “The Doomsday Machine”–and how appropriate is it that Matt Decker’s son succeeds in stopping a planet killer’s attack on Earth? I might have found his character far more interesting if they had engaged with that aspect, linking it back to the old show, rather than leave it all to implication.
As I said, I remembered this movie as tedious. I always think this film is more than three hours long, but it isn’t that long a film; however, it is too long for the amount of plot in it (precious little), and it has far too many drawn out effects shots (far, far too many). During our group viewing, I commented that without Jerry Goldsmith’s stunning musical score, this film would be unbearable. If any modern film deserves to be accompanied by a live orchestra, it’s this one.
I was surprised by a few things, such as the fact that V’ger was heading to Earth (kind of an important plot point, which is echoed a little in Star Trek IV), and how much of a jerk Kirk is. And Starfleet, for that matter–it’s incredibly unprofessional and cruel to strip Decker of his command, without even telling him personally until his replacement has arrived and been welcomed by the crew. I mean, Decker was the last person to find out! And was it necessary to bump him down in rank? Spock maintains his rank as Captain in the next film when Kirk takes over. And I was furious to realize that in essence, the movie is a shaggy dog story, where the punchline is that V’ger was Voyager all along. In a weak Twilight Zone-esque twist, we discover that we’re the Creator! Ha ha ha! Bleh.
The only way I can enjoy this film, and I use that word generously, is on its own terms, as a historical artifact. It’s essentially the first reboot of the Star Trek franchise, an attempt to reinvent and revitalize a failed television show on the big screen. It’s a remnant of a failed attempt to create a new live-action Star Trek television series, refitted and cobbled together into something new(ish). It’s a seed for Star Trek: The Next Generation. (How did I miss the obvious link? Will Decker/Will Riker. Duh!) It brought old fans back, and it was probably meant to be friendly to new fans as well, which is why the crew is kind of starting over again, though I don’t know how successful it was in that.
Obviously, for all its flaws, TMP led to a long series of films and television shows, but you could–and probably should–skip it entirely and go to The Wrath of Khan. You won’t have missed anything remotely important in plot continuity or character development. That’s really the problem–this film is utterly forgettable.
The Human adventure is just beginning, indeed.
Eugene’s Rating: Warp 2
Torie Atkinson: The Motion Picture is actually one of the last Star Trek movies I ever saw, after all the good ones, and I didn’t remember much aside from some really long exterior shots, a bald chick, and a load of space vagina-like nebulas, openings, and tunnels. Turns out my memory is actually pretty good! Even after a second viewing I can’t add much to that description. For a film that fans had waited a decade for, TMP manages to underwhelm in just about every way.
Visually, some truly awesome special effects (and make no mistake, these still look excellent thirty years later) are entirely negated by a bland color palette and they-must’ve-had-their-eyes-gouged-out costumes. Even the Ghostbusters gave their jumpsuits some color and accent. (And don’t even get me started on McCoy, who apparently beamed over straight from a disco.) If Cthulhu had been on the bridge devouring the cast and crew, that Enterprise still would’ve been the most boring area I’ve ever had to stare at for two hours. Off-white and blank, it looks as if it was designed by a panel of Nurse Ratchets to be as unstimulating as possible. I thought I would get used to it but it never stopped bothering me. Where the original series is colorful, bright, and exciting, this future looks like a government issue, if-you-paint-the-walls-you’ll-lose-your-security-deposit pre-fab. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the outrageously silly 70s aesthetic, but it just feels sterilized and cold and I hate it more every time I see it.
It’s not just the atmosphere that’s stilted. There is, of course, the pacing: it’s certainly earned its monikers as “The Slow-Motion Picture” and “The Motionless Picture.” I thought I would be more interested with this viewing, more able to appreciate the little Star Trek touches I had missed the first time around. Yeah, no. The whole movie is essentially an establishing shot, as it takes nearly an hour just to get to warp drive. (Spock doesn’t rejoin the crew for fifty minutes.) I was honestly shocked at how little happens. Granted, the ship looks phenomenal and there are some truly excellent details (bobsandiego pointed out a face looking through a porthole as Kirk’s shuttle docks; I had never noticed that!), but it’s not incredible enough to hold anyone’s interest for so goddamn long. I kept thinking that if they had cut the fluff it would’ve been a fine episode–but it already was a fine episode. They recycled “The Changeling” and ballooned it to two hours with lengthy pans and reaction shots of the cast looking wide-eyed. Who thought this was a good idea?
When not boring its audience to tears with models and effects, the handful of scenes involving actual actors are pointless and irritating. Kirk is a pendulum personality, swinging back and forth from competent commander to shameless dickhead. His face-offs with Decker contributed absolutely nothing to my enjoyment of the film, as Kirk again and again makes the wrong decision (going straight to warp, nearly destroying them all when they enter the wormhole) and yet learns nothing from these (one would assume to be) humbling experiences. In the end, Decker knows more about the ship but Kirk’s still right. It’s his instincts about how to approach the probe that save everyone. Decker doesn’t even get to be science officer long enough to prove himself because when Spock, the movie’s MVP, shows up he takes over any and all functions that Decker could’ve been given. Kirk is right, Decker is wrong, Spock is useful, end of story. Any tension there, any conflict at all, is entirely moot by the end as otherwise important lessons about humility and respect dissolve into meaningless bravado. Sure McCoy perfects the you’re-being-an-asshole look and there’s a half-hearted line or two about letting go of obsessions, but that thread gets dropped about midway and I never felt Kirk was properly punished for his behavior. I think this is a failure of the script and not necessarily the story. The elements are there, but the script didn’t really understand the characters beyond a one or two sentence caricature and the dialogue lacked the nuance necessary to bring out the best of the performers.
The pacing issues and weak dialogue also enable the supremely compelling idea of V’Ger to get bogged down by too much melodrama. Something terrifying and unknowable threatens all life, and instead the writers shoehorn in some crap about Spock being emotional (can someone explain how this probe is reaching out to his “human blood,” when obviously he’s picking it up with Vulcan radar? Give him the damn necklace, lady!). In another fit of dreadful scriptwriting, Ilia’s and Decker’s backstory is provided in a single stilted exchange in the corridor. I kept waiting for more information, but… no, that’s it, some soap opera-style blather about never saying goodbye. (I believe I groaned aloud; those on Skype can verify.) Nobody else makes more than an appearance for fanservice, except maybe McCoy playing daddy to a whiny, tantrum-throwing Kirk. All those subplots, which don’t even bother to feature the main characters we know and love, wind up being a long-winded distraction from the truly interesting mystery of what this “thing” (to quote McCoy) is and where it comes from.
Ultimately, what really kills this movie for me is the complete lack of basic coherence. The setup is classic–an incomprehensible, unimaginably destructive space cloud headed for Earth. What does it want? Can we even provide it? The Klingons couldn’t stop it, can we? But the answer to the mystery is idiotic. This machine does a complete scan of the Enterprise, assimilates the personality of Ilia, and yet still has no idea that starships require human operation? I don’t buy it, and I especially don’t buy that in that memory bank somewhere V’Ger didn’t find his own biography. The whole movie leads up to a reveal that just, on its face, is absurd. The only thing dealt with more sloppily is the (again, melodramatic) ending, in which V’Ger is injected with Decker’s life force, thus solving the problem forever? I still can’t figure out what that’s supposed to do–inspire V’Ger to humanitarian work across the galaxy? Make it go away back to its machine planet where it will never again fit in because it’s been contaminated by puny humans?
Though it ends with our heroes saving the world, it’s a strangely melancholy movie, and at least on that front it strikes the right note. We see the limitations of technology when the transporters fail, killing two people. We see that our greatest threat can be something we ourselves made and infused with what we thought was a noble good: the pursuit of knowledge. And in the end, we see a talented, smart man sacrifice himself in the line of duty. The idea that we need a human element in our approaches to things–the way we pursue knowledge (V’Ger), our interactions in human relationships (Kirk learning to chill about Decker), and our judgments of ourselves and our philosophies (Spock)–is a beautiful one deeply enriched by the Star Trek conceit, and simply not done justice by this particular effort.
Torie’s Rating: Warp 3
Background Information
Star Trek became a phenomenon that few had anticipated. It found new life in syndication, and its fanbase swelled throughout the 70s, evidenced by the countless conventions, zines, novels, and merchandise. Though Roddenberry had suggested a film at the 1968 Worldcon, it wasn’t until 1975 that Paramount seemed seriously interested in the possibility of a film. The studio fielded scripts from many science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and John D.F. Black, but none seemed to work. Treatments, scripts, and directors came and went with the seasons, and by 1977 the momentum for a film was lost.
Paramount scrapped the movie idea and decided to launch a new television network with Trek as the flagship program, leading to the development of Star Trek: Phase II. Phase II would have been a new primetime series with some new characters and a new five-year mission. But between the time they greenlighted the series and the time it went into production, everything changed in the science fiction movie business. With the success of science fiction blockbusters like Close Encounters and Star Wars, Paramount changed its mind and thought a movie would be a smarter choice. More script treatments and directors came and went, but in the end Phase II‘s pilot, “In Thy Name” written by David Gerrold, became the principle basis for the plot of TMP. The characters of William Decker and Ilia were reused.
Paramount wanted someone big to direct this and they got their wish with Robert Wise. An Oscar-winning legend for directing The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music (among others), the studio felt he would bring an epic scale to the movie. NASA, MIT, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and even Isaac Asimov all consulted on the film to lend it scientific accuracy. Each of the old castmembers were round up, and some, like Nimoy, were paid off for lost (or “lost”) royalties to entice them back to the franchise. Kelley, Shatner, and Nimoy all expressed dissatisfaction with the script and rewrites became an hourly event.
Shooting fell behind schedule almost immediately but the real delays came in post-production. Robert Abel Associates had been hired for special effects work, but a year into production there was still no usable footage. The company was fired and Douglas Trumbull, who had originally been offered the work but turned it down, took over effects. The budget ballooned and with the time frame for effects only nine months instead of two years, the movie remained unfinished until the eleventh hour.
There was no time for a screen test and Wise took a fresh print to the world premiere at the K-B MacArthur Theater in Washington, D.C., which was followed by a black tie reception at the National Air and Space Museum. The film broke records on its opening weekend and went on to gross $139 million worldwide.
Best Line: MCCOY: Why is any object we don’t understand always called a thing?
Other Favorite Quotes: SPOCK: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us… it does not know what.
Trivia: There’s some rumor that at the time this was the most expensive film ever made (it cost $46 million dollars). That’s not exactly true: Cleopatra, in 1963, cost $44 million pre-inflation adjustment. Superman: The Movie actually cost $54 million, but the producers didn’t disclose its budget until many years later. In any case, the $46 million also included costs for the Phase II project that never got off the ground.
Orson Welles narrated many of the film’s trailers.
The film was nominated for three technical Oscars: Best Art Direction, Best Music (Original Score), and best Visual Effects.
The script confirms that Will Decker is the son of Matthew Decker from “The Doomsday Machine,” but this wasn’t clarified onscreen. Like father, like son.
The musical score incorporated effects from an instrument called the “Blaster Beam,” which was invented by Craig Hundley, who played Peter Kirk (“Operation–Annihilate!”) and Tommy Starnes (“And the Children Shall Lead”) in the original series.
Gene Roddenberry loved Goldsmith’s score so much, he reused it for the theme to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Director Robert Wise rejected Goldsmith’s original theme, in favor of one with a theme/motif.
This film marks the first appearance of the Klingon forehead ridges, which were not explained until the Enterprise episodes “Aflliction” and “Divergence.”
Uhura’s comm earpieces are the only props from the original series, which were used because they forgot to make new ones.
The Klingon and Vulcan languages used in this film were invented by James Doohan.
To distinguish TMP from Star Wars, Roddenberry decided there would be no space battles, and intentionally pushed for a more sophisticated and complex plot.
The “buckle” on the Starfleet pajamas is actually a medical scanner linked to Sick Bay.
A previous version of the script killed Chekov during V’ger’s scan of the ship.
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I tell you what, though: I was a 13-year-old HUGE Star Trek fan when this movie came out, after Star Wars and BSG and Space: 1999 and Blake’s 7, and I LOVED it then. It was slow, and it was Nomad, but it was Star Trek again! I don’t think I can overstate the effect it had on me, to have new Trek on-screen. Even crap, it was better than what they’d left us with (Turnabout Intruder and TAS).
Now? I doubt I’d stay awake through the whole thing. But when I was 13, I was goggle-eyed and went to see it again and again. Of course, one had to, as only the very wealthy had VTRs (sic) yet.
Which reminds me, when a friend of mine got the first VCR on our block, they bought the movie “The Sting” with it, and I remember my mother scoffing: “Who’d want to own a copy of a movie? Who’d want to keep seeing it over and over?”
Not my mum’s best moment of intuition.
@1 CaitieCait
That’s a really good point. It would be an entirely different experience to see the film after more than a decade of not seeing those characters onscreen, animated series notwithstanding. I might have enjoyed Star Trek Generations more if the show hadn’t just gone off the air with an amazing finale.
My original viewing of Star Trek and the movies also was all in a rush–I didn’t even have to wait a day to see what happened to Spock after Star Trek II, and since I’d seen VI already, I kind of new he’d make it in the end.
The shows you’ve just mentioned, Space: 1999, Battlestar Galactica, and Blake’s 7 may have more in common with TMP than Star Trek did. Science fiction on television in the 70s was quite different from that of the 60s, and I wonder if those influences simply fit Star Trek poorly. It was only when they went back to what worked well on the show that the movies really became something special.
It’s easy to rag on TMP for its many flaws (I’ve referred to it as Star Trek: The Filmstrip)–but I also remember seeing it in the theater, and the audience actually cheering during the long, slow, self-indulgent flyby scenes of the new Enterprise in dock.
It’s TMP’s Klingons that became the new standard ones, and all the subsequent films and TNG borrowed from its visual aesthetic, not that of TOS.
The weekend that ST:TMP opened up there were two big disappointments for me. One was that I was appearing in a play in high school and wouldn’t be able to attend. The other was the movie itself. It looked sort of like Star Trek, and it sounded sort of like Star Trek, but there was just nothing going on. Even to my teenage eyes it was little more than us watching them watching the viewscreen.
Even bad Star Trek is in the realm of better than no Star Trek at all, but this was worse. It was just plodding along Star Trek, and it had been done already–by Star Trek.
I was 18 when this film came out and I remember clearly walking to the theater to see it. ( I lived about 2 miles from the Sunrise Theater.) Yeah it was deadly slow and padded like a newbie in his first SCA fight, but it was Star Trek and the only Star Trek there was. The crowd cheered at the appearance of each and every character. Flawed and slow it still was a love returning to us and for that it was special.
@ 2 Eugene
Space 1999 was more directly related to Star Trek and either BattleStar or Blakes 7, both of which are post Star Wars and show that influence. (Battlestar was originally title Star Worlds until lucas’ lawyers had a chat with Larson)
It’s probably hard for most people to understand just how disappointing this film was for those of us who were a little bit older than CaitieCait. For years, we had watched all the old episodes until we were at a point we could identify an episode from just a few seconds of the teaser or a musical sting and could quote huge passages from memory. Then came the hype and the excitement. And then those people who knew all the episodes so intimately got “The Changeling” with a healthy dollop of “The Immunity Syndrome”, a dash of “The Doomsday Machine” and just a soupcon of “The Corbomite Maneuver”. Plus, this mishmash of old episodes clearly shows Roddenberry’s typical ham-fisted rewriting skills. I literally spoke Kirk’s last line in the film a good 2 seconds before he did. Meh.
On top of that was the interminable starship porn that just went on and on and on. One of you noted that there’s just about an episode’s worth of material here. Most of the rest of the time is the approach to Enterprise. To make matters worse, they offed two people in a transporter accident solely as an excuse for Kirk to come in a shuttle. Redshirt deaths are supposed to contribute to the story, dammit!
The film also suffers from late 1970s cinematic techniques. Not just the pacing, but there is a flatness to the color and the sound that was endemic to movies of the period. I think it was supposed to provide verisimilitude or something. Instead it just creates a distancing effect. A few months ago I came across TMP while flipping channels and I paused for a moment. What jumped out at me in a scene where McCoy and Spock were talking in a corridor or something is that there was no background music, just a bit of machine hum from the air circulation or the engines. I wouldn’t have watched long anyway since it was dubbed into German, but everything about that scene screamed, “Boring!” so loud, I switched away very quickly.
Maybe the best thing you can say about this movie is that a) it brought Star Trek back and proved that it could succeed on the big screen and b) fan complaints were loud enough that they realized they had to hit an absolute home run in a hurry with the sequel, resulting in Khan.
I had considered watching along with you guys, but I had coincidentally just watched this movie for the first time a few weeks before. And the idea of trying to sit through it again made me want to take a spork to my eyes. The only way I made it through the first time was that we were doing a puzzle at the same time.
Kirk really is a jackass in this one, isn’t he? He’s always been arrogant, but he’s just completely dislikeable here. If it wasn’t for the fact that we know he’s supposed to be the star, I would have thought Decker was the main character and Kirk was the evil petty bureaucrat sent to be his antagonist.
The title I’ve heard the most was Star Trek: The Motion Sickness.
This movie and The Fifth Element share one trait for me – their beginnings are different movies than the rest of the film. That opening sequence with the Klingon ships encountering the cloud and the ensuing one sided battle had some energy and seemed a good set-up for a story. How I’d have liked to have seen that story. I had that same reaction after seeing Fifth Element. However. The Fifth Element managed to win me over because that second story was entertaining and full of action or at least, confusion. On the other hand. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was – after that first sequence – just as boring as the title.
I agree with the comments about the pacing and the characters. The editing also has problems. Visual and audio effects seem to be slightly off the beat and I’ve wondered if that was intentional – thinking it could stir up some tension.
Last little bit. Over the years I’ve wondered if the machine planet could have been worked into the Borg story line. Either an effect of Decker’s joining or they came about as the result of a probe from another world being sent back to its creators.
I, too, was about 18 when this hit the screen and recall the excitement in the theater from all those who had waited for so long for a return of these characters (that excitement would be repaid in full in ST:II, but that’s another comment).
I did not find it terribly dull and tedious at the time (I do find it so today), perhaps because I was used the the pacing of films at the time. It was a technique of the era. Try watching the French Connection sometime. The sci-fi films of the era were dreadfully slow paced and reached for relevance in the form of metaphor. Soylent Green, Silent Running, etc. Even the original Alien was a bit of a moody, slow paced affair (which worked).
The shine had been rubbed off sci-fi by the late 70s, and the mood was one of post-Nixon dystopia. Our toys had not brought us happiness. Gas lines existed in place of fusion energy. The moon was a cold gray place that made even playing golf and driving around in a dune buggy seem like slogging hard work. Space was boring, and probes took forever to get anywhere and often blew up or stopped working when they arrived. Even computers in the era were absurd, clunky, limited devices.
You think TMP’s backgrounds were dull? Look at the technology design of the time, in this era before (bless him) Steve Jobs.
Yet you also had, though, Star Wars coming in and blowing everything else out of the can; and I can only surmise that this film was too far underway at the time of SW’s release to benefit from that film’s explosive energy. That would not be true of the ST sequel.
Overall, I’d say ST:TMP is an okay sci-fi film of that era. It is a terrible Star Trek film of any era.
Sorry guys you cannot blame the turgid nature of this movie on the style of film-making from the period. Yes, films had a slower pace in them during the 70s, but that did not make them dull. Jaws, The Godfather, The Andromedan Strain, The Man Who Would Be King, all films from the 70s, all films with a slower pace than today all perfectly watchable movies. No the faults with St:TMP lie with Roddenberry. It has the look he wanted, up to and including costumes the same color as the background, it shows his bias towards the same set of stories over and over. (Questor, V’ger, and Data are all machine intelligences needing to learn how to be human.) and the directors, one of the most talented in the biz clearly was better than the material.
@10 bobsandiego
This film clearly reflects the slower pace of films of the era, which also would have influenced Roddenberry and the studio’s design and directorial decisions, but you’re right that the story is a mess and was not as interesting, well-written, or tight as some of those other films. (Personally, I did find The Andromeda Strain boring, but I haven’t seen it since I was in junior high.) And Roddenberry is most to blame for forcing his aesthetic and story preferences.
But you just reminded me of his original design for the Enterprise Bridge, before NBC demanded it be made more colorful to sell more television sets. The drab colors in “The Cage” closely resemble the refit Enterprise, though I still don’t understand why he thought those uniforms were a good idea.
@ 1 CatieCat
Did you see it multiple times in the theater?
@ 2 Eugene
It’s extremely weird to be able to queue the movies up. I don’t even have to deal with season cliffhangers for TV anymore, because I tend to wait until the series is over or close to being over to watch it. But man, I remember when Scully got abducted and Anderson was in contract negotiations and you didn’t know what was going to happen… feels like an eternity ago.
@ 3 S. Hunton Blount
A shame the Klingons are in so little of the film.
@ 4 ccradio
It’s hard to believe that they tried so hard to get that movie off the ground, when it looks like no one put much thought into it at all.
@ 5 bobsandiego
I am a Star Wars fan, but it did destroy science fiction films forever. Thoughtful, slow, meditative SF is now a thing of the past. Everything has to have explosions and pointless action scenes. We have Transformers only because of Star Wars, and for that I’m deeply sorry.
[Transfered from a FB comment last night. I was pretty drunk at the time…]
I’ve always thought that this film got a bad rap, mostly based on impatient viewers and series loyalists, and watching it on netflix a couple of months ago I felt even more certain that those were exactly the reasons it was always looked over. It’s about specifically making a break from the campiness of the original series (which always bugged the hell out of me, to be honest), and instead trying to convey something further from “space opera” and closer to a stark reality of the ugliness and pettiness of people and their interactions, regardless of how we may advance – all so that we can be shamed in the end by the scope of the possibilities in the universe. It’s always seemed to me to be the one film out of the lot that’s an attempt at art instead of just making a pleasant adventure movie. (as an aside, the bit of Klingon injected in seemed to show a more nuanced and meaningful treatment than they ever get before or since)
If it didn’t have the “Star Trek” name attached to it, I feel that people would have had a more positive response. Then again, I really loved both 2001 and Solaris and didn’t really care for the original series of Star Trek much, so I think I come at this from someplace waaaaaay out of left field compared to most people.
@ 6 DemetriosX
I generally don’t mind slower films. I caught the last hour of the Andromeda Strain recently, and even having missed the beginning I was engaged by it. But movies like that are driven by subtleties of character and a deliberateness of plot, not starship porn and cartoonish infighting. TMP may have been influenced by the time but that’s no excuse for being terrible.
@ 7 Jethrien
I think that’s what surprised me most on this re-watch. I had entirely forgotten what an asshole Kirk is and I still don’t understand why. Hubris means making honest mistakes, not being arbitrarily dick to people who, frankly, know more than you do.
@ 8 Ludon
I absolutely adore The Fifth Element, so make of that what you will.
I really love your idea about the Borg. That would’ve been amazing.
@ 9 Lemnoc
Your description of the era reminds me of a one-sentence summary of Ghostbusters I saw on MightyGodKing.com once. To paraphrase: No matter how cool a job is, it’s still just a job to the people doing it.
@ 10 bobsandiego
I agree. Even Close Encounters is a pretty slow movie, and yet never manages to be boring. It’s no excuse for the pacing here.
@ 13 Rob N
I mean, okay, but it was the Star Trek movie. Trying to divorce it from the series it’s a continuation of just doesn’t make any sense to me. The fact that it was “closer to a stark reality of the ugliness and pettiness of people and their interactions” is precisely why it just doesn’t work as Star Trek. The series was always about people overcoming those things to come together and achieve greater goals. An entire movie in which people become bogged down by them betrays that spirit in a fundamental way. I’m a big fan of art films, but again, I think it’s misplaced here. Star Trek couldn’t work as an art film. Its ideals are kind of corny (In a good way as far as I’m concerned, but YMMV), and the series always privileged a kind of sincerity and optimism that only works if you blur the edges a bit.
I’m reminded of the most recent X-Files movie, in which they tried to basically gut the XF part and make it a standard crime thriller. It doesn’t work. That series works in a genre, and you need the genre box around it to get the most of that story.
@8 Ludon @15 Torie
I believe Shatner did say that the planet of alien machines was the Borg in one of his Star Trek novels.
I wonder how much of the movie’s problems resulted from Paramount’s indecisiveness and angst with what they wanted to do with their non-franchise.
You have to put it into the context of its time, that this translation of a network TV show to the majesty of film was not common, perhaps unheard of. Stars who worked in film rarely whored themselves out to TV, and the transition the other way was almost unheard of. And, actually, to be honest, I never thought any of the cast really brought the acting and gravitas to the big screen that big screen actors bring.
This was all in the days LONG before film studios began scraping the bottom of network TV trash, ultimately bringing “My Favorite Martian” to the screen. What? No “Mr. Ed?”
You had a studio indecisive about whether to relaunch a series, and if so whether that show should have a mostly new cast (Decker, Illya, new Vulcan science officer), whether to bring back the B cast (many of whom were originally cast because they fit–ahem–a racial profil,e rather than because they were skilled in the Method or casting couch); whether Spock would return (Nimoy was being a pill about being typecast and returning to the series, all the way through STIII, IIRC). I think they brought some of this uncertainty into the film by assuming they’re all estranged and in one way or other mustered out of active duty.
Undoubtedly you also had a script for a pilot, recut perhaps for a one-off special, blown up to fit a movie ratio, squashed again, then accordioned–all the attendant nonsense that goes into passing a script from writer to writer, producer to studio head, each with new imperatives. With, ultimately, cautionary directives to make it something familiar, predictable, and not terribly risky. Plus–as others have noted–what generally happens when a producer writes and/or directs and/or is otherwise too close to his brainchild.
And finally you have the dimwit studio execs micromanaging their property (same guys who told the original series to “get rid of the guy with the ears,” and who canceled it and then restored it with a cut budget and terrible time slot): “Put a little more ‘2001’ in there, and mix it around with some ‘Flash Gordon.'” “‘Logan’s Run’ was a big hit.” “My favorite movie when I was kid was ‘King of the Rocket Men!'” “I said: get rid of the guy with the ears.”
No doubt the subdued color palettes were in reaction to the cartoonishly garish pop art original sets that, to sniffy movie set designers, didn’t translate to a more “serious” filmatic effort. If you’ll recall, it took the franchise a LONG, LONG time to admit that they ever had starship bridges that looked like E1. TNG never admitted that. DS9 admitted that.
Anyway, my point is that this was a big risk, a big investment, something never tried before, and probably suffered from being overthought, overwrought, overmixed, overpadded, and over-epic. Like a lot of things that are top-heavy, it toppled.
Must’ve proven something, though, because there was a sequel.
@17 Lemnoc
Wonderful observations about the novelty of a TV-to-film adaptation and I bet a lot of these elements contributed to the final film. It really took a clear vision and commitment to the source material, from Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett, to crystallize the look and feel of the later Star Trek films–but that’s a conversation for next week.
…it took the franchise a LONG, LONG time to admit that they ever had starship bridges that looked like E1. TNG never admitted that.
Actually, TNG did admit it in the episode “Relics” when the Enterprise-D crew recovers Scotty from a transporter matrix and he calls up the bridge of the original Enterprise on the holodeck–“No bloody A, B, C, or D.” Interesting that the holodeck chose the TV show version rather than the refit version, which also would have been within his specified parameters and would have matched the more “distinguished” aesthetics of the modern franchise. It’s a lovely scene.
@ Torie and Rob N
After reading your exchange of comments I took a look at the IMDB page for Robert Wise. I’m beginning to think that the biggest mistake made in this film was the choice of Robert Wise as the director. Take a look at the list of his movies. His films were edgy. He tended to deal with friction between the characters to an extent that – as Torie pointed out – was at odds with the Star Trek storytelling style. Was it the writers or was it Wise pushing for the Kirk The Jerk characterization?
An aside. As out of place as Kirk The Jerk seems with the original cast, Kirk The Jerk would fit right in with the tone of the new movie.
And Torie. I didn’t mean that I don’t like The Fifth Element (I like it a lot), I was only pointing out that the opening sequence feels (to me) like part of a different movie.
One last comment: If you took an actor of a certain, er, limited range like Wm Shatner and told him his character motivation looked something like this: “You were wrong to accept a promotion. You need to get back your command. You will let absolutely nothing stand in your way.” Then told him the subtext was that he was the only guy who could save the universe…
…you’d probably get a character behaving like a overblown jackass.
I had just graduated from university when I saw this the day it opened in my local theater. At the time I was not impressed, and had most of the same complaints that are voiced here, especially that it was in so many ways a rehash of other, easily identifiable episodes.
At the time, a lot of fan disappointment was being written off as “expecting it to be like Star Wars.” Um…no. That would be like expecting War and Peace to be like reading the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper.
I still don’t think it was the best Trekfilm, but now I look at it and I can at least see what they were getting at. It just isn’t that bad.
I will be sending you my personal re-watch of this that I wrote a few months ago.
@ 21 Bluejay Young
To be fair some people can read War and Peace and think it’s a simple adventure story while others can read a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe. (yeah I got your reference.)
LOL
I was 18 when it opened, and went to see it three times in as many weeks. No it wasn’t perfect. Yes, there were things that annoyed me. But I didn’t care. We had NEW Star Trek! All we’d had for years were the episode novelisations, the occasional novel (and those early ones were pretty awful), some photonovels to remind us what the episodes looked like in between reruns (we only had three channels here in the UK and only one of those ever showed Star Trek. So it wasn’t on all the time, and there were no video tapes).
I loved that flight around the Enterprise and I loved seeing the crew back together. At the time, it was enough.
Nowadays, the film is well down the list, behind VI, II, III and IV (but way ahead of V). The Director’s Cut DVD is an improvement on the original theatrical release though, and the new effects (which Robert Wise says would have been his choice in ’78 if only time and budget had allowed) are fantastic. They’ve even got rid of that Vulcan ‘moon’.
I noticed though that the continuity in Engineering is atrocious – Scotty’s wearing his blue uniform; then he’s in his special engineering suit; then he’s in his uniform; then he’s in his engineering suit…
Triva note: James Doohan’s twin sons are in the scene on the recreation deck when Kirk addresses the whole crew
– http://trekmovie.com/wp-content/uploads/doohanbro.jpg
– http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090627220123/memoryalpha/en/images/0/02/Doohan_family%2C_The_Motion_Picture.jpg
@23 EngineersMate
I missed Scotty’s costume changes, but it reminds me of the distracting uniform changes in Star Trek Generations, where you had some of the crew in TNG-style uniforms and others in the DS9-style. I eventually figured out they must have been in the middle of the transition, but why would you handle that onscreen?
Late to the game, as usual, but I’m off on holiday in the lovely state of Vermont, so I have an excuse!
I saw STTMP when it came out; I was at university (UNM, Albuquerque campus), and I cut class every day for a week to watch it over and over again.
I can only explain this as a bout of temporary insanity brought on by, as was mentioned earlier, the elation of having Star Trek on the big screen after a decade of nothing but reruns. Because, yes, it is a horrid film by almost any standard one could mention.
I remember any number of disappointments as I was watching it: the Vulcan sky, which was completely wrong (‘Vulcan has no moon, Miss Uhura.’ ‘I’m not surprised, Mr Spock.’); the mind-numbing visual tour of Enterprise; the leisure-suit uniforms (Space:1999 later came out with similar ones, but maybe Europeans just do jumpsuits better); the bizarre, uncharacteristic behaviour of Kirk, the flatness of McCoy’s humour, and the total lack of chemistry amongst the Triumvirate; the utterly boring interiors; the stupendously stupid, derivative plot; the crummy transporter effect (I always thought the original television version was the best); and on and on and on….
And yet, like a battered spouse, I kept going back day after day and telling my brain to shut up and just let it wash over me.
I don’t have much to add to the rest of the comments other than that, and to simply marvel at how, after 20 years of Star Trek television episodes, animated episodes, novelisations, and general gestalt, a film production team could have gotten it so utterly and completely wrong. It started with the script, I’m sure, but that was accepted by management and signed off on as a viable basis. Which simply confirms my belief that most everything wrong in this world is down to the utter stupidity and narcissism of the people the rest of us somehow allow to be in charge of things.
The interesting thing will be to note how Nicholas Meyer, a man who, as I understand it, had never seen a Star Trek episode before, put together The Wrath of Khan and got it almost perfectly right.
Anyway, hi again to everyone! And to Torie and Eugene: is there some way we can get notification of additions to the site without having to check on it all the time? (There’s probably some simple thing I have to do and am woefully ignorant of.)
@25 NomadUK
I’m glad you found us at last! We’ll be here all week :)
If you and other fans hadn’t kept going back to see the film, we may not have gotten Khan and all the rest, so thank you for your incredible sacrifice. We can never repay that debt to you. I had a hard enough time re-watching it for this review, though I am tempted to pop in the director’s cut for the first time…
As for the notifications, I think the best (possibly the only way) is to sign up for our RSS feed via the little button at the top right of the page, not that we mind the extra traffic to our site. Torie may have a better answer for you when she checks in from her own holiday in warmer climes. She needed to go somewhere to recover from re-watching Star Trek V last week.
I admit that the vast desert of no Trek caused me to like this movie at its release all out fo measure to it quality. I used to be able quote nearly the entire film. (That’s not really too far out fo the norm for me though. Lines stick in my head like money in a politicians PAC.)
Of course once Khan came along this poor film suffered greatly in retroactive reviews. And then the pendulum went too far the other direction, particualrly if you watched the most recent directors cut with the new effects. More of the character story survives in that version. Just enough that you can see the glimmerings of a possiblity that was never obtained.
As far the script — they were re-writing ti as it was being filmed. Not tweaking and adjusting, re-writing whole sections and leaving the actors blind to what was going to happen and how the film would end. Not a recommended process for good films.
@ 17 Lemnoc
Thank you for the interesting historical context. When I was reading up about this I was surprised at just how many writers and directors the studios went through. They want a science fiction writer! No, let’s just get a Hollywood type. We want a real director! But, why spend the money? No wait, a real director! No wait, what about…
@ 19 Ludon
You’re absolutely right on every point. And don’t worry, I wasn’t offended. :)
@ 21 Bluejay Young
I’m looking forward to it. Post it here, too, if you’re comfortable.
@ 24 EngineersMate
Aww! That’s adorable. Great trivia.
@ 25 NomadUK
I don’t have much to add to this except that I really, sincerely love this comment.
Re: updates, your best option is RSS. If you’re Twitter-minded that works, too, as it tweets every time there’s a new post. If there’s some other method you want to be notified by (e-mail?) I can always look into it. I’m happy to entertain requests to improve the site!
@ 27 bobsandiego
I still think Khan was a bit too frenetic a pace to be maintained for a whole franchise. But TMP is just too damn slow.
Torie@28: I’m using the RSS thing and it seems to work well enough. E-mail would be nice, but don’t go to too much trouble.
Oh, and I’m glad you liked the comment!
@ 28 Torie
I was not suggesting that every Trek Film be like Khan. That was the problem with most fo them, they held Khan out as a model to copy rather than explore other stories. Trek at its best has always had the courage to tell a variety of stories, thoughtful SF (Where No Mane has Gone Before), Comedy (Tribbles, A PIece of The Action), drama (Amok Time) and adventure. Sadly the films have fallen into all adventure all the time. (except for IV, which also had no villian and was more comdey than serious,)
@Eugene: ” You won’t have missed anything remotely important in plot continuity or character development. ”
Although many of the criticisms here about the movie are valid, it still holds a special place in my heart ( maybe I really enjoy starship porn…when it’s the Enterprise ), but I did want to take a small issue with this statement by Eugene.
The one piece of character development that does carry over from this film directly into the next is Spock’s realization that his human half, which he has worked so hard to repress over the years, is just as important and valid a component of himself as his Vulcan self. When you watch TWOK, Spock just seems far more comfortable with himself than ever before. He even allows a small hint of a smile when discussing Kirk taking command in his quarters. This is something that only occured early in the first season of the original series ( see “The Enemy Within” and “Charlie X” ) , and disappeared as Nimoy found his footing with the character. If there is one character arc that must be remebered from this film, I would say it is Spock’s ( which is made more apparent in the “Director’s Cut” released in 2001 ).
Forgive me if this has already been covered in previous posts, but I didn’t have time right now to sit and read all of them.
I’ve been distracted lately with a very different re-watch. Something from my childhood but really a lot older than that. The Ma & Pa Kettle movies. I loved these movies as a kid and I still do. However. While watching those movies I thought about the comments about pacing in the Star Trek movies. The Kettle movies are slow – ST:TMP kind of slow. But, they still work. They are from that slower era and they are about characters who live slow lives with brief spells of excitement. For example. Pa knocks over a box of popping corn spilling some into Ma’s large bowl of pancake batter. Ma returns to the kitchen in conversation with another character. She mixes the batter some more while talking then pours out eight pancakes onto the griddle. We watch her pour all eight of them. She continues then concludes that conversation before turning the pancakes. We watch her turn all eight of them. Then she goes to the electric washer and fiddles with the laundry before the corn starts popping. Marjorie Main’s reaction to the self-flipping pancakes is perfect. It works. But, a scene paced like this would be out of place in any Star Trek movie – even TMP. Even the slowest of the original series episodes had a faster pace than a Kettle movie.
I know I’m revisiting my comment about Robert Wise being wrong for this movie but from watching the Kettle movies I’ve come to think that the problem started with the stuffed suits in the studio offices who wanted an experienced Director with a proven track record for this film. Their thinking was old school while the original series was produced during the transition to a faster pace of storytelling. The French Connection was (for the time) a fast paced film but it was an action drama. Star Trek was (and is) science fiction. Star Wars had been fast paced but at that time not many considered it to be quality science fiction. The box office success of Star Wars alone would not have been enough to green-light transitioning the Star Trek franchise onto the big screen. The other factor was that all those years after the series had been canceled, it was still being talked about in college courses and in the mainstream. Translated – Star Trek was quality science fiction. At that time, the only examples of big box office quality science fiction were Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey. These were both slow paced movies. Therefore, (and I’m guessing on this one) the powers that were decided that The Motion Picture needed that slower pacing.
Apes and 2001 worked because they had been structured around the slower pacing. Likewise. Talk of a big screen version of Ender’s Game has been gaining attention again. Even if this current effort is successful, I’m not sure that it would (or could) be a hit with fans of the book. (I’m not one. I’ve read it but don’t want to read it again.) Ender’s Game is slow paced and I can’t see Star Trek 2009 kind of pacing doing justice to the story of what was done to that boy to prepare him for that decisive battle.
Maybe I’m reaching a little too far with this one. Well. My excuse is that I’m still dropping into a universe were Ma and Pa proved – twice – using both division and addition that 25 divided by 5 is 14.
@33 Ludon
I always figured, and had read, that TMP was influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s interesting that you mention Planet of the Apes, particularly since it and TMP have a “surprise” twist at the end. The difference is that 2001 and Apes were both original stories to theater audiences, so even if they were slow, viewers may have been engrossed by the sense of the unknown (unless they had read the Apes book already). Star Trek would have been familiar to many theatergoers, who all knew perfectly well who the characters were and what Star Trek should “feel” like. And TMP wasn’t it. There were many slow episodes of the original series that worked, so I think this film could have succeeded, if it had more plot and better writing, rather than an emphasis on the special effects, however impressive they were and are.
Strangely, I have never heard of the Ma and Pa Kettle films, but I’ve just looked them up and they seem interesting, so I’ll try to check them out!
I’m quite late to the party, but reading through the comments confirms my opinion that fans are essentially unable to appreciate the qualities of the film because they are too distracted pointing out what’s wrong/not TREK while critics don’t take a STAR TREK film seriously per se.
There’s a nice blog entry by John Kenneth Muir http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.de/2012/06/from-archive-star-trek-motion-picture.html as well as a book by Justin Busch who looks at the films of Robert Wise and maybe surprisingly focuses very much on this film http://books.google.de/books?id=XWcRmW5YA70C&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false though it’s apparently his favorite film besides Vertigo and Seventh Seal. I agree with both authors and think it’s a pity that there’s not more attention to these attempts to watch the film closely. Some of the complaints strike me as strange.
1) Slowness/Special effects overkill. This is obviously not a negative quality in itself though one can get the impression reading comments and criticism of the film. The question is: Is the slow narration justified? I think it very much is because it’s a film about discovery, the peeling away of the layers of a mystery and most of all about development. These things take time and the film tries to make the viewer feel that. When Kirk flies around the Enterprise it’s obviously an illustration of the love affair between him and the ship with all the sexual undertones and the constant cutting from his expressions to the shots of the ship. And we also experience this way the size and might of the ship which makes it then all the more staggering how much bigger V’ger is when shown in even longer sequences. You really feel the size of the space and the film works a bit like an experimental film which tries to open up a fresh mode of perception. That’s pretty daring for a mainstream film. There isn’t much point in complaining that it isn’t only a straight narrative because it deliberately tries to be more.
2) Characters. Yes, the joie de vivre isn’t here. So what? Does this really have to be the 80th episode of the series in the same style? Instead we get indeed a pretty dark development which seems to imbalance the two main characters seriously: Kirk’s obsession with the ship gets a decidedly negative spin before he is straightened out, similarily Spock tries to push himself into one direction. Both however underestimate the human factor and that’s ironically also V’ger’s problem.
3) Plot problems. The parallels to The Changeling are indeed striking on a basic level. However the episode doesn’t connect the drama with our characters while V’ger is linked here to the personal dramas on the Enterprise, most obviously by “updating” the Ilia/Decker romance but also by showing Spock the futility of his quest. Plot and characters merge organically in the finale while the episode essentially ends with the knockout of the machine. It also can not be a problem of a movie that it repeats previously told material of a television show. Art is not about what is told but instead about how it is done considering that there are few fundamentral plots. It’s the way of telling that makes things look fresh.
Obviously this film is a late child of the intellectual 70s sci-fi movies in the wake of 2001 and Planet of the Apes and can also be compared to Alien with all its sexual innuendo and the basically archetypal narrative. Unfortunately more juvenile stuff like Star Wars won out in the end and the STAR TREK movies also developed in a more conventional way, but THE MOTION PICTURE is in some ways a more successful film than KHAN even though the latter is obviously more lightly likable.
@35 Lubitsch
I guess if one approached TMP with no knowledge of what came before it, or was able to separate it internally from the rest then the strengths you’re talking about could be appreciated. However. The primary audience for TMP when it first came out was the Trek fans who had been religiously watching the episodes on reruns for all those years. They (I’m among them) had scenes, if not whole episodes, memorized and believed they knew how the characters should react in any situation. For many or most of the fans from that era, the characters didn’t quite fit the their expectations. And the Nomad episode was still fresh in their minds because they’d see it every so often in the rerun cycle. While I can’t really speak for those who came to Trek later, I do feel that these are the root of the problems we old time fans have with TMP.
I’m curious. Was TMP your first exposure to Star Trek?
While reading your comment I realized there is a movie I like that compares favorably with TMP. That film is Francois Truffaut’s take on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Both are slow paced and both have characters going through troubling changes. Even the effect of the score on the movie is similar in that both scores make the film seem to go faster in scenes than the action is really going. I like 451 a lot and as I suggested above with the Kettle movies, I do like some slower paced films so I guess this strengthens my thoughts about the fans’ baggage being the block to fully enjoying TMP.
Oh kay, you guys are crazy!
Just kidding, you guys are awesome, but dammit I love this movie. It was one of the earliest Star Treks I ever watched, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I must have worn out the VHS recording we taped off the television. I’m sure my parents and siblings hated me for having imposed this upon them time and time again.
Today, as and adult and after having seen the majority of the series and all the films, I love it even more. Almost everything Eugene complains about are things that I love. I love that Kirk isn’t the hero, that he’s in the wrong for once, and not the best man for the job. It makes him seem more human than he’s ever been depicted. He’s a middle-aged man struggling to get back the thing he loves the most, that he foolishly let get away from him. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who can’t identify at least a little with that sentiment.
I disagree with Eugene that the big triad of Kirk, Spock and McCoy having lost touch doesn’t ring true. I think it’s incredibly realistic. Co-workers, especially in the military, can become incredibly close, but when the job’s done, the war’s over, the tour of duty ends, people tend to move off in different directions, and it’s easy to lose touch. Kirk understandably gets a big promotion and finds himself trapped behind a desk. It may be ignominious but its totally realistic.
McCoy leaves Starfleet seems completely true to character – he’s never been a big fan of space travel or transporters – he’s just an old country doctor. I’m sure he and Kirk chat occasionally, but Kirk’s a Starfleet bureaucrat now, and Bones obviously wants nothing to do with that life.
Spock returning to Vulcan makes sense too. He’s been the only one of his kind on the Enterprise for decades under its various captains. He’s constantly struggled between his human and vulcan halves, and he’s looking for inner peace, though, like so many of us, he starts off by looking in the wrong place. At any rate, I like to think that the Spock who’s more comfortable in his own skin in later films has a lot to do with his interaction with V’Ger.
Where Eugene sees this film as returning to the status quo, I see it as a story about these characters coming home, realizing that where they were is where they’re meant to be, something that’s sometimes hard to see until you’ve left. I suppose you could say that’s just a different way of looking at it, but I think it makes for a good arc.
I love that the triad is broken up in this film. It shows just how much these people rely on each other. Look how screwed up they’ve become in their friends’ absence? It also lets the new characters step a bit into the spotlight. Comparing Decker and Ilia to redshirts is simply unfair. They are more akin to guest stars. I realize that having the day mostly saved by the guest stars (and Spock) makes for an unusual episode, but as far as crew member guest stars go they are two of my favorites, and while they both left at the end of the film (I won’t say they were killed off), I’m glad that they returned to the franchise, at least in spirit, in the forms of William Riker and Deanna Troi.
Sure the film is slow, but that’s kind of how I like my science fiction. My favorite scenes in the original series weren’t the man-wrestling or the womanizing or the space battles (though I loved the space battles). They were the scenes were the officers were gathered around a table talking.
I will give you that the uniforms and the general palette were dull. I read somewhere that the cast absolutely loathed the outfits, not so much from an atheistic viewpoint as from the fact that they needed assistance getting them off, even to use the facilities. I will also admit that a few of the long, meandering effects shots could have been whittled down a bit. But overall this is one of my favorite films, period. I realize that this places me solidly in the (extreme) minority, but that’s alright. At least the result of everyone’s disappointment was that we got The Wrath of Khan, which is an undeniably wonderful film.
I meant inglorious, not ignominious…I don’t know how that happened…
@Torie – It’s too long. I’ve rewritten it several times and I will email it to you. I think you’ll probably enjoy it, but I’ll need to post it somewhere else for people to read.
I think the Director’s Edition is far superior. It’s not the version available on bluray, just DVD. It makes a flawed film very good, IMO. I feel like that is the version people should judge the movie on.