| Written by: | Harold Livingston | | | Directed by: | Robert Wise | | | Release Date: | 1979 |
Good news everyone! Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm going to improve the internet by posting a few thousand extra words about Star Trek: The Motion Picture, padded out with pictures of people in beige staring at a cloud.
I love that this is called 'The Motion Picture' by the way. It's not a film or a movie, it's a motion picture, it's about something, it cost money. A feature film based on a TV series starring the same cast isn't unheard of, but they're rarely set up to be the next 2001: A Space Odyssey. They even got Robert Wise, the guy who made The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain, to direct it. Which kind of explains why it looks like The Andromeda Strain now that I think about it.
There were a few attempts during the 70s to bring Trek back in some form, but this particular project started life as Star Trek: Phase II, a television series starring most of the same cast (minus Leonard Nimoy) intended to launch a new fourth US TV network. But someone decided the pilot script had movie potential and there were soon bigger plans in play. From what I've heard the series was actually cancelled within a month of being announced, but they had to let pre-production roll along for almost a year while they got the movie deals in place. Of course the film was expected to pay for all the work done on the false starts along the way, which made it seem even more wildly over-budget than it actually was. The most expensive movie ever made at the time in fact, aside from maybe Superman. But you couldn't call it flop; if you adjust for ticket price inflation it's actually right up there with the J.J. Abrams movies.
You'd think this leap to cinemas was inspired by the success of Star Wars, but it was apparently much the opposite. I read that Paramount believed they'd missed their chance because everyone had already spent their money on one big sci-fi movie and wouldn't want to see two of them in just a few years! That's why they were making Phase II instead. But the massive success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that same year made it clear that science fiction had a future.
Anyway this is going to be 50 images separated by SPOILERS for the entire motion picture, so either mentally prepare yourself for that ordeal, or bail now. You can tell me what a huge mistake this was in the comments box underneath.
Then after that, there's a minute of opening credits! I was a bit surprised at first when the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme started playing, but then I remembered it originally came from this movie. They actually had a different theme recorded for Next Gen but it sounded like it belonged to a 70s Superman series so they went with the Goldsmith movie theme instead.
But now I'm watching Klingon battle cruisers, and I appreciate how they're pretty much the same ships featured in the TV series a decade earlier. They built a new model with far more surface detail, but they didn't pull a Transformers and completely reinvent them for a modern audience.
There’s a few firsts in this shot: it's the first time we see the Klingons in their traditional outfits, the first time they have bumpy foreheads, the first time any Star Trek race has the cliché bumpy forehead look, and the first time we ever see the inside of a Klingon ship. Well unless you count the one the Romulans were using in The Enterprise Incident.
That’s Mark Lenard in the captain’s chair by the way, completing his alien hat-trick after playing the first Romulan who appeared in the TV series and Spock's dad. What's special about this appearance though, is that he's given basically nothing to do in the movie besides tell his men on the rotating tactical arcade cabinets to start shooting torpedoes.
This is the first time we ever got to see that beautiful photon torpedo effect, created by shooting a 20 watt laser through a rotating crystal in a smoky room. It’s also probably the first time in Star Trek they've ever composited both a ship and the target it’s firing at in the frame together. In the Original Series it'd always be a shot of the Enterprise firing phasers, then a shot of the other ship being hit (or vice versa).
The folks at the Epsilon IX monitoring station have been monitoring all this, and have determined that the cloud's current heading will take it into Federation space close by to them... on a precise heading to Earth!
Spock's here to undertake the kal-if-fee ritual: the purging of all emotion. Wait, that one's the fight to the death with sticks. He's been undertaking the Kolinahr ritual, and he was doing really well for the first few years until he began hearing the cloud in his head. The Vulcan master detects that it's been stirring up emotion in him and just tosses his Kolinahr medallion onto the ground. I suppose it must be logical to leave jewellery lying next to your ancient statues if it's going to torment the poor guy who just wasted years of his life working to earn the thing.
I’m fan of Jerry Goldsmith, but his music leading into this scene is so damn… heroic, that I’m almost cringing. I feel like lowering the volume in case the neighbours hear it and that’s not typically the experience I’m after in my sci-fi movies. Yes I know it's just the theme tune again, but twice in 10 minutes is too much!
Kirk is being a bit of a jerk here, demanding that the Enterprise be made ready 8 hours earlier than humanly possible and scheming to take command of her again. But he’s a Star Trek admiral now, so being a dick and trying to take command is pretty much in his job description.
I suppose they just wanted to get their money's worth out of the massive 6 foot tall model they'd built. They get even more use out of it in the next movie, as the model plays the role of the considerably more plot-relevant science station Regula I.
Mr Scott feels the ship needs more work and a shakedown cruise, but seeing as there’s an alien object on its way to potentially obliterate humanity in less than three days, his concerns are a low priority to Kirk. But why does it need to be the Enterprise that goes out to meet it? Because despite Starfleet having a fleet of these starships, she's somehow the only one within interception range!
C’mon Starfleet, the Klingons managed to get three battle cruisers over to it and it wasn’t even threatening them!
FIVE HOURS LATER.
The ship looks pure white in these shots, but the Enterprise model actually had a ridiculously expensive pearlescent paint job.
The Enterprise is obviously not the ideal shape for what it does, with its engines up at the top, a thin neck and tiny pylons, but that helps illustrate how advanced this civilisation is. They're centuries beyond rockets, rotating gravity sections and structurally sound sensible bricks in space; their ships are a work of art. But when you get close up you see all the concessions to reality, like the thrusters around the saucer section, and the circular airlocks. Plus the self-illumination system which lights the thing up when there's no star nearby. The designers put in hard work to make it easier to suspend disbelief.
Anyway I like the ship, and so does literally everyone else... except the poor folks at ILM who had to film the awkward model for the sequels. I'm definitely glad we got a refit instead of the complete redesign they'd come up with a couple of years earlier.
Wait, what was I even talking about? Oh right Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Scotty docks the pod onto an airlock on the lower hull and the two embark.
An Ensign offers to show Kirk around the reconstructed ship, but he’s still being a dick so he tells him he can find his own way.
The thing is, if you look at photos of real life astronauts or sailors, one of the first things you'll notice is that you can see them against the walls of their vessel or space station. The Enterprise crew on the other hand are wearing beige camo to blend into the carpet.
It seems that like they left the bridge layout alone though pretty much. Also they’ve made it really obvious that the front viewscreen is a TV not a window by putting that pattern on it. Which is interesting as the new movies do the exact opposite.
In the TV series it was never entirely clear what was going on with the warp engine, but here it's a long tube running through the neck and lower hull, with matter coming in from the top and anti-matter coming in from the bottom so they can annihilate each other in the middle. This set the basic look for Star Trek engine rooms for the next 20 years.
It also uses clever trickery to look like a bigger room than it actually is. See those people in white suits standing way off at the back? They’re not far away, they're children.
Kirk's down here because he just remembered someone on board he hasn't been a dick to yet: the captain! Sorry Captain Decker, you're now Commander Decker. Temporarily of course, until the crisis is over (but not really).
Decker storms off leaving Kirk free to gloat for a bit, but an engineering console suddenly lights up with sparks from the inside and it's apparently part of the transporter system! Scotty contacts the transporter room telling them not to beam anyone on board, but it's far too late for that.
“Enterprise, what we got back didn’t live long. Fortunately.”Good work Starfleet, transporters don’t need a platform at the other end to work, but you went and connected to the Enterprise’s untested systems anyway and now two people are dead because of it. Worse, one of them was the Spock replacement Kirk was chatting to earlier, so now they don't have a science officer!
Kirk’s been doing well so far at finding his way around, but now he can’t find the turbolift and has to ask for directions. He realises that Decker is watching him, and the man isn’t impressed by his new captain. He’s even less impressed when Kirk gives him the job of science officer. He wanted another Vulcan in the role, because he really just wants his friend back, but Decker’s the only person qualified for the job who also knows this new ship.
But then the cloud reaches the Epsilon IX array and they're all able to watch the event live on their giant TV. The folks manning the array try to communicate and scan the cloud, but it utterly annihilates them live on camera. It doesn't annihilate the camera though weirdly.
Fun fact, this scene might be the only time we ever get to see out of any of the windows located on the edge of the Enterprise's saucer section! Or maybe it's not, I don’t know.
Her name's Deanna Troi, and it turns out that her and Will Riker used to be in a relationship. Wait, sorry I mean her name's Ilia, and her and Will Decker used to be in a relationship. She makes a point of announcing that her oath of celibacy is on record though, which comes out of nowhere and is never explained.
You can't tell by looking at her, but Ilia is an alien from Delta IV. So now we've gone from aliens with forehead makeup, to aliens with ear makeup, to a woman with her head shaved.
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| Star Trek: Phase II Costume Test |
They’re still waiting on one last officer, who refuses to beam up for whatever reason (maybe because he saw the cleaners scraping off the remains of the last two who tried beaming up). So Kirk goes down to the transporter room to convince him.
Doctor McCoy is furious about the whole thing, as he's been pulled back into Starfleet against his will due to a reserve activation clause. Turns out that it's all Kirk's fault, as he needs his friend on board as an advisor. Plus having another doctor around is never a bad idea the way he's been running things.
Then we get more visual effect shots of the ship turning its lights on, leaving dry dock, and flying past Jupiter at impulse speed. Why spaceships always have to go past Jupiter on the way out I’ve no idea (but it looks very nice).
Usually the Enterprise will just go straight to warp drive right next to the planet it's at, but here they're taking it slow due to the fact that the engines aren't even supposed to be ready yet. Kirk's getting impatient, but McCoy talks him into letting his people do their jobs and run some simulations first. I miss the old Captain Kirk from the TV series who actually knew what he was doing.
We never saw any kind of warp effect in the Original Series, but this was made in the 70s so they replaced the original engine with a disco warp core. They had to make the film look flashier than Star Wars did two years earlier when the Millennium Falcon went to hyperspace you see.
I want to say that this streak effect was created by holding the shutter open and moving the camera, but as far as my brain's concerned it could've only been pulled off with magic. They hired an actual sorcerer called Douglas Trumbull to come in and cast the same spell he used for the trippy star gate effect at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull's team wasn't even meant to be working on the movie, he was brought in late in production after the first model effects team utterly failed. So these amazing visuals had to be created at a pace so insane that it put the guy in hospital for 10 days afterwards.
Fortunately things are going much better aboard the Enterprise...
Turns out that the wormhole was created by the Enterprise herself due to faulty engines. Nice work Kirk, you knew the ship was brand new, your chief engineer told you the warp drive wasn't ready, and yet you just had to floor the pedal anyway.
Incidentally this wormhole was perhaps the only effects shot from the original effects house included in the movie. A year's work and millions of dollars spent, and all they got out of it was an orange hole in the universe. To be fair Gene Roddenberry did keep rewriting the script on them during production.
The crew have only 20 seconds to deal with this crisis, but this is Star Trek: The Motion Picture so those seconds drag on forever. Around a minute later there’s just 10 seconds left to collision, and I’m not even exaggerating. We’re running at 1/6th speed here.
Kirk wants Chekov to destroy the asteroid with the phasers, but Decker belays his order and tells him to use photon torpedoes instead. Because they look cooler I guess (literally in fact, as they're blue in this film).
This shot only exists on the Director's Edition DVD, as it was added to give the sequence a better climax. It puts the Enterprise, the exploding asteroid, and the dissipating wormhole all in the same frame to better illustrate what's going on. Apparently firing photon torpedoes really can disrupt cosmic phenomena, so maybe the Klingons were onto something!
The new CGI effects for this version of the film were provided by the original Babylon 5 effects house Foundation Imaging, who also did work for Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. Sadly their work on Babylon 5 was rendered at TV resolution, which is part of the reason that series' DVDs look so terrible whenever there's effects on screen. I mention that because the same thing happened here; the Director's Edition effects were rendered at DVD resolution, meaning that Paramount had to scrap them and go back to the original cut when producing the Blu-Rays.
Okay, so we’re a third of the way through the movie now and all our heroes have achieved so far is to tear a hole in spacetime and go approximately nowhere. Well at least they didn't end up stranded in the Delta Quadrant or something.
Decker points out that the phasers are channelled through the warp engines, so broken engines means broken weapons, and Kirk has to admit that he's probably right. If you want to be a good captain you've got to learn why things work on a starship, and Kirk hasn't had time to catch up to Decker yet. He's still pissed off though, telling Decker to quit competing with him!
Once he's gone, McCoy points out to Kirk that he's got it backwards. He's the one feeling threatened by Decker, because he wants to keep the ship and recapture his glory days as a starship captain.
They're not a particular friendly crew so far.
This model was actually painted a pale purple colour, but somewhere along the line someone remembered that all spaceships must be grey, so it came out looking like this.
Everyone’s happy to see him at first, but then they realise that something’s up. He may have seemed cold and unfriendly in the series, but the Kolinahr training has turned that up to 11 and now he’s just as much of a miserable jerk as Kirk and Decker are.
You might be able to notice that Spock has an aura around him that blurs everything behind him. This effect keeps happening to other characters during the movie as well, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much. The reason for this is because a lot of the film was shot using a special lens called a split-focus diopter that can have one side of the frame focus on the foreground while the other focuses on the background. It would've been possible to get a larger depth of field by just turning up the lights and using a smaller aperture, but then the rear projected computer screens would've been too dark.
By the way, does every window on this ship point at that left warp nacelle? No matter where they go it's always the same... hang on, are they at the back of that huge rec room from earlier? Wow that'd explain so much. This is another DVD exclusive effect by the way; the original shot had nothing but stars and nothingness outside. It's just a shame that the warp engine is at the wrong angle to match the moving starfield.
Now they just have to figure out how to not end up like the Klingons and Epsilon IX. They know that shooting it's a bad idea, and Kirk's hesitant to scan it or even raise shields in case it's interpreted as a form of hostility. Decker argues against this, but then he argues about everything. Kirk begins to snap at him until he realises it’s the first officer’s job to give alternatives, and he's got to learn to listen to the guy.
“I sense puzzlement. We have been contacted, why have we not replied?”Suddenly they’re attacked just like the Klingon ship and Epsilon IX were, and Kirk orders the shields raised.
The lightning hits, sending enough energy into the ship to fry Chekov’s hand right though his console, but the shields hold! If they get hit again they're going to light up with the blue lines and disappear like everyone else, but for now they're still here.
I guess it was lucky for everyone that the recently refitted Enterprise was the only ship in intercept range instead of a less advanced starship with last-gen shields. Finally their new hardware's solving problems instead of causing them! The ship was actually supposed to have a visible Next Gen-style shield effect in the movie, but that didn't work out for whatever reason.
Fortunately Spock figures out that they really were contacted, at a frequency way too high for them to notice. so they’re able to send out a ‘don’t hurt us, we’re nice’ message at the same frequency. Their attacker understands the message and holds fire, though not out of mercy. Whoever’s waiting for them at the centre of the cloud is acting out of pure logic. According to Spock anyway.
Kirk asks Decker for advice and then does the opposite, bringing the ship inside the cloud.
It's like they're loading in the next bit of the movie. I'm all for first person cinema, but Hardcore Henry is probably more my kind of thing.
So far at least 10 minutes of the movie's run time has been taken up by shots of a smaller object flying around a bigger object, and while it certainly makes it clear that the bigger object is really big, I'm not finding these murky abstract shapes I'm stuck staring at nearly as fascinating as the crew does. Funny thing is, these scenes were actually trimmed for the DVD release, and the theatrical cut is even longer.
The Enterprise swings around and then parks itself at the back end of the object. Parks itself relative to the cloud I mean; they’re still travelling hundreds of times faster than the speed of light here. Maybe the ship's inside the cloud's warp bubble now or something.
The probe’s not happy about this and decides to take it out on Mr. Spock.
Spock's still transfixed by the viewscreen along with everyone else, so it's Uhura who has to tell Kirk that the door's closed behind them and they're stuck in here. You know, she's the one who should've gotten the promotion instead of Chekov, because then maybe the actress would've had some lines. Now I'm imagining a version of the film where Uhura is in Decker's role... probably because there's nothing happening on screen for me to think about.
After a four minute ride, the ship reaches the next section of the movie and the tractor beam disengages.
They decide to risk scanning the object, now that they’ve gotten to know each other a little better, but it’s pointless. Scans are being reflected back and sensors are useless. Spock suddenly trails off mid-sentence and the intruder alert goes off.
Actually the real Ilia is still dead; this is an android probe constructed using her as template. She was sent here by 'V'Ger' to figure out what the 'carbon units' infesting the Enterprise are about, by interacting with them in their form. She explains that V'Ger is heading to Earth to find its creator, so the movie is basically about this thing's journey to find God. Like I said, it's a Gene Roddenberry production.
Kirk goes outside with Spock and Decker to have a chat about the probe, locking the sickbay door behind him. He's finally come up with a job for Decker that gets him off the bridge and out of his sight: he wants him to seduce the robot. Well, more like see if he can stir up any of Ilia's memories and feelings within the thing.
His unfamiliarity with the redesigned Enterprise trips him up again though as he doesn’t know that the sickbay doors are made out of paper.
Decker gives the probe a tour of that giant recreation room from earlier, showing her the games Ilia used to enjoy, but he doesn't have much luck. Eventually he gives up trying to be manipulative and just tells her the plan, saying that reviving Ilia’s memory patterns will give V’Ger a better understanding of humans. She can’t argue with that, so she goes along with it willingly.
Spock is concerned about her being their only source of information though, so he sneaks into an airlock, neck pinches the man working there, and steals a spacesuit. The guy always used to put duty before his own needs, but now he's gone rogue!
Believe it or not, there's actually a longer edit of this movie than the theatrical cut, put together for the ABC television broadcast. In this extended edit there’s a close up shot of the airlock Spock uses to leave the ship, but the visuals effects hadn’t been completed, so it turned out looking a bit… less than convincing.
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| 1983 television version |
Anyway Spock uses his booster engine to fly through a tiny gap into the next section, and finds himself... slowly moving forwards through an endless series of first person effect shots. What a twist.
You could presume that these are all things that V’Ger has ‘processed’ with its lightning, but I doubt it processed its own homeworld so I’m thinking that most of it was recorded the old fashioned way. Then again we don’t know for sure what any of this is, Spock’s just making educated guesses. A planet covered in lights? That’s got to be the ship’s homeworld! A big floating ball with tunnel running through it, flickering with electricity? That must be a field coil for a gigantic imaging system!
Spock tries mind melding with giant hologram Ilia's neck sensor and ends up basically sticking his brain into a plug socket. Fortunately Kirk noticed he was missing and he's gone out in a space suit to bring him back in.
He's not going to suddenly turn into wacky crazy Data with an emotion chip plugged in, but he's come to terms with who he is. So there you go, there's one important piece of character development in this movie.
V'Ger's cloud has pretty much dissipated away by this point, which is a good thing really as the single-minded ship is entering Earth's orbit. It sends out a binary code message via radio to its creator, but there's no response. So that must have been kind of a let down for it.
In the theatrical cut, this shot is far closer to the V'Ger and you never really get a chance to see what the thing actually looks like. Here though... you kind of get to see more of its shape. I'm not really all that keen on filmmakers reworking their old films and replacing the visual effects, but this really did need the extra clarity.
Spock explains that V’Ger is basically a still a basically a child with limited understanding, so with less than a quarter of the film left, Kirk finally gets a chance to do his Kirk thing and out-think a computer. He tells the probe that he knows why V’Ger’s creator hasn’t responded, but he won’t give her this information until it calls off the attack.
After pleading with him and threatening him doesn't work, the probe agrees to call off Armageddon if he gives her the information. Well it's a good first step, but now Kirk needs to figure out part two of his plan.
He lies and says the information can only be given to V'Ger directly at its core. Also he needs to bring a gigantic antimatter bomb with him and park it nearby. No seriously, that's the plan. They're going to have the Enterprise self-destruct and annihilate V'Ger from the inside... unless Kirk can think off a better scheme when he gets there. He's like Gene Roddenberry, hoping he can come up with an ending at the last minute.
This means another tractor beam ride inside V’Ger! 5 minutes later, the Enterprise slows to a halt and oxygen is pumped around the ship. They have reached the core.
This is another new shot for the Director's Edition, created to replace a matte painting. I was a bit annoyed about this at first, as this is probably the most obvious CGI in any of the new shots, and I remembered the matte painting looking just fine the way it was.
But I remembered wrong.
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| Theatrical version |
So now the landing party have to finish the rest of the journey on foot, but takes them less than a minute to discover that the heart of V'Ger....
It fell through “what we once called a black hole” and ended up on a planet of machines that fixed it up, gave it intelligence, equipped it with weaponry powerful enough to wipe out entire planets, and sent it back out to complete its mission. I guess they thought it'd be a laugh.
We only got as far as making Voyager 2 in reality, but they’re both still out there 38 years later, still sending messages back to Earth. And we have to keep telling them they’re doing a good job or else they’ll come back and wipe us out.
Funnily enough Kirk's actually been in this situation before, as the episode The Changeling also featured a reconstructed human probe with intelligence and devastating destructive capabilities coming home to find its creator. He tricked that probe into killing itself because it didn't meet its own standards of perfection, but this time he can simply give V'Ger what it wants: the response codes from NASA.
But the thing is, V'Ger doesn't want to upload its data and retire, it wants to meet with its creator and join with it. It's desperate to find a purpose in life and become something more than it is now. Well, as desperate as a purely logical being can be.
And after successful usurping the Enterprise from the new cast members, restoring the status quo, and saving the Earth, the original three leads head back to their ship. But Willard Decker and Ilia will basically return with slightly different names and new actors in… Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Back on the bridge everyone friendly and smiling again like in the old days, except for Spock who’s back to his original 90% logical self. Kirk's got his ship, his friends, and his sense of humour back, and decides to give Scotty that shakedown cruise he wanted. The last line of the movie is him telling the navigator to set a course "Out there, thataway."
The ship flies off, “The human adventure is just beginning,” comes up on screen, and the credits roll.
CONCLUSION
When they called this Star Trek: The Motion Picture they really weren't lying. The camera pans across models and pushes forward through abstract blue weirdness for minutes at a time! The filmmakers were really counting on people being mesmerised by their first person effects sequences, but it's just shapes and lights drifting by. There's no excitement, no tension, nothing to contemplate, nothing to examine, and every single time it only leads to yet another section of murky blue scenery! Plus I could barely tell what I was looking at half the time. Personally I just wanted them to get back to the interesting part, the bit where the characters bounce lines off each other and solve problems.
The trouble with that though, is that Kirk and Spock start off cold, unfriendly and so focused on getting things done and satisfying their own needs that they're practically unrecognisable. Their story arcs are about them regaining the camaraderie and humanity needed to function effectively as a Starfleet crew, but that means we're stuck watching unlikeable jerks for a lot of the run time. The other returning cast members on the other hand are very much their old selves, but they're mostly just on screen to justify all the chairs they've got lying around the bridge.
It's not all bad though, as it's nice to see space travel being taken a bit more seriously. It takes a team of experts to run the Enterprise in this film, and they clearly respect the hardware they're trusting their lives to. When they get a commander with gaps in his knowledge of the ship his decisions nearly kill them all. Twice in five minutes. Though I have to admit I liked that film better when Kirk was finally given something to do other than stare at his TV or be wrong. The scene when he's talking the probe out of annihilating humanity is vintage Star Trek.
I suppose there's a theme running through the film about manned space exploration, with the human-run Enterprise contrasted against the cold and logical Voyager 6. Two people die before the Enterprise even leaves dry dock, it's a really dangerous place to work. But when faced with the unknown the crew were fascinated by it, they grew from their experience, and they were ultimately able to use their wits and compassion to come up with an ideal solution to the problem at its core. V'Ger on the other hand zaps the unknown and stores it on its hard drive, because it doesn't care. Space probes are a useful tool to gather information, but if we can get out there into space ourselves, we totally should, whatever the risk. Because it's awesome.
Other good things in the movie include: the visual effects, the music, the art design, and the fact that it feels like an actual proper grown up movie with a blockbuster budget. We didn't get another Trek film so lavish and cinematic until the J.J. Abrams reboot 30 years later. Plus this is literally the foundation that two decades of Star Trek was built on, as the set framework was reused for the standing sets of Next Gen and Voyager. But all that work put in from so many talented people couldn't cover up the lack of a decent plot, and the more I read about this film, the more I realise that the story of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is far more interesting than the story in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The production was such a mess that they had to invent the themed Happy Meal to raise the cash needed to finish the film by their deadline and save Paramount from bankruptcy!
Oh great, now I'm bored and hungry! Thanks Star Trek.
Strange new worlds explored: 0.
New life discovered: 1. If V'Ger wasn't alive at the start it almost certainly was by the end.
New civilisations discovered: 0. Well they saw a hologram of a civilised alien planet I guess.
Boldly gone where no one has gone before: No one had made it inside V'Ger before them.
Other ships in range: 0.
New life discovered: 1. If V'Ger wasn't alive at the start it almost certainly was by the end.
New civilisations discovered: 0. Well they saw a hologram of a civilised alien planet I guess.
Boldly gone where no one has gone before: No one had made it inside V'Ger before them.
Other ships in range: 0.
The human adventure will continue with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan... in a month or so. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm going to be watching Babylon 5's feature length pilot, The Gathering!
If you've got any thoughts or opinions to share about Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Sci-Fi Adventures, my writing, or something else that's relevant then feel free to drop a comment in the box below! If I've made a mistake or I'm on the wrong track, I'd like to know about it.
Very entertaining read! I think I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I watched it at 5 yrs old in the theatre, so not a lot of clear memories, but I've seen it on the small screen and VHS and DVD at various times over the last 35 years. I have strong nostalgia for this movie, but of course I struggle with my adult eyes. Looking forward to reading about the other films!
ReplyDeleteI also overall agree with your assessment. Particularly regarding this felt like a proper movie and it wasn't until Abrams movies that we would get another. Trek is really at its best on TV.
ReplyDeleteI saw this at 8 years of age. I was the only one in my family that was mesmerized and I had no concept of how long this film actually was. Luckily, no one knew where I was sitting or else we'd have left early due to everyone else' complete and utter boredom. Nice write-up. I was laughing in agreement at quite a bit. My views on the movie changed as I got older, but I'm still fond of it. ST 5 was far worse than this film.
ReplyDeleteThat was a good read. This film and Disney's The Black Hole always reminded me of Space: 1999. They both have a dour, down-beat 1970s tone, the actors are all middle-aged and everybody looks very serious all the time. And everybody wears space pyjamas, and the script tries to be clever but isn't nearly as smart as it imagines. The line about the story of how TMP was made is more interesting than the actual film is a good one. I think of TMP as the last of the 70s-style sci-fi films - like Silent Running, Planet of the Apes and so forth - where everything was desaturated and you weren't supposed to enjoy it and it wasn't supposed to be fun.
ReplyDelete