Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Written by Alan Dean Foster and Harold Livingston
Directed by Robert Wise
Release date: December 7, 1979
Stardate: 7410.2
Captain’s log. Three Klingon ships approach a weird blue swirly thing. The Klingon captain orders torpedoes to be fired into the swirly thing, but they are ineffective, and the captain then orders evasive maneuvers. The swirly thing responds by vaporizing each Klingon ship, one by one.
Federation Station Epsilon 9 monitors the destruction of the Klingon ships, and also plots the swirly thing’s course: it’s en route directly to Earth.
On Vulcan, Spock (no longer in Starfleet) is undergoing Kolinahr, a ritual that purges all emotion from a Vulcan—and which also requires him to have a shaggy haircut and wear tan robes. He meets with three Vulcan elders who are about to place the symbol of logic around his neck, saying he has achieved Kolinahr, but Spock is distracted by something. One of the elders mind-melds with him, and learns that something is telepathically contacting him from space, awakening curiosity in his human half. He therefore cannot achieve Kolinahr, and they drop the necklace on the ground. Okay, then.
On Earth, Kirk (now an admiral) arrives at Starfleet Headquarters for a meeting with Admiral Nogura. He encounters Commander Sonak, the new science officer of the Enterprise, and is surprised he isn’t on board. Sonak points out that the ship won’t be leaving dock for another twenty hours, but Kirk says that it’ll be leaving in twelve, and he’ll be in command—which surprises Sonak, since he was under the impression that Captain Willard Decker was in command of the ship.
Kirk meets with Admiral Nogura, who gives him command of the Enterprise in order to intercept the swirly thing. Kirk then beams to Spacedock—the Enterprise transporters are down—and meets with Scotty (who now has a mustache). Scotty is apoplectic about the jumped-up departure time, but Kirk says that the Enterprise is the only ship in the area that can intercept the swirly thing before it reaches Earth in three days. Why the capital of the Federation has no other ships in the area is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Scotty ferries Kirk over in a shuttle, and we spend about eight hundred years on a flyby so the special effects team can show off the shiny new version of the Enterprise. (Scotty is grinning like a proud parent the entire time.) After several ice ages (really four minutes and forty-four seconds), the shuttle docks. Scotty is called to engineering and Kirk heads to the bridge.
The bridge is a mess of crazed activity, but it silences as soon as Kirk enters. Uhura (now a lieutenant commander) says they just got the change-of-command orders and she, Sulu (also a lieutenant commander), Chekov (now a lieutenant and the security chief), and the rest of the bridge crew welcome him. Kirk orders Chekov to assemble the crew at 0400 in the rec deck, and then he goes to engineering to give Decker the bad news.
One crewmember doesn’t share in the excitement that Kirk is back in charge, asking what about Decker, who’s been with the refit from jump. Uhura snottily responds that their chances of surviving the mission just doubled, which doesn’t actually answer the crewmember’s question.
Kirk arrives in engineering, where Decker is working with Scotty. Kirk informs Decker that he’s being demoted to XO while Kirk takes command—Decker’s familiarity with the refit means he needs to stay on board. Decker is resentful—and justifiably so—but reports to the bridge as ordered.
The transporter malfunctions just as two crew members are beaming aboard. Rand (now transporter chief) tries to get them back, but they’re mangled and killed. One of the two people transporting was Sonak, so Kirk has Decker doubling as science officer, since no one else is rated on the new design.
In the rec deck, Kirk shows the crew what happened to the Klingon ships. In mid-briefing, Epsilon 9 reports that the swirly thing is two AUs in diameter, and they can’t read whatever’s at the center. The swirly thing then vaporizes Epsilon 9 the same way it destroyed the Klingon ships and continues on course.
The crew watches in horror. Kirk orders pre-launch countdown to begin in twenty minutes.
Lieutenant Ilia reports for duty. Uhura feels the need to mention that she’s Deltan. When she reports to the bridge, Decker smiles and greets her—Decker was stationed on Delta IV years earlier—and then Ilia feels the need to mention that she’s taken an oath of celibacy. Okay, then.
Uhura reports that five of the last six crew members have beamed aboard, but the sixth insists the others go first, wanting to see how it scrambles their molecules.
Rand beams McCoy aboard, in civilian clothes and a beard. He’d resigned, but Nogura drafted him with a little-used reserve activation clause—which Kirk reveals was at his request. He needs McCoy to help him deal with the swirly thing.
McCoy reluctantly comes aboard, being cranky and curmudgeonly the whole time.
The ship takes off from Spacedock—which also takes forever, though at least we get dialogue for this—and prepares to use warp drive. Both Decker and Scotty advise further simulations. Kirk refuses at first until McCoy whups him upside the head. Once the simulation runs, Scotty’s not entirely sanguine that the untested warp engines will work.
Sure enough, the ship’s imbalanced warp drive creates a wormhole, which sucks in both the Enterprise and an asteroid that they’ll collide with. Kirk orders phasers to be armed, but Decker countermands that order, and has Chekov arm photn torpedoes and fire on the asteroid. The impact knocks them out of the wormhole and back into normal space. Systems return to normal. Leaving the conn to Sulu, Kirk orders Decker to meet with him in private.
Decker explains that phaser power is tied into warp drive, so with the warp drive offline, the phasers were also. Kirk then admits that Decker acted properly. Kirk accuses Decker of competing with Kirk, but after Decker leaves (and after the XO opines that Kirk’s inexperience with the refit ship and two-and-a-half years at a desk make him a liability) McCoy points out that Kirk’s the one competing with Decker and that Decker may be right.
A shuttlecraft rendezvouses with the Enterprise containing Spock, who took the time to get a haircut while en route from Vulcan. Kirk wastes no time restoring his commission and assigning him as science officer. Spock wastes no time fixing their engine problem and they have warp drive again—but Spock is also even less emotional than usual, sticking entirely to duty and not even providing his usual snide commentary.
Once the ship goes to warp, Kirk meets in the lounge with Spock and McCoy, where Spock reports that he felt a powerful, and very orderly, telepathic presence from the swirly thing. He thinks it may provide the answers that Kolinahr couldn’t.
They make visual contact with the swirly thing. It scans the ship—Kirk orders Spock not to scan it in return, as that may be what prompted it to destroy Epsilon 9, nor does he arm weapons or raise shields, as that may be what prompted it to destroy the Klingons.
Spock theorizes that there is an object at the center of the swirly thing. When they reach the outer boundary, Spock senses a telepathic presence, questioning why they haven’t responded to their query. Another plasma bolt erupts, but it only overloads and damages the Enterprise—injuring Chekov in the bargain. Spock realizes that they’ve been broadcasting, but on a frequency they can’t read. Spock reprograms the computer to transmit their greetings at their frequency, which stops them from attacking again.
They hold position at the outer edge of the swirly thing. Spock advises going ahead, Decker advises caution. Kirk, unsurprisingly, goes with Spock’s recommendation and moves into the swirly thing.
After several eternities, they finally reach the center of the swirly thing, a big blue ball. Kirk has Sulu take them on a parallel course 500 meters above the object, and then 100 meters ahead of it.
A probe arrives on the bridge in the form of a very loud shaft of light that moves around and checks out different consoles. It starts going through the ship’s computer records. Spock’s surprising solution is to physically smash the computer, which gets him zapped by the probe.
The probe examines Ilia and vaporizes her, then disappears from the bridge. The object snags the Enterprise in a tractor beam, pulling them in to the object and shutting the door behind them. Once inside, the tractor beam is released.
Kirk orders Sulu to move forward and Spock to scan ahead. However, all scans are reflected right back. Chekov reports an intruder alert in Ilia’s quarters. Kirk, Spock, and a security guard arrive to find an automaton that has taken on Ilia’s form. It’s a probe programmed by something called V’Ger to observe the carbon-based life-forms that have infested the Enterprise. However, the probe recognizes Decker, so Kirk has Decker be the one to show the probe around the ship in the hopes that the probe has duplicated her memories so precisely that her feelings for Decker are in there somewhere.
To that end, Decker takes her to the recreation deck and shows her a game Ilia enjoyed. For a moment, there is a flicker of recognition, but then the probe declares that the game serves no purpose, and moves on. The probe is confused as to why the Enterprise has so many carbon units on board, and also reveals that carbon units are broken down into pattern storage when they’re vaporized. Decker offers to bring Ilia’s memories to the fore to help the probe understand the carbon units better.
The probe also informs Decker that—while V’Ger is searching for its creator, V’Ger doesn’t actually know who that is.
Spock steals a thruster suit—assaulting a crew member with a neck pinch in the process—and heads into the heart of V’Ger. It looks like a representation of V’Ger’s homeworld, and then images of planets, moons, galaxies, even Epsilon 9 and Ilia—stored images of V’Ger’s entire journey. Spock is now convinced that they are inside a living machine.
He tries to mind-meld with it, and is electrocuted for his trouble.
Kirk goes out in a thruster suit of his own, just as Spock is ejected by V’Ger. Kirk catches him and brings him to sickbay. Spock finally shows emotion, calling Kirk “Jim” for the first time, and almost smiling. He realizes that V’Ger is indeed pure logic with no emotion—and that leaves V’Ger empty with no answers to questions it cannot help asking.
V’Ger is now in orbit of Earth and sending out a signal looking for its creator. The signal is an old-fashioned radio signal, and when there’s no response, V’Ger deactivates Earth’s entire defense and communications grid. It sends out probes to equidistant points in orbit of Earth, which then reproduce to surround the planet completely.
The probe says that V’Ger will wipe out the carbon infestation of the creator’s homeworld. After Spock hypothesizes that V’Ger is akin to a child, Kirk announces that he knows why the creator isn’t responding but he won’t disclose it until the probes are removed from Earth orbit, and he will only disclose it to V’Ger directly, not its probe.
In response, V’Ger hits the Enterprise with another tractor beam. In response to that, Kirk orders Scotty to set the Enterprise to self-destruct on his order, as a last-ditch tactic to destroy V’Ger.
Spock is actually crying, sad for V’Ger, who is where he was when he attempted Kolinahr. It is asking questions about its purpose in life, seeking out its creator for the great answers to life, the universe, and everything, and not being told that it’s 42.
Uhura pinpoints the source of the transmission, and the probe leads Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Decker to the hull of the saucer section. V’Ger has created an Earth-like atmosphere and a walkway to its center—which turns out to be the sixth of the Voyager probes, sent out from Earth in the late 20th century. It fell into a black hole and came out on the other side of the galaxy and was found by the machine planet. It saw Voyager 6 as a life form, and upgraded it so it could perform its programming—to collect data and report that information to its creator on Earth.
But it’s now three hundred years late, and nobody on Earth is left who worked on Voyager 6. Kirk contacts Uhura and asks her to call up the NASA code response for Voyager 6 and transmit it.
However, it doesn’t work. The probe insists that the creator must join with V’Ger. Decker volunteers to join with V’Ger as a representative of its human creator. Decker becomes part of V’Ger, at which point V’Ger goes cosmic.
Kirk tells Uhura to list Decker and Ilia as missing rather than as casualties, and then tells Scotty that it’s time for a proper shakedown cruise. He orders Sulu to go ahead warp one, and away they go.
The human adventure is just beginning…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? V’Ger’s plasma weapons don’t just vaporize their targets, but scan them thoroughly and break them down into information, as Spock discovers when he sees Epsilon 9, dozens of planets, and Ilia in the heart of V’Ger. Oddly, he doesn’t see any of the Klingons.
Fascinating. Spock resigned after the five-year mission and returned to Vulcan. His attempt to completely eliminate emotions from his life via Kolinahr fails because of telepathic contact with V’Ger—which ultimately makes him realize that a life without emotion is hollow and fruitless.
He continues his streak of horrible behavior without consequences (“The Menagerie,” “Operation: Annihilate,” “Amok Time,” etc.), as he assaults a fellow crew member and takes a thruster suit without authorization.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy also resigned after the five-year mission, but is activated by Kirk. He serves his usual function of kicking Kirk in the ass when he needs it—though there are several occasions where he wanders onto the bridge, watches what’s happening, and then just leaves without a word.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu is still flying the ship. He’s also third in command behind Kirk and Decker (Spock is only reinstalled as science officer, so he’s not in the chain of command, not that it comes up), and it’s implied that he was Decker’s first officer, though that’s not confirmed.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura does her usual opening of hailing frequencies and such, in particular coordinating with Starfleet Command.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty has to nurse the brand-new engines through an ad-hoc shakedown, though it’s Spock who actually fixes the biggest problem.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov is now chief of security and tactical officer. He also gets to scream when his console exploding burns his arm and also has the funniest non-McCoy line of the movie. When Decker tells him not to interfere with the probe (right before it kills Ilia), Chekov stares nervously at it and cries, “Absolutely, I will not interfere!”
Go put on a red shirt. Only four crew members die, and none of them are security, amazingly enough: Sonak and another person (I suppose she could’ve been security…) in the transporter malfunction, Ilia from the probe, and Decker sacrificing himself to transform V’Ger.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Decker and Ilia have a past from his time serving on Delta IV. When the probe arrives on board looking like Ilia, she’s in the shower and nude, so Kirk puts, not a uniform or simple civilian clothes, but a revealing sexy bathrobe on her. Sure.
Deltans have a very strong sex drive, and she has a goofy-inducing effect on the male members of the crew similar to that of “Mudd’s Women,” though this is natural rather than artificial. (Notably, this aspect of Ilia’s character is heavily downplayed in the director’s cut.)
Channel open.
“Why is any object we don’t understand always called a ‘thing’?”
–McCoy, being cranky-yet-insightful.
Welcome aboard. Besides the big three returning, we’ve got James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Majel Barrett, and Grace Lee Whitney back in their familiar roles. Doohan, Nichols, Takei, and Barrett were last seen in the animated series, while Koenig was last seen in “Turnabout Intruder” and Whitney was last seen in “The Conscience of the King.” Persis Khambatta and Stephen Collins are the big “guests,” playing Ilia and Decker, respectively. It was one of Khambatta’s first American roles, and she was billed, “Presenting Persis Khambatta,” making it look like her coming-out party in American film, even though it was not her first role.
Mark Lenard achieves a trifecta by appearing as the Klingon captain in the opening sequence, having previously played a Romulan (“Balance of Terror“) and a Vulcan (“Journey to Babel,” “Yesteryear“). He’ll next be seen in The Search for Spock, reprising the role of Sarek.
In addition, David Gautreaux—who was set to play Xon in Phase II (see below)—gets a make-good by being cast as the commander of Epsilon 9. Marcy Lafferty (William Shatner’s wife at the time of filming) plays DiFalco, Ilia’s replacement at navigation, Jon Rashad Kamal plays the ill-fated Sonak, and Edna Glover plays the Vulcan who refuses to grant Spock Kolinahr.
Trivial matters: By the mid-1970s, Paramount had obtained all the assets of Desilu Studios, the production company that owned Star Trek. Paramount was considering starting a fourth network, with Star Trek: Phase II as its flagship. That plan wound up being abandoned, though several scripts had been commissioned. Two of them were rewritten into TNG episodes—”The Child” and “Devil’s Due“—and the pilot, “In Thy Image,” was repurposed into the script for the movie that Paramount decided to do instead. In 1995, Paramount again decided to form a network and use a Star Trek show as its flagship, with the United Paramount Network debuting with Voyager‘s “Caretaker” in January of that year. UPN only lasted eleven years before it was merged with the WB to form the CW.
Roddenberry was contracted to do a Star Trek movie with Paramount going back to 1974, though all of his story notions, and those of other writers commissioned by Roddenberry and by Paramount were rejected. The success of Star Wars led to rethinking it as a TV series, which led to Phase II, but then they circled back around to a movie when Paramount pulled the plug on a network, as they’d already spent a bunch of money to set up a TV production, which was then transferred to the movie budget.
Leonard Nimoy was the only main cast member to decline to appear in Phase II. His spot on the crew was taken over by two people: Decker as first officer and a full-blooded Vulcan named Xon as science officer. Ilia was also to be the new navigator. However, Nimoy was willing to appear in the feature film, so Xon was written out (replaced with Sonak, who was quickly dispatched in a transporter accident), and both Decker and Ilia didn’t survive the end of the film, either, thus putting the band back together without any yucky outsiders.
This movie famously went horribly overbudget, partly due to constant script rewrites, mostly due to Robert Abel & Associates, the original special effects house, shitting the bed and having to be replaced by Douglas Trumbull, who had to redo the effects from scratch.
This is the first time the Earth of the 23rd century has been seen. All but two subsequent movies will feature at least some scenes on Earth, the exceptions being Star Trek Insurrection and Star Trek Beyond.
We hear both the Klingon and Vulcan languages for the first time, the former developed by James Doohan, the latter by linguist Hartmut Scharfe. Both languages would be re-done by linguist Marc Okrand in the next two movies. In addition, we also see “bumpy-headed” Klingons for the first time. The differences between these and the more human-looking Klingons seen in the original series was left unspoken and unexplained for years, until the 2005 Enterprise episodes “Affliction” and “Divergence.”
The novelization of this film was written by Gene Roddenberry his own self, his first (and only) novel credit. It kicked off Simon & Schuster taking over the license for Trek novels from Bantam Books, and S&S continues to publish Star Trek novels to this day.
The comic book adaptation of the film kicked off Marvel’s acquisition of the license as well, with the first three issues of their monthly Star Trek comic being an adaptation of the film by Marv Wolfman, Dave Cockrum, & Klaus Janson. However, Marvel’s first run would only last eighteen issues before they let the license lapse. In addition, a newspaper strip was launched concurrently with the film, which lasted until 1983.
The period between the end of the five-year mission and this movie was initially chronicled in the novel The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard, and several subsequent stories were published under the “Lost Years” banner to indicate being in that two-and-a-half-year timeframe.
Decker was spotlighted in the Enterprise Logs story “Night Whispers” by Diane Duane, and also fleshed out in the novel Ex Machina by Christopher L. Bennett. The latter novel was explicitly written as a direct sequel to this film, fleshing out the situation before and after the movie and also much of the new crew, seen mostly just as background extras. Among Decker’s other appearances: the DC comic Star Trek Annual #2 by Mike W. Barr, Dan Jurgens, & Bob Smith, and your humble rewatcher’s The Brave and the Bold Book 1.
While it’s never stated in the film, it was always intended (and all the tie-in fiction, particularly Roddenberry’s novelization of the film, have gone with this) for Decker to be the son of Matt Decker, the ill-fated Constellation commanding officer from “The Doomsday Machine.”
All the characters who remained in Starfleet have been promoted since the end of the series: Kirk is an admiral, Scotty is a full commander, Sulu and Uhura are lieutenant commanders, and Chekov is a lieutenant. Chapel has achieved her MD, and Rand is now transporter chief.
DiFalco, the replacement navigator, was a supporting character throughout Marvel’s first run of comics.
The backstory for Decker and Ilia was repurposed (almost word for word) as the backstory for Riker and Troi in TNG.
The redesign of the Enterprise would continue to be the template for Starfleet ship designs in each of the spinoff TV series—even the prequel. The bridge of the Klingon ship is also the template for every Klingon bridge seen since.
To boldly go. “Out there—thataway.” The Motion Picture was released in 1979. I was ten years old, and I absolutely loved it. Looking back, I’d say there were two reasons why I loved it: (1) After spending literally my entire life watching the original series episodes over and over again every weeknight at 6pm (and rereading James Blish‘s adaptations of same over and over again), I was really really really ready for new Trek. (2) I was ten.
As I grew older, I began to see the flaws, and came to intensely dislike the film. The acting is uniformly horrible, the visuals are bloated and overused, the story is not actually that interesting (and more than a little derivative of “The Changeling“), and the pacing is abominable.
Watching it now is notable, also for two reasons. (1) I haven’t actually watched it in ages. (2) I finally watched the director’s cut, which numerous apologists for this piece of garbage have said I should watch because it’s so much better. I was skeptical of #2 because no amount of reediting can fix the bad story or the bad acting.
And I was right. The director’s cut is better than the theatrical cut, yes, but only in the way that one root canal is better than three root canals.
The pacing in this movie is just a total disaster, even reedited by Robert Wise. The biggest offender, as I said above, is Kirk and Scotty’s flyby of the refurbished Enterprise. Twenty-five years ago on The Chronic Rift, a public access talk show I cohosted, I referred to that scene as “the long, masturbatory look at the new Enterprise,” and I stand by that description. Four minutes and forty-four fucking seconds we have to endure Kirk’s “ooh shiny” moment.
And while it’s the worst offender, it’s hardly the only one. Every special effects-heavy scene takes longer than it should, from the launch out of Spacedock to the excursion through the wormhole—which has all the suspense drained out of it by the time Chekov finally fires the torpedo—to the trip through the swirly thing to the heart of V’Ger.
Watching this immediately after finishing the original and animated series is very much like watching a Zack Snyder DC Comics film right after reading a comic book—it feels like all the color has been drained from everything. The movie is all grays and blues. Even the white of the engineering suits and the short-sleeved uniforms feels muted.
Thank goodness DeForest Kelley is in this movie, because it would be unbearable otherwise. His acid tongue and snide remarks are the only relief from the endless stilted line readings. With Spock, this works, as he’s going for totally emotionless, but Nimoy also doesn’t stand out very much because everyone else sounds like that, too. Bits of personality occasionally bleed through in the regulars, but the secondary actors—from the Epsilon 9 crew to DiFalco to the guy who wondered how Decker would feel about being kicked out of the center seat to the other engineers working with Scotty—all sound like bored high school students reading off cue cards. Even Mark Lenard—slathered in latex and speaking a made-up language—can’t do anything with his Klingon captain.
Not that that character even belongs there. The entire sequence with the Klingons is emblematic of the “hey, look, we have money, now!!!!” aesthetic of the movie. Either that or, “Dammit, we paid for these effects, and we’re gonna use them!” The Klingons serve precisely zero function in the story. The swirly thing could have just gone straight at Epsilon 9 and saved us the first of many long, uninteresting effects sequences, and they could have saved the new Klingon design for when they’re actually part of the plot two movies hence. As it is, they just show up, fire on the swirly thing, and get vaporized, and then are never mentioned again. Spock doesn’t even see them in his fly-through of V’Ger.
Another character that might have been better served not in the story is Decker. Apparently, removing the character was an option that was discussed once Nimoy joined the cast, as Decker was only created to take over as first officer because there would be no Spock. As it is, leaving Decker in there only serves to make the lead look like a dick.
Seriously, we all just assume that Kirk should be in the center seat because that was where we saw him for three seasons in live-action and two more in animation, and he’s The Shat and that’s where he belongs. But watching the movie now, I was struck by how much of an asshole he is in this film. He’s been promoted—which is what happens to successful captains—and the person he recommended for the job of replacing him is in place as captain of a ship that’s barely even recognizable as the same vessel anymore. Yet he basically bullies his way into the center seat, and while Uhura and Sulu and Chekov seem thrilled, and Scotty is more guardedly optimistic, the fact of the matter is that I’m on the side of that crewmember who felt the need to point out that the Enterprise already had a captain.
Sure, it’s possible that Decker wouldn’t have done as good a job with V’Ger as Kirk did, but while the options he suggested weren’t always the right ones, he was, by his own admission, providing alternatives in his position as first officer. As captain, he might have done something different.
Plus, of course, if Kirk had followed his advice, maybe Ilia wouldn’t have been vaporized.
The only thing I actually found myself liking and appreciating more in this movie upon rewatching it for the first time in so long is how important this movie is for the character of Spock. It was a bear to get Nimoy back for the film, as various issues kept him from wanting to return to the character he wrote an entire autobiography to disassociate himself from (I Am Not Spock). But ultimately, he’s the character best served by the movie (even as Kirk is the worst), as exposure to V’Ger and its longing for emotions it can’t feel makes him realize that his two heritages shouldn’t be at war with each other, as he himself described it in “The Enemy Within” and felt writ large in “The Naked Time.” Instead, he realizes that he can and should find a balance between logic and emotion. The catharsis Spock undergoes here is reflected in his subsequent appearances as Spock in the future movies, as well as on TNG.
The number of derisive nicknames this movie has received are legion: The Motionless Picture, The Motion Sickness, Where Nomad Has Gone Before, and so on. And they’re all deserved. The character arc for Spock and the very presence of McCoy’s glorious snark leaven it considerably, but overall this is a tiresome slog of a movie that spends far too much time being a spectacle and not enough time actually telling its story, and when it does do the latter, it does so poorly and woodenly.
In that way, at least, it sets the tone for every other Trek movie, which is a thirteen-movie litany of spectacle over substance.
Warp factor rating: 2
Next week: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Keith R.A. DeCandido has two works coming out this month: the novel Marvel’s Warriors Three: Godhood’s End, Book 3 of the “Tales of Asgard” trilogy, available for preorder from Joe Books; and the short story “Behind the Wheel” in TV Gods: Summer Programming, which will launch at Balticon 51 over Memorial Day weekend from Fortress Publishing.
The one thing that bugs me about the movie every time I watch it: Why didn’t Rand know the transporter was broken? Did she just get on duty and the guy from the previous shift forgot to tell her, “Oh yeah, transporters are down for repair. Don’t beam anyone until engineering tells you it’s okay”? Was she totally incompetent? Or maybe somebody deliberately misinformed her that the transporter had been fixed in a plot to kill Sonak?
Kirk isn’t the only one having a a ‘Look, shiny!’ moment. Personally I could look at that new Enterprise all day. In fact two hours of admiring the Enterprise would have been BETTER than this film!
And the uniforms…dear God the uniforms. Footie Pajamas? Seriously? And BEIGE???
I can’t say I’m surprised that you don’t get the film. It requires patience, attention to detail and a willingness to accept a different narrative mode.
There’s a pretty perceptive review of the film here: http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.de/2009/04/cult-movie-review-star-trek-motion.html (Muir also currently reviews TOS). And there’s also an extensive and worthwhile chapter on the film in Justin A.E. Busch’s Self and Society in the films of Robert Wise. Both aim very much at the same thing I have in mind.
First this is a film of the 70s, intelligent even daring Sci-Fi and in the obvious 2001 mode which means that storytelling isn’t everything the film aspires to do and be. And what it does spectacularily is evoking SPACE. That’s why there are so many extended special effects sequences. It’s about really conveyeing through images that V’ger is basically a sum of the universe’s knowledge and power. The Klingons are here to demonstrate the futility of an aggressive approach and to establish a sense of doom. The Enterprise introduction shows us how big the ship is and what a work of wonder. But when it then flies through V’ger endlessly you really can feel how much bigger V’ger is in relation to it.
As for Kirk being a dick, yes, that’s a major point of the film. It’s about a commanding officer who is out of place at the new ship and whose experience is first partly a liability. The film takes its time to reassemble the old team and even more time passes until it works smoothly. That’s pretty realistic, I’d say. And the masturbatory sequence is on another level a pretty good expression of exactly that, the slightly unhealthy love affair between Kirk and his ship with lots of loving glances. The sexual subtext obviously doesn’t stop here with the Enterprise penetrating V’ger and in the end inseminating V’ger with new information. So the film has quite some parallels to Alien which has similar undertones.
This film is clearly not your typical Star Trek film. It was an intelligent expensive blockbuster when it was still possible to do such a thing. There are no space battles (the Klingons are rather comical in their fight), no villains, few snarky one liners and little action. It’s instead about the relation between knowledge and emotion, science and religion and so on. It’s regrettable that Star Trek movies later on chose the easy path of perpetually fighting villains when this film showed that Sci-Fi blockbuster films can be so much more. Today a film like Arrival should be a Star Trek film with its intelligent approach (a la Darmok) but instead we merely get action roller coasters.
And the male uniforms, if worn without the tunics, are entirely too revealing.
Having said that, I was also about 10 (well, actually, about 12) when I saw this movie, I loved it at the time, and I still have quite a bit of affection for it in all its ploddingness; the 4 minute Enterprise reveal and the 2001-esque trip through Vejur are still some of my favorite parts of the movie, and it’s arguably the Trek movie that feels truest to the spirit of the TV series, in that they solve the problem not by shooting it, but by science and the Powah of Love!
(I also read the novelization (and the Black Hole novelization, which came out at around the same time) repeatedly, and possibly before I actually saw the movie in theaters. I’m pretty sure that in the novelization, Roddenberry spelled it “Vejur”, which did a nice job of obfuscating the whole Voyager probe thing until the Big Reveal.)
Call me old fashioned and philistine but film is supposed to be a storytelling medium and if you need to EXPLAIN to people what you are trying to communicate then you have SO VERY FAILED.
And STMP isn’t all that ‘intelligent’ either. I mean seriously we have covered this ground before – and better.
@@.-@: Yeah, I forgot about those uniforms showing more than a girl should see. Also putting Nichelle Nicholls in beige should be a punishable crime.
I am left wondering whether I made it up, or whether I read it somewhere, perhaps in the novelization. The story I recall is that the woman killed in the transporter malfunction was Kirk’s wife. However, since I don’t see it here in the typically exhaustive (and thoroughly enjoyable) rewatch I must have been hallucinating.
The movies have been playing on Saturday evenings on Space here in Canada; this one was a catch-the-last-few-minutes before Doctor Who, but at least it gets a bit in comparison to #5.
@7, David: Not wife but a former girlfriend who was instrumental in persuading Kirk to accept the admiralty. As I recall they had a fight about her lending herself to Starfleet using Kirk before the whole Veejur crisis blew up and Kirk wonders if she’d decided to join the crew for a chance to reconcile with him. Of course this makes him feel really bad.
I like this movie. I like that it is slow and takes its time with the story, dallying along the way, and I like the whole aesthetic of the design, music, and effects too. It is a movie you can smoke weed to. I’m not going to claim it is intellectual, like some do, but I am going to say it is a very enjoyable mood piece that is great to watch on an afternoon when it is too wet to do anything productive outdoors.
@3/Lubitsch says:
I’m gonna have to agree with @5/Roxana here. This isn’t an art-house indie flick, this is freaking Star Trek. It’s supposed to be a story, not navel-gazing optical wankery. You want “daring” sci-fi for the 70s, how about THX-1138 or Zardoz for starters?
I wish I had never read this sentence… *scrubs brain futilely*
That doesn’t make it good, though.
The last time I watched TMP, I especially remember noticing the bits and pieces that are just unnecessary remnants left over from earlier versions of the story. The Klingons, Sonak, and Decker (the last to a lesser degree) don’t really belong in this movie, but still persist because they were never written out. And the extended special effects scenes really make it feel padded. Not wondrous, just slow, IMO. Judicious use of the FF button improves the watching experience.
oh, Zack Snyder dig and TMP review, it’s a lucky day
I was 17 when this came out and I hated it. I think the worst part was that those of us who were just a little bit older than Keith knew all the TOS episodes so well that we could spout whole scenes from memory or identify an episode from a few seconds of the teaser. And we wound up with “The Changeling” with a healthy dollop of “The Immunity Syndrome”, a dash of “The Doomsday Machine” and just a soupcon of “The Corbomite Maneuver”. It felt insulting, this thing we had been waiting for for so many years was just warmed over rehash of stories we knew well. And there’s really only about an episode’s worth of material here with enough padding to get it up to feature length. It was also really predictable in a lot of ways. I literally spoke Kirk’s final line a good second or two before he did.
Maybe Kirk being such a dick was his revenge for all the various commodores and ambassadors and computers who came on board and kicked him out of the big chair.
@11 – Judicious use of the FF button improves the watching experience.
Wholeheartedly agree!
David H. Olivier: As Roxana indicated, the other transporter victim was stated in Roddenberry’s novelization to be Vice Admiral Lori Ciana, whom Kirk was dating. J.M. Dillard’s The Lost Years fleshed their relationship out even more.
Lubitsch: Oh, I “get” the film just fine, thanks. I just didn’t like it. I’m glad you find enjoyment in it, but it’s foolish to assume that someone who doesn’t like something you like just didn’t understand it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Since I’m the guy who wrote Ex Machina (and have revisited the same post-TMP era in Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again and DTI: Forgotten History), it should be pretty clear that I’m a big fan of TMP. I acknowledge that it has its problems, but I think it’s a smarter, more thoughtful and conceptually interesting film than its successors, actually trying to be about exploring big ideas rather than fighting a bad guy, and it does a great job building a world that I’d love to see explored more fully. It’s a longstanding source of annoyance to me that new Trek productions tend to ignore all the background aliens that previous productions introduced, rather than reusing them and developing them further as Star Wars has often done. TMP introduced a wealth of background aliens in the Starfleet HQ and rec room scenes, and nobody ever used them again, except the comic strip and me. Well, and Margaret Wander Bonanno, who used Rhaandarites in one or two books.
And I don’t get the complaints about the slow-paced flyover sequences in TMP, because who could be opposed to the opportunity to just sit back and listen to Jerry Goldsmith’s fantastic music for several minutes without a lot of dialogue and sound effects getting in the way? Those sequences are pure cinema, beautiful interludes of music and visuals, like Fantasia. In fact, I realized a few years ago that TMP has a lot in common with another Robert Wise film, West Side Story, much of which is also devoted to lengthy dialogue-free passages carried entirely by music and imagery. It’s certainly the most cinematic of the original ten movies, since most of the rest were made by TV producers and directors, and often on not much more than a TV budget.
And while I think Lubitsch came on a little strong, they make a good point about TMP being consistent with the pacing and tone of a lot of ’70s SF movies, which tended to be slow, thoughtful, and often a bit sterile. Wise’s The Andromeda Strain is in a very similar vein to TMP, and it’s far from the only one. Going back to the ’60s, I find 2001: A Space Odyssey to be an immensely slower-paced film than TMP; that one bores me profoundly, and I would’ve found it completely incomprehensible if I hadn’t read the book first. At least TMP has Goldsmith to keep things interesting. (And I read the book first there too, which may have helped me to appreciate it.) Basically, TMP is the last gasp of the pre-Star Wars era of SF film. Well, it and The Black Hole, I guess; while that’s more of an action-oriented movie, and is blatantly imitating Star Wars in some ways such as the inclusion of cute robot characters, it does have more of the feel of older sci-fi adventure films (and indeed it was intentionally sort of a riff on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), and its trippy finale is very ’70s.
@1/SeanOHara: I think I addressed your question about the transporter in Ex Machina, along with a lot of other stuff about the events, characters, and other aspects of TMP. I don’t remember the specifics, though — something about a spurious all-clear signal going through, or the malfunction not registering, or something like that.
@8/Roxana: Yes, in the novelization, Vice Admiral Lori Ciana was Kirk’s wife for a time before she was killed in the transporter — but since this was a ’70s SF story, it presumed a short-term marriage contract that was allowed to lapse some time before.
*raises hand* Me! I’m opposed! If I want to do that, I’ll plunk in the soundtrack. As part of a movie, I’m ready to gnaw my leg off at the knee waiting for it to fucking end already so the story can actually start up again. Seriously FOUR MINUTES AND FORTY-FOUR SECONDS!!!!!!!!
I didn’t actually say this in the rewatch entry, and I meant to, but I had so much else to say that it got lost, but this is the first Star Trek production that was made after Star Trek became a major phenomenon. (The animated series kinda was, but it was also considered in many ways a trifle.) This is the first Trek production that is self-conscious, and sadly it shows. The near-five-minute flyby was pure fan service, and it’s aged very very badly. Hell, it had aged badly before the next movie came out.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think a general rule of thumb is that if you have to write an essay about why people’s reactions to a movie are wrong because they didn’t “get it”, I think the problem isn’t with them. Sometimes you just like something that other people don’t like and there’s no need to pretend there’s some greater intellectual reasoning behind your opinion. A film spoke to you that didn’t speak to most people who saw it. There’s nothing less intellectual about wanting a movie to have proper pacing for you to enjoy it.
@16/ Christopher L Bennett: It’s been a while since I read the STMP novelization. I forgot they were married short term. I did remember it had been an intense and close relationship and that Kirk felt betrayed because Lori had been hand in glove with Nogura’s plan to use him, Kirk, as a poster boy for Starfleet and that he and Lori had a nasty fight about it before he took off for the Enterprise.
Personally I would have willingly cut a few long looks at Veegur’s innards for some onscreen fleshing out of Lori and Kirk’s relationship. As it is she’s just another ‘red shirt’.
I’ve had the opposite experience with this movie; I hated it as a kid but I like it now. Maybe it’s a sign of aging, but the hyperkinetic pace of many modern movies has made me appreciate the slower pace of old movies, even when they’re extremely slow. And the first Star Trek is one lava lamp of a movie!
Worth watching, to me, just for the sequence with Spock space walking into the heart of V’ger, gloriously expressed through Trumbull’s effects and Goldsmith’s score. Those two are the real stars.
I’ve seen this argument several times when people bash WOTK or even First Contact as being “action movies” and not “real, thoughtful sci-fi.” WOTK has a lot to say about aging and death and also raises serious moral questions with the Genesis device. First Contact has one of the best ever sub-plots about Data coming to grips with his humanity, the Cochrane stuff is a beautiful statement about the importance of exploration and people like Cochrane coming to grips with the unexpected consequences of technological advancement, Picard dealing with PTSD. There is nothing inherently “dumber” above movies that are also well-paced and have good action set pieces in addition to asking important questions.
As KRAD points out the “sci fi” plot of this movie isn’t even really original to the trek series, let alone sci fi. A robot (for lack of better term) wanting to feel emotion and find its purpose is a well-worn trope.
@17/krad: I think the flyover sequence has aged quite well, in the sense that the miniature effects are still pretty convincing (and yes, I know that’s not what you meant). Douglas Trumbull’s team did amazing, meticulous work there, and as an aficionado of pre-CGI visual effects, I love the chance to examine it at length. (Although I do think the Director’s Edition could’ve stood to trim down that really long bit where the travel pod slooooowwwwly turns around before we get the big reveal of the ship from the front. Keep enough to build suspense, but the whole thing wasn’t needed.) Similarly, the V’Ger flyover miniature (if you can use that term for something that filled a whole room) is one of the most beautiful, truly alien-looking things I’ve ever seen in an SF movie, and a really incredible achievement on the part of the FX artists.
One thing a lot of people don’t realize is that the theatrical cut was unfinished, rushed into theaters due to an unbreakable release date, so it didn’t represent the best version of the film. It was always the intention to trim down those lengthy FX sequences, but the rough cut included them in full so that the editor and Wise could then choose what bits to keep. There were also some planned FX shots that were missing; for instance, there’s a long closeup on the Starfleet Command seal in the HQ scene that’s there as a placeholder for an exterior matte shot that wasn’t done in time. The theatrical cut also has only a rough sound mix, so the sound effects are incomplete and often clumsy (like in the plasma-bolt attack sequence where the sound of the onrushing bolt continues for some time after the bolt disappears). The Director’s Edition was created based on Wise’s and Roddenberry’s notes for how they’d hoped to complete the edit given the chance. They pushed for the chance to finish the edit and send it out to replace the rough cut for later showings (since back then, films stayed in theaters for months before being replaced), but they weren’t allowed to. The DE tried to come as close as possible to what the film would’ve looked like had it been completed as intended in 1979.
And one thing that contributed to the perception of the film as drab-looking is that most people saw it on TV or in the “Special Longer Version” home video releases based on the ABC-TV edit. The film-to-video process in use at the time washed out the colors and made them look much blander — although it’s true that they were subdued to begin with, especially in the bridge scenes, due to the dim lighting required to make the monitor graphics visible. The Director’s Edition is remastered from the original film stock, so it recreates the theatrical color balance far more accurately. If you look at the photonovel of the film that was released in ’79 along with the prose novelization, the colors in it actually look pretty vivid. I think maybe they went in the opposite direction from the video transfer and made the color saturation even richer than in the film itself.
The Star Trek episode of Futurama really nailed it when the bad fan script had Kirk say “my ship, who I love like a woman…” It really is a wank for the fly-by to last THAT long, and anyone would get tired of just ogling by then and want to get to the action.
@19/Roxana: Well, keep in mind that Lori Ciana is purely a creation of the novelization. In the actual film, the woman who dies with Sonak in the transporter is wearing the beige jumpsuit of a junior officer, and it looks like she may have a lieutenant’s stripe on her sleeve, though it’s hard to tell. The department color epaulets and insignia circle seem to be either engineering red or operations gold; in contrast to Sonak’s science-orange badge, I’d say they’re red.
Of course it was red!
I was 16 when the movie came out. I was a HUUUUUUUUGE! Star Trek fan. I had every book I could find, read them all again waiting for the movie to come. I had dolls, err…action figures, all over my room. I was a geek.
And then I saw the movie. First day, first showing. It was . . . horrible. They had a solid decade-plus to make this move and this was the best they could come up with? I’ve read fanfic that was better.
I will never understand why the people who made this – and every other ST movie – couldn’t have mined from any of the novels that were available at the time.
I’ve never watched TMP again. I’ve got it on DVD, along with all the other movies, but along with ST5 I will never abuse myself by watching them again.
Although I did see ST:TWOK about a dozen times when it came out. Its not a great movie either (be honest), but at least its not dull dull dull.
I recently recorded a feature-length commentary for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE with my pal Zaki Hasan, which is downloadable here: http://www.zakiscorner.com/2017/04/nostalgia-theater-commentary-track-star.html
You don’t HAVE to watch the movie while you listen to the commentary–but it couldn’t hurt! :-)
We cover all major areas: the long road from a sequel TV series to a full-blown movie, the Theatrical Cut vs. The Director’s Edition, what’s wrong with the movie, what’s right about it, and the lessons that were learned (and not learned) for the movies that followed.
When all is said and done, I like TMP a lot–it’s what got me interested in Star Trek in the first place. I liken it to a first date that went really well, but it wasn’t until the SECOND date that I fell in love. :-D
I was 14 when the movie came out, and loved it in the theater. Bought the soundtrack album, too. But I only saw it once in the theater, and never on tv, because after the initial “Yay! More Star Trek!” wore off I realized that it just wasn’t that good. Although I do love the flyby, mainly because of the music. Watch it with the sound off and it just drags.
And, oh my, so 70’s.
Bu I loved Wrath of Khan, and have rewatched that multiple times, and reread the novelization multiple times, too.
I should add that one reason TMP resonated with me so strongly is the one thing about it that Keith praised: Spock’s life-changing epiphany about the value of emotion. At the time, I was only a few years past the death of my mother, and I’d retreated into a Spock-like unemotionalism to try to control that grief, but I’m intensely emotional by nature, so my attempts to suppress my emotion just led it to build up until it burst out, which happened quite often; I ended up feeling I had more in common with Dr. David Banner of The Incredible Hulk than with Spock. Spock’s insight in TMP about the importance of accepting and integrating one’s emotions came around the same time that I reached the same understanding, and though I can’t remember if it was a direct influence on that change, it certainly resonated quite strongly with where I was in my life at the time.
Part of the reason I wanted to write Ex Machina was that nobody, absolutely nobody, had ever picked up on that profoundly transformative moment in Spock’s life. Few Trek novels were set in the post-TMP era, and those that were tended to ignore Spock’s epiphany and write him indistinguishably from the TOS version of the character who denied and warred with his emotions. The one early novel that did really try to make use of TMP elements, The Prometheus Design by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath, inexplicably reversed Spock’s emotional growth, having him reject his epiphany from V’Ger and retreat into an extra-harsh, cold “Vulcan command mode.” So it frustrated me that this event that was so important in Spock’s life, and in my own, was so totally ignored. I wanted to tell the story of how Spock was affected by this revelation, how he grew from it and toward the serene, comfortable Spock we saw from TWOK onward.
I’m pretty sure everybody thought my comment arrogant and I didn’t aim to win any popularity contests with it, but I find the comments of the detractors of the film remarkably uninspired. You just slow down the narrative speed a bit and all shout “boring”? I’d hate to go to film university with some posters here and watch with them some older films or silents from the 10s or some arthouse slow films (not that I’m a fan of the latter). It’s a pretty narrow minded approach.
@5 No Roxana, film is not supposed to be a storytelling medium. Why should it be so and who has declared that and cast it in iron letters? And it’s not that TMP is some abstract avantgarde flick by Oskar Fischinger, but why can’t it be a little bit more than just a simple narrative film?
And it wouldn’t be necessary to spell out the film’s intent in print if the viewers would try to think a little bit for themselves and find out why there are such long sequences of special effects. “Because the film sucks” should always be the last possible explanation.
@10 Why can’t Star Trek be an indie flick? Since it never did fully fit the blockbuster schemes of modern cinema, why not go the Darmok route and try to make something intelligent and daring on a smaller budget? What is so exciting about a forthcoming 14th movie with more villains, weapons of mass destruction, phaser battles and witty one liners? Especially since this kind of movie is made by all studios over and over again just with different characters but basically rehashing the same standards ad nauseam.
@15 krad as I’ve written repeatedly, I’m not a fan of your reviews. You tend to point out merely very obvious things like all the 60s sexism. If you think the film is bad, fine. But nothing in your review indicated that you really engaged with its ideas. You just slammed it for being boring and overlong. Muir on his blog has an unfortunate tendency to praise episodes which clearly are cheap hokum, but at least he analyzes the episodes and tries to get to the bottom of them.
@16 and 17 The point is not how great the music is and it’s not predominantly about fanservice. This is a love scene between a captain and his ship. First he’s a bit stiff and formal then he warms up to it and finally gazes lovingly and longingly at it. Firthermore it is not possible to really experience size as a viewer by just seeing a small shuttle put against a big ship. In order to FEEL it you have to show it and to make the viewers feel how much time is needed to even get around this long ship. But for modern audiences suffering from ADHD this is probably asking too much. They’re just waiting for an explosion to happen.
@18 Your whole post is about you, you and you. Your reaction, your proper pace and your enjoyment. But art is (amongst other things) also supposed to confront you with other and different modes of expression than you’re used to and to open you up towards these possibilities. And yes writing essays to point this out (in a more diplomatical way than I’m doing here obviously) is useful because people simply don’t care and don’t pay attention.
From a dramatic point of veiw I can’t help thinking it would have been better for Decker to remain as Kirk’s flag captain and then have had Kirk as the outsider treading on the toes of the ship’s actual Master. Kirk would be out of his comfort zone and it would have been fun to play with the idea of his merely being a passenger.
Trek has never really been good at dealing with flag officers though, for some reason, with the exception of DS9 they’re almost always bureaucrats who never actually command anything.
“We hear both the Klingon and Vulcan languages for the first time, the former developed by James Doohan, the latter by linguist Hartmut Scharfe.”
Doohan? Really?
“In addition, we also see “bumpy-headed” Klingons for the first time. The differences between these and the more human-looking Klingons seen in the original series was left unspoken and unexplained for years, until the 2005 Enterprise episodes “Affliction” and “Divergence.””
Mentioned by not explained in DS9’s “Trials and Tribbleations”.
Typo: Should be “Desilu” early in the trivia section, not “Desliu.”
That being said, your review is spot-on and matches my feelings. I saw this film four or five times when it first came out because it was the first Star Trek in ages. Then I watched it again about twenty years later and, boy, it was boring. The only good thing about it is the Spock subplot.
I think there were plans to bring the Klingons back in the latter half at some point. The idea was dropped for whatever reason. Which is too bad, I think, because it would’ve added some much needed tension if the Klingons, unaware of what’s happened to them, suddenly materialized and started menacing the Enterprise. Then Kirk could’ve talked them into helping solve the V’ger puzzle, or something peacemaking and Trekkie along those lines.
A lot of the conflict between Kirk and Decker is unnecessary. Kirk is a flag officer, he can command the mission while Decker commands the ship. In that situation you can still have conflict in command styles and familiarity with the ship’s current capabilities, without making Kirk look grasping and petty to the officer he had been mentoring. But no, Kirk has to have the chair as well. Worse, Kirk remains an Admiral for the next movie so they did the same situation in Wrath of Khan (with the same problem that the Enterprise is only available), except Captain Spock was not going to be resentful, especially of his old friend.
Of course Kirk gave the naked Ilia probe the robe, that’s what would be in Ilia’s shower. Giving her something else to wear afterward just must have slipped everyone’s mind (yeah, that’s it).
@30
If you dislike everything Keith’s written before, then why are you here?
I came down with a really bad case of the flu the night I saw this movie in the theater and hallucinated about it. Yes, it was as scary and boring as you can imagine.
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@30 Lubitsch
I agree with your general statement. I would gladly watch a 2-hour film that uses the big screen to show us the wonders of an interesting sci fi world, even if it had no story what-so-ever.
The main problem with TMP, however, is that half of those “wow” shots don’t show us anything interesting. Exploring the interior of the V’ger cloud, which should have been the artistic and emotional climax of the film, was surprisingly dull. The wormhole scene also fell flat: It seemed more like an attempt at manufactured danger, rather than being either a valid plot point or an decent artistic exploration of something.
Of-course, other parts of TMP did the “exploration” thing very well. The peek at future Earth was incredible, and so was the 5-minute Enterprise scene that Krad seems to hate so much. I especially liked the depiction of the voyage from Earth, passing by our moon and the Jovian system. Some of the scenes inside V’ger were also cool, but they were too few and too far apart.
And then, there’s the story. It was a very intelligent (though not very original) premise, which was executed pretty poorly. You know your film is in trouble where your B-plot (Spock’s personal journey) gets a more profound treatment than your high-concept A-plot.
To summarize, while I agree that Krad’s review didn’t do justice to this film, it is still far from perfect. I would rate it a 6, or maybe a low 7 if I’m generous. Though I must say, this film is very difficult rate in a single number: The good parts are incredible and the bad parts are mind-numbingly bad.
Well… on to the Wrath of Khan. I really wonder what rating Krad is going to give that one, given that our other resident Trek Author (Christopher Bennett) hates that film.
I’m as much a fan of Star Trek as most anyone here, but it ain’t arty. It never tried to be arty. It was never supposed to be arty. Wagon Train to the Stars, with social commentary, sure. But not arty. It’s a mass market, mass appeal TV show. That’s like saying Buffy the Vampire Slayer is arty. It’s television.
@39/Omicron – Have you seen “What the Bleep Do We Know?” I was amazed when I saw it in a theater. It was on Netflix last I knew.
The music though, is gorgeous. It has the most detailed and complex orchestration of any Star Trek film music (though V is a good contender) and set musical direction of Star Trek for the next few decades…
@30, without a story pretty pictures are just pretty pictures and for this I spend ten or twenty dollars and two hours of my life? Not likely! White the Hell is so wrong about storytelling? An ancient and Noble art!
I honestly hate to throw water on you, Meredith, but “What the Bleep Do We Know” is complete nonsense. It’s pseudoscience masquerading as deep insight into quantum physics. At least one person interviewed in the film, David Albert, has commented that their interviews were misleadingly edited to have them supporting claims they don’t actually believe, and I’ve never seen a single physicist or philosopher that thought there was any validity to anything it posited. There’s almost no major claims it makes that are actually founded in any real evidence: there’s no reason to think, and no evidence to suggest, that Native Americans couldn’t see Columbus’s ships; taping words to bottles of water doesn’t change the crystallization of ice in those bottles; the Maharishi Effect is absolute bunk, ignoring that the murder rate increased in DC during the time described; individual cells don’t have any consciousness, that’s a misinterpretation of what the quantum mechanical definition of “observer” is; just in a general sense, there’s absolutely no scientific evidence that quantum mechanics has anything to do with consciousness at all.
Also, the entire movie is essentially propaganda for the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a New Agey, cultish organization of which many of the producers and writers of that “documentary” were members. It’s led by JZ Knight, one of the movie’s talking heads, who believes she literally channels a spirit-warrior named “Ramtha”, a former citizen of Atlantis 35,000 years ago who supposedly preaches ancient Lemurian revelations of reality to the school’s members.
Edit: @43/Roxana: Conversely, what’s wrong with not storytelling? Not Storytelling is also a pretty ancient and noble art. And have you never spent a couple hours at an art museum? $10-20 is about right for admission for most of them.
Storytelling can be good or bad. Not storytelling can also be good or bad. Neither’s innately better than the other, it’s entirely up to personal preference.
@44/Idea, I go to an art museum with different expectations than I bring to a movie. But point taken. I guess I’ve made it pretty clear where my preference lies!
I myself actually “liked” the earth toned uniforms at the time, since they are so very 70’s and seemed so “of the moment” when I saw it as a little child of the 70’s that I am, even if the men’s uniforms verge on the indecent. That was then, though.
I also was really impressed by the big assembly of the whole crew in the space auditorium and we can see that they made efforts to show more representatives of the -non-human- Starfleet crew members.
I remain (to this day) really rather bummed about the late, barely lamented Xon. I am a sucker though, for these types of characters. Sito Jaxa, Ens. Stahdi, the unnamed Vulcan doctor from Voyager, Lt. Masters, etc….
@41/Meredith
As I have some actual background in quantum mechanics, I just couldn’t take that film seriously. Why oh why do people have to make stuff up when they create a film of this sort? It’s like watching TNG’s “Genesis” when you have a PhD in genetics… only “Genesis” never tried to represent itself as anything other than fiction, while “Bleep” tries to pass their made-up science as real science.
The really frustrating thing about “Bleep” is that it puts forward general ideas which should be examined seriously. These ideas should be investigated by people who know their science, and not by dudes (and dudettes) who make stuff up for the sake of coolness.
There are different ways to tell a story.
And I think that those “exploration” bits which were done well on TMP, do form a narrative. Showing us the details of 23rd century earth (seen on screen for the very first time!) works precisely because it silently tells us the story of what humanity has become. It’s not just “a pretty picture”. It’s relevant world-building.
And the converse is also true: The endless shots of the void within the V’ger cloud (for example) are boring, precisely because they are nothing more than pretty pictures.
@47/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: I mentioned up-thread, but in this particular case they make it up because the movie’s literally cult propaganda in the guise of pop science. It’s the product of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.
The first time I saw the director’s cut I realized that two major scenes were cut in the theatrical release (and possibly others I didn’t remember). The first was the junior crew member on the bridge questioning Kirk replacing Decker and Uhura telling him that their chances of completing the mission just doubled. Ok, that scene wasn’t really needed.
The other was Spock crying because V’Ger was what Spock had thought he wanted to be but Spock realized that V’Ger, with its pure logic, was barren. And my reaction was: What the bleep! Without that scene, Spock’s journey in the movie doesn’t make sense. “My task on Vulcan is complete.” When did that happen? During the crying scene, which we were deprived of theatrically.
The first time I saw this was my friend’s fifth birthday party. I’m sure it’s easy to imagine what a disaster it was to bring a gang of five year olds raised on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica to this film. We left probably less than halfway through.
One odd footnote: TMP was the first film to tie in with a Happy Meal.
@34/Tyranno: “I think there were plans to bring the Klingons back in the latter half at some point. The idea was dropped for whatever reason.”
Not quite. What happened was, the film’s script was being constantly rewritten throughout production by a bunch of different people (Shatner and Nimoy wrote a lot of their own dialogue in the third act), and for a while they hadn’t settled on an ending and were tossing out a bunch of different possibilities. One of those was to have the digitized Klingon ships re-emerge when V’Ger ascended — which makes no sense in terms of story logic (why only them and not everything else?), but it got far enough that some concept art was done, which is reproduced in The Art of Star Trek.
@52 The Klingons were to reappear when V’ger ascended? Okay, that makes no sense. It should’ve happened earlier when Enterprise was trapped inside the massive vessel. That, and more random aliens would’ve been welcome.
But Kirk and the Klingons in their first movie outing and they don’t meet? That’s a missed opportunity if ever there was one.
30. “No Roxana, film is not supposed to be a storytelling medium.”
I used to go around saying things like this when I was an English/Creative Writing major. Film is supposed to be a storytelling medium if you ever want to see a return on your production investment.
When you have kids and a mortgage and no free time, it gets a lot less interesting watching theories rather than stories.
I saw this when I was 21. I was THRILLED to have new Trek. Went with a bunch of friends.
Loved the flyby. You call it masturbatory; I called it coming home. The sad truth, though, is that was the last damned good part of the movie.
Too much emphasis was on the special effects and not enough on the characters. Kirk was a dick and Spock only less so. Thank God for McCoy. Loved seeing Rand but did her character get hosed. The other four were as usual.
The overwhelming consensus among the Trek fans that I knew at the time (no Internet then, only Starlog!) was massive disappointment. These weren’t quite our characters. But I guess bad Trek was better than no Trek. Maybe.
I really wish the Phase II series had been made. That said, I still love Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I love the TOS uniforms and the TOS bridge design. I wish they had never changed it.
I don’t agree that Kirk is an asshole in this film. First, I think that it was a good idea to have him on the ship – this is a major threat to Earth, and he has five years of experience, while Decker has none. Decker could still command the Enterprise afterwards and go on a five-year-mission of his own, or whatever the original plan was. Second, while the way he tells Decker about his demotion is pretty harsh and non-considerate, he’s more acquiescent in all subsequent scenes, even self-deprecating (“I trust you will nursemaid me through these difficulties”).
Decker, on the other hand, remains confrontational and would be in serious trouble with any other boss. I can understand his initial reaction, but he should recover from it much sooner. He’s part of a military organisation and should be able to adjust to a situation he doesn’t personally like. Also, this is a major threat to Earth. He should put his personal grievances aside and work together with Kirk. But then, this is a guy who left his girlfriend and “didn’t even say goodbye”, so I have problems to root for him anyway.
I like how Kirk changes between stiff and formal on the hand and open and smiling on the other hand, depending on the situation and the people he is with. When he talks to Scotty, when he first comes to the bridge, when he meets McCoy in the transporter room, he’s completely different than in his dealings with Decker and the mission. In a way, this is worse than “The Ultimate Computer” – he has the ship back, but it is no longer his ship and crew, his friends don’t support him, and he doesn’t have the time for much soul-searching because they are in the middle of a crisis. It culminates when Spock comes to the bridge, with not just Kirk but everybody reacting with wonder and delight, and Spock being completely aloof.
Kirk taking Decker’s place is a big issue, but whom does McCoy replace? That’s never even mentioned. Chapel? In this case, McCoy comes across as an asshole when he complains that “I’m gonna need a top nurse, not a doctor who’ll argue every little diagnosis with me”. Come to think of it, that’s a shitty comment no matter what – they surely still have nurses on board, and he has worked together with other doctors before, for example M’Benga. So what’s the problem? That his subordinate has become an equal?
I don’t get the ending of the film. After the sickbay scene, I thought that the solution would be to help V’Ger find meaning, either by giving it a human sense of wonder or by getting it to share its knowledge with the people on Earth, or both. That would have been a beautiful message. Instead, the film takes a weird turn by coming up with the idea that the world is not enough. Fortunately there are “other dimensions, higher levels of being, the existence of which cannot be proved logically”. Um, what are they talking about here? Religion? New age stuff? Or is it about meaning after all, because “we gave [the new lifeform] the ability to create its own sense of purpose”? But then, why did it disappear, er, ascend? It seems to be two or three different ideas muddled together, and I don’t get it. On top of that, there’s yet another case of Star Trek promoting goal-driven evolution (“possibly a next step in our evolution”).
@29/Christopher: That’s a really beautiful story.
@53/Tyranno: When TMP was new, I read an interview with Roddenberry where he said that if he were allowed to make a second film, he wanted that film to be about the Klingons, to show a more nuanced version of them than they had done in the TV show. So when I first heard about the second film, I expected it to be about Klingons and was surprised that it wasn’t.
@56/Grayson: But Phase II would have been without Spock. It wouldn’t have been the same without Spock.
Popping up to be pedantic here, but Star Trek Generations doesn’t, strictly speaking, have any scenes set on Earth. The Enterprise B is already in space at the start of the film and the later scenes with Picard and Kirk are in Nexus recreations of Earth, rather than Earth itself.
Also, I’m not sure that Star Trek III has any Earth scenes. Are they not all set in Space Dock or is the hospital McCoy is taken to on Earth?
Personally, when I saw the film in theaters I was older than 10 and had not even seen (and had actually refused to see many of the TOS episodes because when I had seen bits on syndication, they came across as preachy, boring and crappy – with poor writing and acting on full display). I sneaked into the theater to watch TMP with a bunch of other students, who wanted to see science fiction and felt it accomplished that. A few years ago, I re-watched the film and certainly understand the criticisms but some of them have a lot more to do with people’s expectations for the current cinema to be fact paced, quick cuts, action packed and fast moving, even for say love scenes and so forth. It’s not a great film but it’s not utter crap.
That all said, what I re-watched was the re-edited Director’s Edition.
Just for funsies, here’s TMP recut with a Daft Punk score.
…it actually kinda works.
https://vimeo.com/217336882
@54/Steve C: Okay? I mean, yes, different life experiences lead to different artistic preferences. That’s kind of obvious, since that’s how artistic preferences form in the first place, life experiences. But that still doesn’t mean it’s more than a personal preference, and it doesn’t make another person’s artistic preferences less valid.
Two things I appreciate that you didn’t: the Kirk arc, actually, in which he makes the same assumption the audience does and then gets his humble pie when Decker has to solve the faulty warp problem. He manages the fallout from that a lot better than numerous nobodies who get in Picard’s, etc., way later and I think actually learns something. Sort of. Respect for Decker, anyway, which helps prevent Decker from remaining a nobody to the audience.
And I don’t mind the drawn out pacing, most of it anyway. Yup, lots of cruising around the Enterprise, but I was feeling what Kirk was feeling and I actually look forward to that scene on a rewatch, cause that feeling is sustained in me for almost the full five minutes. Spock gets to see a lot of interesting scenery. The only one I don’t like is that long flyover of Vger. Kudos to the director for not simply casting Star Trek in a Star Wars template with just flashbang action scenes (unlike what’s happened since 2009 when it’s tried to be everything else and forgotten its roots to rake in the cash).
@57/Jana: I see V’Ger’s ascension as equivalent to the sort of thing we’ve seen elsewhere in Trek when corporeal beings “evolve” to an incorporeal state, like in TNG: “Transfigurations,” or all those episodes with aliens like the Organians saying “Once we had physical form like you, but we evolved beyond it.” The “higher planes of existence” V’Ger left to explore include things like the Q Continuum, other dimensional realms beyond our own inhabited by the types of ancient superbeings that have “transcended” the physical. Yes, it’s definitely new-agey and pseudo-philosophical, but hey, it’s a ’70s film.
@58/Richard: ST III had several scenes set on Earth — Kirk’s apartment (the “to absent friends”/Sarek sequence), the officer’s lounge where Morrow denies Kirk’s request, the bar where McCoy met his “backward friend,” the detention facility McCoy was broken out of, and the “Old City” transporter station where Uhura and “Mr. Adventure” worked.
@62/cecrow: I realized a while back that it kind of works to think of TMP as if it were a 2-part TV episode — the first half’s main character arc is about Kirk usurping and clashing with Decker (resolved when McCoy forces Kirk to confront what a jerk he’s being) and the second half’s arc is about Spock working through his logic/emotion issues.
Didn’t Shatner write a book that suggested that V’Ger was modified by the Borg? I always thought that was a nifty idea.
And all the crapping on the post-2009 films is really unwarranted, IMHO. Based on the way the series was going it seems like a natural progression towards action and I find no fault with it. Besides, it’s looking increasingly likely that there won’t be another one, so all the haters can rest easy.
@63/Christopher: Yes, I can see the similarities. Well, I didn’t like “Transfigurations” either, because that isn’t how evolution works. And I generally prefer more worldly plots.
@64/Jason: I don’t think the Borg would do anything so altruistic.
@64/Jason Hay: The Return by Shatner and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens did suggest that an offshoot of the Borg created V’Ger, but it was a clumsy and implausible concept and the book had to stretch enormously to justify it. It doesn’t make sense for a lot of reasons. The Borg are a hybrid of humanoid and cybernetic life, but V’Ger was a purely cybernetic entity that didn’t even recognize organic beings as living things. Also, the Borg are crude and primitive compared to V’Ger, who was at the limit of what cybernetic life was able to achieve. And while Kirk did claim at one point that V’Ger came from the far side of the galaxy, the Spock Walk sequence and Spock’s dialogue indicate that V’Ger’s journey was intergalactic in scope, and Spock’s knowledge is more direct than Kirk’s.
The novel tossed in a handwave about there being various different subspecies of Borg with different attributes, but it was a hell of a reach, and totally unnecessary; if they have to be so different, why even bother asserting a connection, aside from gratuitous continuity porn? It’s a big universe. Insisting on connecting everything to everything else just makes it feel smaller and more artificial.
@65/Jana: Of course that’s not how evolution works in real life, but incorporeal “ascension” is a repeatedly established phenomenon within the fictional universe of Trek, so at least it’s consistent. It’s part of the rules of that universe, even if not of our own.
@63 ChristopherLBennett I wasn’t sure if the bar, detention centre and transporter station were actually part of Space Dock. But I had forgotten about Kirk’s apartment which was certainly on Earth.
Haven’t seen the movie in ages, but relying on the summary: In-universe, is there any reason for the Klingons to even attack V’Ger? Surely their sensors are good enough to tell that V’Ger is headed towards Earth/Federation space. I’m not much of a space captain, but if a scary monster thing is headed towards your enemy’s homeworld, surely the best thing to do is just stay out of the way. Maybe they figured it was some sort of federation prototype weapon that had wandered into klingon territory?
@44/47 Idran and Omicron – Good to know about “What the Bleep,” thank you! To be honest, I didn’t actually follow most of what they were talking about, and I don’t like the movie…but I was impressed that such a film made it into theaters. I only went to see it because it has one of my favorite actors. But I really appreciate having its flaws pointed out so clearly! Still, though, if you want a really edgy mass market film, that doesn’t actually tell a story, but is all arty farty…”What the Bleep” is an excellent candidate.
@68/dunsel: There may have been Klingon systems that were near the intruder’s path, near enough that they might have been possible targets for it. And they just generally don’t like anyone intruding on their space without permission, so they would’ve felt the need to assert their territorial control. If they let powerful aliens just barge through their borders willy-nilly, it would make them appear weak, or so they’d see it.
Besides, Klingon warriors would rather die in courageous battle against an overpowering threat than live with the perception that they fled from it out of cowardice. Of course, Keith’s The Klingon Art of War did establish that the first of Kahless’s precepts is “Choose your enemies well,” i.e. pick your fights wisely, but not every warrior would understand that wisdom. The Klingon commander may have felt he had something to prove. (His name was given in early script drafts as Commander Barak, which is the name I gave his alternate-timeline counterpart in Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History. The Collectible Card Game called him Krase, which I think is lame, since it’s just an anagram of “Sarek.”)
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but the writers didn’t always seem to have the best grasp of how space works. (SEE ALSO: All of the JJ Trek, and The Force Awakens.) Was there an original cast movie that had a border between two nations designated by a line of floating space buoys, or am I misremembering that from The Fifth Element?
(Also, was ST:TMP the first time in Trek that the ship going into warp had some kind of visual indicator?)
@71/hoopmanjh: Yes, TMP was the first use of a specific warp-entry effect. TOS’s use of moving starscapes was meant to indicate that the ship was at warp (though the stars wouldn’t have moved remotely that fast unless the ship were going fast enough to cross the galaxy in a day or two), but it was sometimes used inconsistently, with “stars” going past the ship even at impulse.
@72/CLB –Yeah, TBH the starfield with relative motion between the stars is something that’s always bugged me, but I realized I had to just let it go at some point.
Just by the way, my biggest issue with this movie isn’t the pacing, though it’s right up there. No the biggest problem is one that has nothing to do with the “big ideas” of the movie (though I question the “bigness” of the idea that emotions are important, as that comes across to me as more of a normal-sized idea), it has nothing to do with the special effects, and it has nothing to do with it being a love story between a man and his ship.
It’s that the acting in the movie is really really bad. The line readings are the most stilted of any Trek production ever done. And that has nothing to do with any “70s sensibility” or the plot or the script or the nostalgia or any other aspect of the film.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@66/Christopher: But the fictional universe of Trek is supposed to be our future, so the same rules should apply.
Anyway, it isn’t just Star Trek – evolutionary theory is misrepresented in popular culture a lot, and that bothers me because it obfuscates something that isn’t really all that difficult to understand.
1) The first five minutes of the film are mine. I had nothing to do with (i.e., I was not allowed or asked to contribute) to anything that followed. Once the film became a big budget extravaganza, I became an instant non-person as far as the producers were concerned. I did make Kirk an Admiral, and they kept that.
2) The quick description I offered for the design of V’ger was “a gigantic gothic cathedral turned on its side”. I was trying to channel Phillipe Druillet.
3) In the original treatment, I had Kirk stuck on Earth with no way to get back to the Enterprise (V’ger at work there). So while he went a bit crazy trying to get back to his ship, it was left to the rest of the crew to solve the V’ger problem. That idea was shot down pretty quick.
4) I was heavily into working on the character of Xon, really interested in having a pure Vulcan as science officer yet a young one forced to constantly wrestle with the knowledge that he was a replacement for the sainted Spock and having that reputation to live up to. That died too when Leonard Nimoy agreed to return.
5) To get a sense of the industry’s general perception of SF these days, try walking into a studio and offering to make Stapeldon’s Last and First Men. ARRIVAL is a wonderful exception, but I don’t see a studio rushing to make anything similar.
6) Much as I enjoyed some of Trumbull’s effects, I never understood why they had the Enterprise fly over “the top” of V’ger. First of all, there is no “top” and second, why not just fly around to the back, if that’s your goal? As for the query about a line of space buoys (or something like that) defining a border in space, I recall The Last Starfight having a setup like that, as well as others. Nobody in the film business seems to grasp the basic fact that space is, like, big.
@75/Jana: No, it’s meant to be a fictional universe. There are plenty of things in it that wouldn’t be possible in reality or that would work very differently than shown, like telepathy, telekinesis, humanoid aliens, universal translators, warp drive, time travel, transporters, phasers, you name it. Most works of fiction pretend to be in some way connected to the “real world,” but it’s only a fictional pretense — not something that anyone would ever actually believe was literally the future or hidden present of our world, because the very fact that the show exists as fiction in our world makes that a non-starter, but just something that the viewer can pretend is connected to our world for the sake of playing along with the story.
It’s true that Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be a scientifically plausible conjectural future, but only to the extent that dramatic and budgetary necessity allowed. He included implausibilities like humanoid aliens and parallel Earthlike worlds because those were the only way the show would be affordable, and he included all sorts of aliens with telepathic and telekinetic powers because those are easy to depict inexpensively just through dialogue, pantomime, and the occasional jump cut for appearances and disappearances. And subsequent creators were far less concerned with plausibility than he was. So the Trek universe as it exists now has far too many impossibilities to be treated as anything like our own reality; the best we can hope for is that it’s consistent within itself.
As for how incorporeal ascension can be reconciled with biological evolution, I touched on that question in my TNG/Lost Era novel The Buried Age. I think I suggested that it might be an emergent property beyond biological evolution — much as the evolution of our brains and hands has given us the intelligence and technological capability to alter our bodies and our environment in ways unrelated to genetic mutation and selection, thus serving as a sort of meta-evolutionary mechanism for change, perhaps the evolution of a sufficiently complex brain brings about an emergent ability to transform the consciousness independently of the body’s cellular biology.
Of course, when we talk about an artilect like V’Ger, biological evolution isn’t even an issue. The point is simply that higher dimensional realms and planes of existence are an established reality in the Trek universe, so V’Ger gaining the ability to enter such realms is something that can be fit into the known cosmology of the Trek universe.
@76/Alan Dean Foster: Hi, Alan — great to hear from you about this! I often wondered if maybe the story of TMP was inspired by the animated episode “One of Our Planets is Missing,” which you novelized — they both involve the Enterprise entering a cloud creature threatening to destroy a planet, traveling to its brain, and setting self-destruct to take it out before communication was finally established. But when I learned more about your original premise, I saw that all the elements that resembled the animated episode were added afterward by other writers. Thanks for confirming that.
One nitpick, though — the Enterprise did in fact approach V’Ger from behind and flew forward over its body to reach the maw at its front. I think the idea was to appear less aggressive by not approaching it head-on.
And now I am coveting a Netflix adaptation of Stapledon’s Last & First Men. Or Star Maker, for that matter.
@74 It should be a normal sized idea that emotions are important, but take a look at the world today. It is increasingly objectivist, materialistic, and prosperity gospel driven, with an outright denigration of happiness as an idea not relating to social status or financial numbering. Happiness, friendship, fulfillment, all for the just the sake of those things as being a reward in and of themselves? Our current socio-political climate scorns those things (we are becoming Borg). It is quite horrifying, so I think emphasising those emotions as worthwhile things all by themselves is and will continue to be a big and controversial concept, even though it shouldn’t be. This is what happens when society denigrates a liberal arts based curriculum, just btw.
@76/Alan Dean Foster: Wow, that’s really interesting. What was the original ending?
@77/Christopher: Of course it isn’t the actual future. Of course it relies on many impossibilities. Still, there are different kinds of impossibilities. Some are psychologically plausible, or necessary to have this kind of story at all, or they’re really metaphors for something else, or they’re at least not harmful. Parallel evolution is necessary to tell the stories Star Trek wants to tell; Lamarckism isn’t.
But this is really more a criticism of “Transfigurations” than of TMP. I wonder, though – had higher planes of existence already been established at this point? Incorporeal beings, yes, but that isn’t the same thing.
@80/Jana: I don’t see how it matters when it was established. TMP introduced a number of concepts that were kept and expanded on by later productions — ridged Klingons, Kolinahr, Deltans, a “fireworks” warp entry effect, the security chief (Chekov) as a bridge officer, Starfleet Headquarters’ location next to the Golden Gate Bridge, the general look of Starfleet technology that would persist for the next century, etc. My point is simply that Trek canon as a whole establishes the existence of incorporeal beings and higher planes, so what TMP showed us about V’Ger can be fit into that larger framework.
I also timed the Enterprise shuttle flyby sequence when I was a kid!
@81/Christopher: I was just curious. I didn’t remember any higher planes from TOS and wondered if I had missed them.
Do Deltans ever appear again on screen?
Has anybody got a copy of the Okudas’ Chronology sitting around handy? I swear “the Borg modify V’Ger” made it into that somewhere, but my copy of the book is packed away.
@83/Jana: There are a couple of background extras in later Trek movies that were implicitly Deltan, but the only other canonical mention of them was in Enterprise: “Bound,” when Travis Mayweather mentioned having had some Deltan passengers on his family’s cargo ship some years before.
Debating why this movie is or isn’t good is pointless – one either loves it or hates it. I don’t think there’s any middle ground.
I have learned to love it over the years (helped along in large part by the extra, online-only commentary Paramount released for the Director’s Cut after Wise’s death – they describe it as an “unfinished masterpiece” that is an extended meditation on the theme of making person-to-person connections – watch it with that in mind sometime). I enjoy the slow pace because it gives plenty of time to think about the big ideas – and they are genuinely big ideas: developed to a shorter extent in some of the TOS episodes, but really given room to breathe here. I like that the costumes (while, yes, blandly colored) are a logical outgrowth of NASA astronauts wearing polo shirts in space. I love Goldsmith’s score, of course. And, as Keith points out, the character arc Spock gets is crucial to the character’s entire 50-year history.
This is Star Trek at some of it’s sense-of-wonderest, and while it’s not my favorite of the films, it’s way up there.
Thanks for an entertaining review as always!
@68,
Klingons will Klingon. I’m just surprised the movie didn’t show them throwing more and more ships at V’Ger in an effort to win.
I think it’s odd the V’ger incident was never even mentioned in any of the subsequent Trek series and movies. Man and machine reaching a higher plane of existence is kind of a big deal. At least a passing reference from Data or Seven of Nine would’ve been a nice tip of the hat.
The movie comes up short in a lot of ways as a Star Trek movie, but it isn’t Final Frontier inept. They didn’t have to totally disown it.
@86/Mike: Part of why I like the movie is that it’s impressive how well it turned out despite the total mess of the process of its creation. It’s kind of amazing that it’s as coherent as it is. If nothing else, it has a certain underdog charm.
@88/Tyranno: The movie wasn’t well-received critically (although it was the most financially successful Trek film until 2009, even adjusted for inflation), so later films ignored it. Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer approached TWOK as a soft reboot, not blatantly contradicting TMP but generally disregarding it by jumping forward over a decade in the timeline and basically starting from scratch with the idea of Kirk as an admiral getting the Enterprise back. Sure, they reused the sets and props and stock footage and such, but that was because they had a very low budget and needed to reuse what they could.
In Ex Machina, I tried to make up for this omission by exploring the impact the V’Ger incident had on the galaxy, at least to a degree. Realistically, that impact should’ve resonated for generations, but I did what I could.
Lubitsch’s admonition notwithstanding, “boring” is a perfectly acceptable criticism of a movie, if it is in fact boring. TMP obviously didn’t bore everyone, but I’m sure someone somewhere would actually sit and watch paint dry with rapt enthusiasm. I think it was the TIME reviewer who called this movie: “Star Trek: The Motionless Picture” and that is pretty much spot-on in my estimation as well. Comparisons to 2001: Space Odyssey are appropriate I suppose, given the slow pacing of both films, but TMP pays lukewarm homage to that film, which was a groundbreaker. I have taught classes on jazz and many of my new students are underwhelmed by what is considered by many to be the greatest of all jazz albums, “Kind of Blue”. But they are hearing it from the perspective of a world where modal jazz has existed for over 50 years, with Kind of Blue serving as a near-perfect model for all the weak imitations that have followed. They can’t unhear all that other music and experience Miles’ greatest work of genius as the world did in 1959.
2001: Space Odyssey came from out of nowhere, a self-contained, deliberate, thoughtful hypnotic masterpiece that is no-doubt a crashing bore to many who saw it, especially many who have seen it for the first time more recently. It influenced almost every space-travel film that ever followed, including TMP. The problem I have is that if TMP was not a Star Trek film, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more, and I might be more inclined to cut it some slack as an ambitious but derivative poor man’s 2001. But I sat down in the theater expecting, and wanting, Star Trek. Instead, it was Kubrik-lite, with uninspired direction, a lugubrious script and wooden acting.
And we know the series regulars could do so much better with a better script. Not so sure about the casting of the two big newcomers, though. Persis Khambatta’s character is similar to Spock in the sense that she’s written to convey little emotion. But unlike Nimoy’s Spock, you never got any sense of a river of feeling underlying that stoic reserve. Khambatta just didn’t have the chops to be anything but dull in the persona of that character. And while Stephen Collins did a serviceable job as Decker… well, just meh.
I never finished watching the movie in the theater. It was one of only two times I fell asleep at the movies., the other while trying to sit through a Molly Ringwald abomination called Fresh Horses. After I watched the whole thing years later on video, I realized I didn’t care what had just happened to the characters I’d grown to love. Except I wanted to load them all up with coffee and amphetamines.
This is the first time the Earth of the 23rd century has been seen.
Technically, we did see Earth during the picnic scene with Pike and Vina on The Menagerie, which supposedly takes place on Mojave, even though it was part of a Talosian illusion.
@90/JohnC: I think the assumption that TMP is just a 2001 homage overlooks Robert Wise’s own prior SF work. TMP is pretty similar in tone to Wise’s The Andromeda Strain from 1971, which also took a rather sterile, emotionally detached approach. Let’s not forget — Kubrick only directed 13 feature films in his life, but Wise had already directed at least 15 feature films before Kubrick even did his first, and TMP was something like his 38th feature.
@84 Meredith
I used to have a copy, and I can tell you with certainty that there’s no such event listed in the main body of the chronology. I think the idea is mentioned in one of the appendixes, though.
75. JanaJansen – It’s supposed to be close but not the same as ours. There was no Voyager 6. There wasn’t an orbital nuclear platform explosion in 1968. We don’t have anything remotely close to the DY-100 or human hibernation technology. Even Gary Seven’s apartment address doesn’t exist in our world. And that’s just a few from TOS off the top of my head.
I recognize that TMP has it’s flaws but I still like it. I like the fact that Kirk actually learns something and becomes a better person than he is at the beginning. It wasn’t handled the best way but it is a personal journey as opposed to the usual of Kirk showing others why they’re wrong and he’s right.
I’ve never been totally sold on the idea that Spock would opt for Kohlinar but his journey towards acceptance of his dual nature is also a great part of the show.
You could even say the same thing happens with V’Ger. It comes to realize that they are imperfect and take steps to help them learn.
The thing that most bothers me about Kirk’s set-up is that if he’s necessary or the mission because of his experience, then Decker never should have been Captain in the first place. You don’t put someone in charge of a starship and then pull it out from under them. If they’re good enough to get the job in the first place then they should be the one running the ship, regardless of what they are facing. As some have already mentioned, put Kirk on board as an expert consultant by all means but at the start, they just made Decker look like a mistake from the start. And that’s too bad because he’s the one that actually saved Earth, even though most follow up fiction gives the glory to Kirk. Decker is the one that realizes how they can stop V’Ger and he makes the sacrifice necessary to do so.
CLB: Point taken to an extent. I like a lot of Wise’s films, most notably Andromeda Strain, Sand Pebbles and Run Silent Run Deep. Andromeda Strain evokes a fun memory for me, as I remember on the last day of 7th grade waaaaaay back when, they showed the movie to us in the auditorium with cake and koolaid. I don’t think the powers that be had previewed it or knew what it was about, because it freaked some kids out, and there’s a scene with bare male buttocks that (as you can imagine) had everyone giggling.
I agree that Andromeda Strain had a very similar, deliberate pace to it, but even though it was an earlier Wise film, it was made 3 years after 2001 Space Odyssey. Seems reasonable to hypothesize that Andromeda Strain and the later TMP would have been significantly influenced by Kubrick’s film. One big difference, at least in my view, between Andromeda Strain and TMP is the way the plot slowly, gradually, but inevitably, ramps up the tension until it’s almost unbearable in the scene where Hall is trying to stop the nuclear detonation and being targeted by those maddeningly indifferent automated lasers. I felt nothing for the TMP climax. My reaction on the big V-Ger/Voyager reveal was more “finally – is it over now?” than “wow!”.
After re-reading my earlier post I’d definitely harsh on TMP, moreso than is probably deserving for a film with such first-rate effects and the musical score you mentioned. And there are many films that I appreciate less for their entertainment value as for the sheer artistry or daring of the filmmaker (About 10 of Kubrick’s 13 films fall into that category for me.) But as I’ve mentioned before in other comments, the reason I love Star Trek isn’t because it’s sci fi. It’s because I love the characters and the way they interact…. and I thought TMP was a vast wasteland in that regard.
@84/Meredith:
In the 1996 edition, it’s an “Editor’s Note” under the 1999 entry for the launch of Voyager 6.
Following production of “Q Who?” (TNG), Gene Roddenberry half jokingly speculated that the planet encountered by Voyager might have been the Borg homeworld.
But the concept of the Borg had yet to, well, evolve in the direction familiar to us. And it’s good we don’t need to take “half joking” musings as gospel, because Christopher is right that it makes no friggin’ sense.
@94/kkozoriz: It’s in the future of the respective production date. When TOS was made, it was still possible to have hibernation technology in the 1990s. When TMP was made, Voyager 6 was still possible. The stories were supposed to take place in the future, it’s just that the future hasn’t aged well.
Decker can be a good captain for an exploratory mission without necessarily being the best person to prevent an imminent disaster. And even if he is – he’s still on board. By bringing Kirk on board too, they can use both Kirk’s and Decker’s skills. That’s an improvement, no matter how good Decker is.
@97/Jana: But part of the point of the story is that Kirk was wrong to displace Decker. Decker actually understood the ship better than Kirk did. Kirk’s push to get the Enterprise back was motivated by obsession and selfishness, not by actual strategic necessity or anything to do with Decker’s lack of ability. Okay, maybe it’s valid to argue that a veteran captain is a better choice for a crisis of this magnitude than a novice captain, but still, we weren’t supposed to see Kirk’s takeover of the ship as an unambiguously correct thing. So it shouldn’t be seen as a reflection on Decker.
Shatner tied this movie into the Borg in his novel The Return
@98/Christopher: Yes, I know that that’s supposed to be the story, but when I rewatched the film a couple of days ago, it wasn’t the story I saw. As I wrote in comment #57, I found Decker’s behaviour more questionable than Kirk’s. Actually, I think that’s something the film does well – it shows the characters’ actions, those actions are believable and somewhat ambiguous, and it allows for different interpretations.
I wonder if there’s some change of values between the ’60s and the ’70s on display here. The characters in TOS are very much about duty, whereas here we’re supposed to take Decker’s personal grievance as seriously as the destruction of Earth.
@100/Jana: I guess you’re harsher on Decker than I am. I don’t see it as being about his personal pride; rather, it’s about his conviction that he has useful knowledge that could help the mission, but he’s not being listened to because of Kirk’s petty pride.
And really, Decker has a point. What does Kirk actually accomplish in this movie? Spock’s the one who figures out V’Ger. Decker’s the one who gains further information from the Ilia probe and who takes the final action that resolves the crisis. The main thing Kirk achieves is to push the launch so hard that it leads to a transporter malfunction that kills two people and a wormhole accident that almost destroys the ship and delays their intercept with the intruder. Okay, Kirk does bluff the Ilia probe into taking them to V’Ger, but who’s to say Decker couldn’t have achieved the same end through his rapport with the probe? Kirk insisted to Admiral Nogura that he was the only one with the skills to pull off the mission, but he didn’t really do much to prove it.
97. JanaJansen – Was Kirk the wrong Captain to confront the Doomsday Machine or the giant space amoeba? e also was on a mission of exploration. Should he have called in amore senior captain like Matt Decker? Whoops, we saw how that turned out, didn’t we?
If you’re good enough to be named Captain then you should be considered good enough to handle whatever situation comes up. Some may be better at combat or first contact missions but overall, if you’re in the centre seat, you’re the one that’s being trusted to do whatever the job calls for.
98. ChristopherLBennett – And that reminds me of another thing that bothered me. Everyone with the excepton of McCoy and a bit of Scotty were all “rah rah Kirk’s back”. As Decker tells him that he “not logged a single star-hour in the last two and a half years”, that’s the same thought that the bridge crew should be having instead of being glad to have their old captain back. Sure, they can be glad to see him but the way in which he came back is utterly wrong and they should know it.
@89 CLB. I salute your expanding on V’ger’s impact. Going to give Ex Machina a read right now. Cheers!
@101/Christopher: “Kirk insisted to Admiral Nogura that he was the only one with the skills to pull off the mission […].” – Hmm, do we know that? We know that Nogura didn’t simply give the Enterprise to Kirk because of Scotty’s “I doubt it was that easy with Nogura”, but we aren’t told anything else. Or is there a line I don’t remember?
Mind you, I’m not saying that Kirk was the better person for the job. Decker and Kirk both had their respective strengths and weaknesses. I’m saying that it was a good idea to put them both together for this mission, and putting Kirk temporarily in command was one way to achieve that.
“I don’t see it as being about his personal pride; rather, it’s about his conviction that he has useful knowledge that could help the mission, but he’s not being listened to […].” – But he is being listened to. Kirk acknowledges that Decker knows the new Enterprise better than he does (“That’s why you’re staying aboard”). After the wormhole incident, Kirk doesn’t reprimand Decker in public, he asks him to his quarters. Actually, he doesn’t reprimand him at all – he asks for an explanation, then reacts by saying “Then you acted properly, of course” and “You saved the ship”. I can’t see anything wrong with the way he handled that.
@102/kkozoriz: If you have two people who may have the knowledge and skills to solve a very dangerous crisis, you don’t choose between them – you use them both.
104. JanaJansen – Yes, you can use them both but there was no reason for Kirk to replace Decker. There’s no reason that Kirk couldn’t have been aboard as an Admiral, running the mission while Decker ran the ship. Kirk managed to almost destroy the ship by pushing Scotty on the warp drive problems. If Kirk’s expertise was dealing with encounters with the unknown, then let him be there to do that. As it was he had to ask directions to the turbo lift. Keep the man who knows the ship in charge of the ship instead of making him keep one eye on Kirk the whole time to make sure he doesn’t kill everyone.
@105/kkozoriz: “There’s no reason that Kirk couldn’t have been aboard as an Admiral, running the mission while Decker ran the ship.” – True. We don’t know why they didn’t do that. Perhaps Kirk insisted to be put in command, which would indeed make him an asshole (although I’d still say that his behaviour in the film itself is fine). Perhaps Nogura tried to get Kirk to back off by imposing the condition that he had to give up his admiral’s rank in order to run the mission, and Kirk agreed. Perhaps it was current Starfleet policy to have one unambiguous commanding officer because they had had negative experiences with the kind of double command you suggest. We aren’t told.
“Kirk managed to almost destroy the ship by pushing Scotty on the warp drive problems.” – Also true. That doesn’t show that Kirk has lost his touch or doesn’t know the ship, though. He did the exact same thing many times in the TV show. Only in the TV show, these calculated risks always worked; this time, it didn’t. I think the writers are telling the audience here: “Look, we know that these things can go wrong in real life, and because this is a serious, grown-up film, we now show you a situation where it does go wrong for a change.” Which is fine.
But it wasn’t a calculated risk. Scotty told him that it wasn’t ready and reintegrated that after the wormhole. McCoy called him on it as well. “Jim, you’re pushing. Your people know their jobs.”
And the decision to use phasers in the wormhole was a flat out mistake, one that Decker called him on and Chekov should have caught but he was too trusting of Kirk. Just look at his face when Decker countermands Kirk’s phaser order.
McCoy was right when he reamed out Kirk in his quarters.
@107/kkozoriz: Yeah, but Scotty always says that. “The engines can’t take any more” and all that. And then Kirk pushes him anyway. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. This time it didn’t, so this time it looks like the wrong decision, but it’s easy to be right with the benefit of hindsight.
As for the decision to use phasers in the wormhole, that kind of thing is the exact reason why Kirk wanted Decker to stay on board in the first place. He said so in their first conversation in engineering. He said so again in his quarters.
@104/Jana: That was the explanation Kirk gave Decker, and since Nogura agreed to give Kirk the ship, I assume Kirk made the same argument. Their conversation is presented in the TMP novelization, though that isn’t canonical. But sometimes I forget what was just in the book and what was actually in the movie (especially since there are three different cuts of the movie).
And yes, Kirk nominally keeps Decker aboard to take his advice, but then he doesn’t follow through. He’s personally offended when Decker overrides his phaser order, seeing it as insubordination — forgetting that this was the whole reason he kept Decker aboard in the first place. When Decker confronts him and explains what happened, Kirk is chastened. He realizes he was wrong. It’s a change in his point of view. As I said, TMP can be treated as a 2-parter whose first half is about the clash between Kirk and Decker. The moment when Kirk is humbled by his realization that he was wrong to resist Decker’s input, and by McCoy forcing him to confront his obsession with getting the ship back, is the moment when his conflict with Decker is resolved. He realizes that he’s been unthinkingly treating Decker as a rival, and he gets over it and starts looking at him as a partner. So in the second half of the film, they finally mesh as an effective team. That’s their character arc over the course of the movie. You’re using examples from both halves of the movie as if they represent a single, unchanging relationship between Kirk and Decker, but it isn’t until the second half that they really get along the way you’re saying.
I just remember the film as being slow and dull. Just like the uniforms were dull; all beige, white and grey. From afar, Roddenberry always struck me as being more impressed with his show and his artistic vision than he should have been. And here, it seems that the big movie budget brought out the worst of his instincts, rather than the best. Instead of being bigger than the TV show, the whole affair just felt bloated. And felt like there were WAY too many cooks involved in its making. But it did cleanse our palates, and when the next film appeared, it made the kinetic energy of The Wrath of Khan all the more impressive by contrast.
As an aside, one of the things that has always stuck with me was that during the four-minute flyby, at some points you could see inside the windows on the Enterprise — especially the big window on the rec deck(?). That impressed me much more than it probably should have.
@110/Alan: The uniforms actually came in beige, white, brown, and pale blue. As I said, the ’80s video transfer washed out the colors and made them look more drab than they were in the original theatrical release, which is where the perception of the “gray” uniforms came from.
@111/hoopmanjh: The rec deck windows are the array of eight windows on the starboard rear of the saucer; in the rec-room briefing scene, there’s a backdrop of the starboard warp nacelle visible out the windows. This is a problem, though, because the rec deck is two stories high, and the miniature’s saucer has an undercut that makes it only one and a fraction stories thick in places. So the rec deck set couldn’t actually fit inside the miniature where it’s supposed to. It was originally meant to correspond to the windows near the bottom front of the lower hull (which ended up being assigned to the arboretum), but the decision was made during production to relocate it to the rear of the saucer so the nacelles could be seen through the windows, and they never reconciled the inconsistency.
Additionally, the corridors outside the main engineering set include a forced-perspective backdrop showing the corridor extending some distance forward from the entrance to the engine room — but in reality, the main deflector dish would be just about where that backdrop painting is on the actual set, so it shows the corridor extending impossibly far forward.
These problems aren’t unique to TMP, though. The original TOS shuttlecraft has a higher ceiling in its interior set than in the exterior mockup. And the Delta Flyer on Voyager is bigger inside than out and too big to fit through the hangar bay doors, plus the hangar bay interior is sometimes shown to be larger than it really could be. Sometimes it seems that Starfleet must have TARDIS technology.
@Alan Dean Foster: Great to have your input regarding the film’s origins.
@krad: I definitely don’t like the term apologist. It gives off a feeling of guilt for the people who truly enjoy a film that I shouldn’t be justifying.
Be that as it may, I absolutely adore The Motion Picture. Only First Contact comes close. The only ones that feel like full feature films, taking fulll advantage of the cinematic format.
Keith, you call the Enterprise reveal a masturbatory session. I call it taking advantage of the new venue. For three seasons of live-action and two seasons of animation, there was no way you could do the story justice with the limited TV visual effects you had. This film was way overdue in depicting the Enterprise in its full glory.
Of course, visuals alone can only do so much. Which is why we have the glorious Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack to accompany it. I’m not kidding when I say it’s the best Trek score in all of the franchise. It feels very much a product of 1979, but it also has that sense of epic grandness, which sci-fi films these days sorely lack. Case in point, Goldsmith’s score for the original 1979 Alien has that feeling while Kurzel’s work for the new film doesn’t even come close.
Not only that, but pretty much everyone associated with the franchise recognized just how groundbreaking Goldsmith’s work truly was. Gene Roddenberry, Harve Bennett and Rick Berman all ended up reusing the main theme as well as hiring Goldsmith for posterior projects, whether it’s TV or feature. That final track when Decker and the Ilia probe join together has to be the most cathartic climax I’ve ever heard on any soundtrack.
Not, it’s not perfect, and I won’t say TMP is on the same level as 2001, but I can definitely see what Robert Wise was going for. This is a director who understood how to take visual advantage of science fiction concepts. At the same time, I agree with something Nick Meyer once said: a film is a product of the time it was made. It feels very much like a product of the same era that brought masterpieces like 2001 and Close Encounters. I don’t know if you could do a film like that now, but as Foster pointed out, Arrival was welcome breath of fresh air in attempting that kind of sci-fi storytelling. There should be more films like that out there.
I can’t name another Trek film that I rewatch as much as I do this one. Doug Trumbull’s visual effects alone make me come back for it every year. Not one of the other films have visual effects that have aged as well as his V’Ger work. This is the only film that feels like they’re travelling into the unknown, with a truly alien encounter (only the whale hunting probe from Trek IV feels remotely as alien).
I’m a sucker for dialogue-free scenes. While there can be a case for better pacing, I honestly can sit through those scenes over and over. The only problem with them is that the crew is pretty much doing nothing during them. That’s an inherent flaw with the way the bridge crew is set up. Even Sulu, who has to fly the ship, let’s the autopilot do most of the job, in order for them to be awed by what they’re going through. The 1983 version particularly has a lot of crew reaction shots.
Story-wise, I can’t complain either. Spock’s journey in this film is the most complete and fulfilling one. There really is no better way to dramatize the concept of logic vs. emotion, while at the same time establish a parallel with V’Ger, who’s one of the better Trek obstacles, in which he’s won by reasoning and understanding rather than violence.
In retrospect, when reading Shatner’s Star Trek Movie Memories, I’m surprised the film ended up as coherent as it did, given how much backstage infighting that was happening between Roddenberry and Harold Livingston, resulting in an endless stream of rewriting.
I first saw this film when I was 12. Even then, I could tell Kirk was being a real prick to Decker. Truth be told, it didn’t bother me then, nor does it now. The way I see it, putting your main hero in such a negative light in your first big screen adventure is far more interesting than just redoing TV Kirk. And it makes McCoy and Spock’s contributions all the more valuable, while keeping Decker* relevant.
*I had no idea he was supposed be related to Matt Decker.
Spock’s resolution also sets up his inevitable demise for the next film, even though the thought hadn’t come to anyone involved at that point.
I will, however, criticize some of the decisions Wise made on the 2001 Director’s Cut DVD. Some of the new visual effects, most notably the wide shot of V’Ger approaching Earth felt really cheap and unnecessary. One of the reasons I loved not having that kind of establishing shot is you had a sense of the Enterprise being truly lost and adrift in the middle of the thing.
Plus, someone at Foundation forgot to render those images at higher resolutions, meaning you couldn’t reuse them for Blu-Ray or HD streaming venues. And playing a DVD on a 4K screen really exposes the limited picture quality.
Having said that, I’m going to start looking for some free time to rewatch this one again, which I haven’t seen in a couple of years.
@113/Eduardo: As I mentioned before, most of the “new” shots in the Director’s Edition were shots that were planned for the original 1979 film but had to be left out because they didn’t have time to finish post-production. As I see it, the theatrical version was a rough cut and the DE is as close as we’re ever going to get to the finished film Wise wanted.
And I appreciated the addition of a full-length shot of V’Ger. It was never clear from the original cut what the whole thing actually looked like. Some fans prefer it that way, but I like having that question answered.
I agree, though, that it’s a shame the shots weren’t rendered in HD — but that was more to do with budget, I think, than “forgetting.”
@114/Christopher: Indeed they put it in theaters before it was finished. It’s one of the reasons I condemn the studio practice of booking unchangeable release dates before knowing how long it’ll take to actually finish the film. Even without the delaying rewrites, production was always doomed to be rushed thanks to that impending opening date.
For years, I knew this film as “the one the BBC never show”. Then they finally showed it and I realised why. Goddamn, it’s slow. Not sure about the characterisation problems. Spock is meant to be a dick (and is), Kirk is struggling but likable and gets hit down whenever it’s necessary. Not convinced that Sulu is third-in-command here: He might get left in charge of the bridge a few times but only because everyone important is busy. (You wouldn’t call Leslie third-in-command in The Squire of Gothos just because he gets left in charge of the bridge when Kirk and Spock aren’t there.) It feels like there’s an awful lot from this period that appears in a few hundred novels, becomes fanon and then gets taken as gospel. Including by me, it has to be said.
I seem to recall the apocryphal explanation for Ciana being the second dead crewmember is that she took a (rather extreme) voluntary downgrade to join Kirk on the mission. I also seems to recall, and I’m possibly going to look stupid here, that the novelisation has a scene of Decker getting intimate with the Ilia probe only for her to run a mile: Which makes sense of Decker’s comment about a stirring of emotion and leaves me wondering if it was cut. McCoy not knowing Kirk recalled him until he came aboard is one of those things that makes sense for the movie but has left a dozen prequels having Kirk go “Recall McCoy but don’t tell him it was my idea” for no logical reason except canon.
I’m glad you found some reasons to appreciate elements of this film, but I believe all reviews that see the film as strictly a “Star Trek” film are a little short-sighted and only take into account the flaws in the narrative that make it a less-than-good STAR TREK story. I believe time will bear out that STTMP will go down in cinema history as a beautiful work of cinematic art on par with “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Forbidden Planet,” and the more modern “Interstellar”. Long after people have forgotten the more pedestrian storytelling in “Insurrection,” “First Contact,” “The Search For Spock,” “The Voyage Home,” “The Undiscovered Country,” and even “The Wrath of Khan,” all containing more than their share of merits as Star Trek movies, “Star Trek The Motion Picture” will be the one cinema buffs, historians, and artistic filmmakers will remember as groundbreaking, beautiful, and important.
@116/cap-mjb: “It feels like there’s an awful lot from this period that appears in a few hundred novels”
There really haven’t been that many novels set in the period between TMP and TWOK — no more than 30-odd books and a handful of short stories scattered across nearly four decades, most of them tending more toward the TWOK end of the interval, and vanishingly few of them picking up on any specifics from TMP beyond the characters’ promotions. One reason I wanted to write Ex Machina was because the post-TMP era was so underexamined in the tie-ins.
@ChristopherLBennett: Yes, okay, I was indulging in hyperbole again. And yes, well done for building on the changes rather than just treating it as the lead-in to a continuation of the original series with different uniforms and a couple of extra characters being called “commander”. To be honest, I think one of the biggest pieces of fanon is that literally everyone seems to assume that the refit came at the end of the five year mission and that we’re only a couple of years or so on from TOS or TAS, even though everyone looks a lot older than that. Frankly, I’m more inclined to believe that Kirk stayed as Enterprise captain for several years after the five year mission and then got promoted to admiral and replaced by Decker, which potentially makes a smaller gap between this and TWOK than is generally assumed. Even The Star Trek Encyclopedia admits in a side-note that dating it to 2271 (or whatever it is these days, it keeps changing) is pure speculation and it might come later. But try arguing that one in polite circles!
@119/cap-mjb: A number of the ’80s novels did seem to presume that the pre-TMP era lasted for significantly more than 5 years; for instance, The Romulan Way is set 8 years after “The Enterprise Incident” but only a year after the pre-TMP My Enemy, My Ally (although a subsequent re-release of those books tweaked the details to move it into the post-TMP era). But the flaw in that idea is that Kirk cites “my five years out there” as his justification for displacing Decker from the captain’s chair. That pretty clearly suggests that he was promoted just after the 5-year mission ended. (Although of course it doesn’t make sense even that way, since he was a captain for at least a couple of years before the 5YM and an officer for more than a decade before it.) There’s also Icheb’s line in Voyager: “Q2” saying that an era came to an end when Kirk’s 5-year mission ended, so that reinforces the idea that he didn’t just go right out on another mission immediately thereafter.
The time frame of TMP is also constrained by TNG: “Cause and Effect,” since it shows the Bozeman crew having TWOK-style uniforms in 2278.
As for the Encyclopedia, I have no idea why the recent revised edition failed to correct its 2271 date for TMP. We know from “Q2” that the 5-year mission ended in 2270, so TMP — at least 2.5 years later — can’t be any earlier than late 2272. The Pocket novels put it in 2273.
@120:
I didn’t really think about the Bozeman uniforms, although later uniform changes seem to be gradual so it’s just about possible both uniforms were in use at the same time. This may not make much sense but I’d probably place TMP around 2278, which would make it seven years before TWOK if you keep the date for that the same. The apocryphal timeline from the Star Trek Chronology indicates Kirk was promoted back to admiral in 2277 but I find it hard to believe he’d have stayed in a desk job for that long. (Generations does muddy the issue by establishing a retirement for Kirk during the movie era: I’ve a feeling Ron Moore said he intended it to be pre-TMP but fanon seems to have placed it in between TMP and TWOK.) The comments at the start of TWOK, where the old hands are still expecting the Enterprise to be returned to full service, seem to be pointing to it being a recent development rather than the Enterprise having been a training ship for eight years.
@109/Christopher: “That was the explanation Kirk gave Decker, and since Nogura agreed to give Kirk the ship, I assume Kirk made the same argument.” – Kirk tells Decker that he’s assuming command because of his experience. He does not claim to be the only one with the skills to pull off the mission. That isn’t the same thing.
I don’t see the scene in Kirk’s quarters as much of a turning point, because Decker remains confrontational after that. He accuses Kirk of jeopardising the mission. He calls moving into the cloud “an unwarranted gamble”. Before that, there’s a scene where he recommends using screens and shields, and tries to insist when Kirk disagrees, and Kirk snaps at him. The wormhole incident hasn’t changed their relationship much. (At least after Kirk snaps at him, Decker points out that it’s his job to present alternatives, and Kirk concedes the point.)
I think Kirk honestly tries to use Decker as part of his team right from the beginning, but at the same time he knows that Decker bears a grudge against him. That’s a difficult situation to navigate, and sometimes he stumbles. They finally become a real team much later, after the Ilia probe appears. That’s the first time Kirk calls Decker with his first name after the initial “I’m taking over the center seat, Will”. I think he does it because he knows what a shock this must be for Decker. The next time we see the two of them together (much later – after Spock’s spacewalk and the sickbay scene) Decker also calls Kirk “Jim”. It seems to me that the mixture of connecting with Decker on a personal level, giving him a task of his own, and spending some time apart did the trick.
Remind me to never invite the author of this article to my house! As a TREKKER (have advanced beyond Trekkie) since the beginning, THE MOTION PICTURE was like food to a starving man! The main reason it could have been better was the time and budget of the movie were not long enough for development. Which was the biggest reason Star TREK only lasted 3 seasons. But, no matter what others may say, give me Star Trek The Motion Picture or give me Sidney or the Bush!
@121/cap-mjb: “The apocryphal timeline from the Star Trek Chronology indicates Kirk was promoted back to admiral in 2277 but I find it hard to believe he’d have stayed in a desk job for that long.”
What I established in the e-novella Mere Anarchy Book 4: The Darkness Drops Again is that when Kirk was re-promoted to admiral (in 2278 in the novel timeline), he made a deal to have the Enterprise assigned as his personal flagship, which he would occasionally take out on special missions (with Spock as captain) as needed. So he wasn’t permanently behind a desk in the intervening years. In that model, the situation in TWOK, where Kirk took over to handle a crisis while Spock continued as captain of the ship, was something that they’d done on a number of prior occasions.
@123/mtprintr: I may not agree with Keith’s assessment of TMP, but I’m sure he’d make a terrific house guest. Although I’ve only been a guest in his home, never the other way around.
@123/mtprintr: “But, no matter what others may say, give me Star Trek The Motion Picture or give me Sidney or the Bush!”
Shouldn’t that be “Give me Star Trek The Motion Picture or give me the bush”? “Sydney or the bush” means “the big city or failure”; it’s just the Australian version of “Hollywood or Bust”.
122. JanaJansen – Seeing as Kirk’s action got Ilea killed, I’d agree with Decker when he said “This is what I call unwarranted.”.
This sums up Kirk fairly well at this point.
James T. Kirk: All right, explanation. Why was my phaser order countermanded?
Willard Decker: Sir, the Enterprise, redesigned, increases phaser power by channeling it through the main engines. When they went into anti-matter imbalance, the phasers were automatically cut-off.
James T. Kirk: (crestfallen) Then you acted properly, of course.
Willard Decker: Thank you, sir. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.
James T. Kirk: You saved the ship.
Willard Decker: I’m aware of that, sir
.James T. Kirk: (getting angry) Stop…competing with me, Decker.
And McCoy calls him on it.
KIRK: Make your point, Doctor.
McCOY: The point, Captain, is that it’s you who’s competing. …You rammed getting this command down Starfleet’s throat. You’ve used this emergency to get Enterprise back.
KIRK: And I intend to keep her, is it that what you’re saying?
McCOY: Yes! It’s an obsession, an obsession that can blind you to far more immediate, and critical responsibilities. Your reaction to Decker is an example
And after a call from the bridge
KIRK: Your …opinion has been noted. Is there anything further?
McCoy : That depends on you.
McCoy has just let Kirk know that the ball is in his court. He’s the one that’s got the problem. And that’s the reason Kirk brought him on board. And yet, when McCoy tries to help him, he snaps at him and acts like he doesn’t want to hear what he has to say.
The beginning of the thaw in Kirk’s attitude occurs with this exchange. Kirk finally realizes that Decker is doing his job and that Kiek actually was the one who was competing. When you’ve got someone in command of a ship that can destroy an entire civilization, you must have a Captain that is willing to listen to alternatives.
KIRK: Mister Decker, I will not provoke an attack, If that order isn’t clear enough for you…
DECKER: Captain, as your Exec, it’s my duty to point out alternatives.
KIRK: I stand corrected.
Despite the flaws, it remains my second favorite ST film. Why? It came to us after the wilderness years. It was the first film that I spent a lot of time on the runup following news about the making (very early online stuff, e.g., SF Lover’s, plus articles in Starlog and the like).
And…”…the human adventure is just beginning…” Oh so few ST films have “boldly gone”. Most are space battles. As a multi-decade fan of Star Fleet Battles and the like, I love space battles, but what got me into ST (during the first run), were the stories of exploration.
More of those, please. I’m really hoping “Discovery” throws me an occasional exploratory bone.
Most of the Discovery trailer left me cold, but that shot of the lead character blasting off in a spacesuit got me a little excited. It’s like the Spock walk in Motion Picture, yay!
@ChristopherLBennett: Just bought Ex Machina on Google Play. Hope you get a piece of that.
I agree with most of the sentiments expressed here, but I would like to defend two criticisms: the Klingons and the Enterprise Fly-Around scenes.
The Klingon scene at the beginning *was* necessary for two important reasons. First, they’re the iconic Trek villains–they had to be in the movie, no matter what, because the audience is expecting that. You may recall that the same thing happened in Star Trek (2009)–and there was even less of a reason for them to be in *that* movie than in TMP. And, secondly, the destruction of three Klingon battlecruisers firmly establishes V’Ger as a credible threat. Without that scene, the big cloud is… just a big cloud. No more than a mystery. But with that scene, it becomes much more threatening–a danger to the Enterprise and any planet in its way. This is probably why there were three Klingon balttlecruisers–TOS implied that a single Klingon battlecruiser was more or less equivalent to a single Constitution-class ship. That V’Ger could annihilate *three* of them so quickly and easily is proof of the extreme peril the Enterprise is in.
And the 4+ minute flyby scene… yes, it’s too long. But–But–But! There need to be lingering shots of the Enterprise in *any* Star Trek film. We *need* those beauty shots because the Enterprise is just as much of a character as Kirk or Picard. Aside from the terrible writing, that’s what displeases me the most about nuTrek–the lack of “beauty shots,” and the frequent absence of even establishing shots. Star Trek Beyond is probably the best of the lot, but did you notice that the only time we actually get a good look at the U.S.S. Franklin is *after* it had crash-landed and been abandoned?
Personally, I’d much rather err on the side of too-many Starship scenes than too few.
@130/Arsene: I think ST’09 had a number of good beauty shots of the Enterprise — first when we saw it under construction, and then the sequence when Kirk and McCoy first saw it in spacedock and stared in awe as their shuttle closed in. It was obviously a much shorter sequence than the TMP flyby, but it was also a clear homage to it. I think all three movies have given us beauty shots of the E.
As I’ve said, I think the movie that was most deficient in beauty shots of the ship was Generations, where we didn’t even see the ship’s exterior fully until nearly halfway through and didn’t get any extended, close-up looks at it until the battle where it was destroyed.
But ST09 was also the movie that showed the Enterprise under construction *on a planet’s surface* and the start of the movies where Federation ships just fly around in atmospheres, or even underwater, and that’s something I still cannot accept.
(Plus the ST09 Enterprise was weirdly-sized, and the less said about the brewery engine room, the better.)
@132/hoopmanjh: I had my issues with the ground-based construction, but I’ve realized that the g-forces a starship must undergo routinely in order to achieve interplanetary velocities and endure space battles would be thousands of times greater than the g-forces sustained by an object sitting still on the Earth’s surface.
Besides, isn’t that a complete non sequitur? We weren’t talking about the credibility of anything, just about whether the movies had beauty shots of the ship.
@CLB/133 — Yes, fair point. And (despite whatever lens flare jokes one cares to make) the Abrams Trek movies did have some lovely, lovely beauty shots of the various ships.
KRAD: I have to disagree with your assessment. As a composer, I can’t help but enjoy that the extended shots of the Enterprise allow for Jerry Goldsmith’s music to take the spotlight for a bit. And this film actually has the crew discovering the otherworldly (unlike the subsequent films, which kind of forgot about exploration). In some ways, to me it’s the most “science fiction” of all the films. No, time has not been kind to the FX, but that’s the case even with TNG now. In some ways TMP is my favorite of the films.
Quoth Arsene: “You may recall that the same thing happened in Star Trek (2009)–and there was even less of a reason for them to be in *that* movie than in TMP.”
So much less of a reason, in fact, that they’re not in it at all. They’re mentioned, but that’s it. We don’t actually see any Klingons in the Bad Robot movies until Into Darkness.
And seeing the cloud destroy Epsilon 9 or another Federation ship would have accomplished the same thing.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@135/don3comp: “No, time has not been kind to the FX“
As I mentioned before, I think the effects still look great. The Enterprise still looks gorgeous and the V’Ger flyover is still awe-inspiring.
Yes, all true. But all is forgiven because it gave us that beautiful, updated Enterprise!
I loved TMP when it came out, and I love it still. Thenagain, I like 2001, Wax: Television of the Bees and Holy Mountain. I certainly like it better than First Contact, or Generations, which I (and my partner at the time) thought would be better served as extended television episodes.
This was the movie that got me into Star Trek at all, I don’t think it really registered with me before that. I’ve watched all the movies since, and the spin offs, etc. Would any of that have happened without TMP?
I get the detractors…it is stilted, and slow. But it’s *weird*, and I have a soft spot for weird. I loved the idea that Vejer was so altered by its travels through the universe, and the *woo-woo* idea of transcending by merging with its creator.
@90/JohnC – Khambatta just didn’t have the chops to be anything but dull in the persona of that character. Well, perhaps. In her defense, though, she plays 2 characters in the film: Ilia, and Ilia/VGer, and most of the movie is that emotionless probe. When she is playing Ilia – or when Ilia is temporarily allowed to “emerge” from the probe – I think she seems like a fairly emotional character, at least as time and very scant material allow. She smiles, she’s sad, she teases Decker a little (in a cut scene, part of the “extended” edition)…
140 comments in and no one is going to mention that McCoy looks like he was transported aboard directly from a Bee Gees concert? :)
A lot of great comments. When I first read the review, it was just a validation of how I remember the movie (I haven’t watched it in about 10 years). However, reading all of the comments and especially Christopher’s ardent defense of it makes me feel that I need to watch it again. I’ll have to do a double feature of this and TWOK so I’m ready for next week.
Persis Khambatta was more than adequate in the role, I thought. She was called on to play two characters — a preternaturally serene Deltan keeping her natural sensuality tightly restrained so as not to overwhelm the emotionally immature humans around her, and an emotionless robotic mechanism. She didn’t show a lot of emotional range or intensity because she wasn’t supposed to.
She was also playing one of the most physically desirable humanoids in the galaxy, a woman of overpowering beauty and sensuality, and she was extremely well-cast for that role. Even the shape of her bald head was flawlessly beautiful.
@141: Well, nearly thirty years on, it did occur to me that McCoy and Fox Mulder had been going to the same “grow a silly beard to show you’re not happy about being dragged out of retirement for another adventure” lessons…
@141 The spin off “Grizzly McCoy: Disco Doctor to the Stars” sadly did not get picked up for the fall season. I’m sorta joking, but I’d have watched the hell out of that show if it existed.
@144, “Staying Alive” would have been a very apt theme song for Grizzly McCoy: Disco Doctor to the Stars.
@144/random22: Have you seen John Byrne’s Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor? It’s not that far off from your suggestion.
@146
I was unaware of this. It is now on my wishlist for when I have a spare slip of latinum.
I especially like this part from the description:
Because of course it does. Plague!!!
@132: Why not? They did in Voyager. (I seem to remember one of the novels had the Defiant hiding underwater. And didn’t we see the Enterprise in Earth atmosphere in Tomorrow is Yesterday?)
As I’ve said, I think the movie that was most deficient in beauty shots of the ship was Generations, where we didn’t even see the ship’s exterior fully until nearly halfway through and didn’t get any extended, close-up looks at it until the battle where it was destroyed.
@131/Christopher: This may be conjecture, but I believe the reason for the lack of Enterprise-D exterior shots on Generations is because they brought back the original six foot model built by ILM which was used in the early seasons. They needed the bigger model in order to convey its scale on the bigger screen. However, that model had less detail than the smaller 4 foot version introduced during season 3. Therefore, John Knoll and David Carson were probably trying to limit the amount of shots of the Ent-D, already considering the possibility of introducing a new ship in the near future.
I also recall Brannon Braga mentioning the visual effects budget being particularly tight for the production, which means given the amount they spent on the saucer crash – plus the Enterprise B nexus shots – they couldn’t afford much time and money for filming proper Ent-D scenes.
Whenever I watch The Motion Picture I’m always struck by how similar parts of Jerry Goldsmith’s score sounds to the score for Prometheus, which, of course, includes homages to Goldsmith’s Alien score. I’ve got to think that Marc Streitenfeld is doing a TMP homage in Prometheus.
@149 I did read an article near the time saying they had problems getting the Ent-D looking good on the big screen. That a lot of the shots and angles that looked good on tv just didn’t work for the big screen, that it looked too short and wide, and they needed a longer line profile or something. It was a long time ago, but yeah, sounds like there were a lot of problems with the model and the direction of that movie. They had problems with the uniforms too, IIRC.
@126/kkozoriz: “Seeing as Kirk’s action got Ilea killed, I’d agree with Decker when he said “This is what I call unwarranted.”.” – I wasn’t talking about the content of his criticism, I was talking about his tone. If he had said “Moving into the cloud is too risky”, it would have been fine. If he had suggested an alternative, it would have been even better. Calling it “an unwarranted gamble” shows that he’s still confrontational.
But let’s talk about the criticism itself: Isn’t this what they always do? Where’s the difference to flying into the energy barrier in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, or into the dark zone in “The Immunity Syndrome”? And what would have been a better course of action, in your opinion? They already know that scanning the cloud is not a good idea – that’s what Epsilon 9 did.
As for the scene in Kirk’s quarters, I don’t agree that Kirk is “the one that’s got the problem”. Kirk and Decker both have a problem with each other. I think the dialogue you quote shows that clearly.
“And yet, when McCoy tries to help him, he snaps at him and acts like he doesn’t want to hear what he has to say.” – And as a result, McCoy becomes really hostile: “You rammed getting this command down Starfleet’s throat […] It’s an obsession.” That isn’t helpful. Kirk used to have a command team made up of friends, and now he already has a first officer who resents him. Criticism is fine, but he also needs McCoy to be a friend.
152. JanaJansen – And sometimes a friend is someone who tells you that you’re making a big mistake and that you don’t even realize it. A friend is not someone who supports you in everything you do “Gee Bob, that sure was a great idea you had to hold up that bank. Great job!”
In his quarters Kirk tells Decker to “Stop competing with me”. Decker asks for permission to speak freely and lays out why he has reservations about Kirk’s ability at this moment in time. So Kirk give him a snarky “I’ll trust you’ll nursemaid me” and Decker simply agrees with him. Seeing as Kirk almost got everyone killed before the mission even started, I’d say that Decker could have been even more forceful in his criticism. Kirk even told Decker that the reason he was staying aboard was because Decker knew the ship better, Kirk got all upset because Decker actually proved that Kirk was right in that case. He did need someone on board who knew the ship. Way to give conflicting signals.
Kirk puts ship in danger twice (wormhole and phaser order)
Decker countermands phase order and saves the ship.
Kirk gets PO’d because Decker did the very job Kirk said he needed him for.
@152 As a senior officer, and medical officer responsible for Kirk and everyone else’ health on the Enterprise, it is McCoy’s job to metaphorically smack Kirk down. And it is kinda his job as a friend too to be brutally honest with him. McCoy’s got a job to do too, y’know. Sometimes the boss has to be told they are acting like an ass when they are acting like an ass.
As for unwarranted risk. Q said it best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOnqKUq5imE
If you can’t take a little bloody nose…
The Klingons took an unwarranted risk. How’d that work out for them?
Being cautious doesn’t mean not taking any action. It means using your brains and the science capability of the ship to figure out what you’re facing. Just like Spock did moments later.
You forgot one of the few known sightings of Skinny Kirstie Alley.
pjcamp: Huh? Kirstie Alley wasn’t in this movie. That’s the next one…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@153/kkozoriz, 154/random22: You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that friends shouldn’t criticise each other, or that McCoy shouldn’t criticise Kirk. I mean that he should have made sure that Kirk knows that he still is his friend first. I find the way he phrases his criticism nasty and over the top. People usually react much better to criticism if it is phrased in a friendly manner, and McCoy used to be much better at swaying Kirk. Kirk isn’t the only one who has lost his touch.
Imagine McCoy had said something like this instead:
“You’re being too hard on Decker. He wants the mission to succeed as much as you do, and you both have to work together to accomplish this. Don’t forget that you took the Enterprise away from him. You’re the winner here. Be generous. Earth needs you both.”
Don’t you think that Kirk would have reacted differently?
@153/kkozoriz: “So Kirk give him a snarky “I’ll trust you’ll nursemaid me” and Decker simply agrees with him.” – I totally don’t see that as snark. I think Kirk is being serious. Actually, I find their exchange rather sweet. Decker has just voiced some severe criticism, and instead of being angry or snapping at him, Kirk gives a little smile and utters a sentence that manages to say “You may be right, but I’m still your boss – let’s work together” in a somewhat playful manner. Decker smiles back and agrees with him because he gets that meaning.
@158/Jana: It’s never been McCoy’s way to softpedal his criticisms. When he thinks people need a verbal slap in the face, he gives them one. And Kirk needed one. He was letting his obsession with the Enterprise blind him to his responsibilities, and he needed to be made to realize that. Because Kirk has always had a healthy capacity for introspection and self-criticism. He’s not the kind of person who reflexively rejects criticism from others, so he doesn’t need to be criticized gently for fear of antagonizing him. His tendency to question himself is what keeps him honest. But sometimes he gets too driven, too caught up in the pursuit of a goal, and needs Spock or McCoy to push back against that tendency.
@159/Christopher: Yeah, I’m no good at channeling McCoy. I knew that he wouldn’t talk like that when I wrote the comment, but it was the best I could come up with.
Still, I think that McCoy isn’t his usual self in the scene. He’s always blunt, but he usually isn’t nasty. Not to Kirk, anyway. He’s never talked to Kirk like this before, not even in “Obsession”.
Like I wrote in one of my previous comments, when I watch the film, I don’t just see Kirk being wrong. I see three people making mistakes, Kirk, Decker, and McCoy.
Come to think of it, that’s why I don’t watch this film much. Not because of the ugly uniforms (the other films have ugly uniforms too) or because it’s slow (I like slow), but because one of the things I love about TOS is the way the main characters take care of each other. Here, all the friendships are broken. It hurts me to watch it. It gets better – that’s one of the stories the film tells, and the sickbay scene is beautiful – but it takes a long time.
@160 Remember McCoy is still a bit aggrieved that Kirk yanked him back from whatever he was doing by having him drafted (or his Naval Reserve status reactivated) just so he can get the band back together. I don’t think he is that much more cranky and blunt than series McCoy, because he still had a sharp tongue in that when the mood took him. And McCoy has already tried soft soaping it, there was the earlier “Jim, you’re pushing. Your people know their jobs” scene where McCoy saw Kirk and Decker have a spat. Kirk wasn’t listening, so McCoy verbally smacked him over the head with it.
@161/random22: That’s a good explanation, thank you!
160. JanaJansen – I can see why you say Kirk and Decker were making mistakes, although it’s more Decker being snarky than making mistakes. After all, he save the ship and was right that Kirk’s actions were going to get someone killed.
However, I don’t see McCoy being wrong at all. He’s doing exactly what Kirk said he needed him back for, Kirk knew that he needed someone to act as his conscience. Since he couldn’t count of having Spock back, even once Spock showed up, he needed someone to sit on his shoulder and tell him when he was making a mistake. And Kirk got all snippy with him for doing it.
Watch the scene in Kirk’s quarters after Decker leaves. McCoy is berating him. He’s being brutally honest because he knows that Kirk isn’t acting properly. He’s acting like an entitled saviour who’s very presence is enough to solve the mystery of V’Ger. As the old jokes goes – Why did the farmer hit the mule with a two by four? Because first you have to get the mule’s attention.
@163/kkozoriz: It’s fine that McCoy criticises Kirk. I just don’t like his tone.
IMO Kirk’s behaviour in “Obsession” isn’t any better than his behaviour here, yet this is how McCoy approaches him in that episode: “Monsters come in many forms. You know the greatest monster of them all, Jim? Guilt. […] When a young officer is exposed to unknown dangers for the first time, he’s under tremendous emotional stress. Now we all know that.” And he ends the conversation with: “Jim, we’re not trying to gang up on you.”
This is how you talk to a friend who has gone off the rails.
But I’m very happy with the explanation offered by random22. McCoy is still piqued because Kirk forced him back to Starfleet duty. On top of that, Kirk charmed him into accepting it (albeit grudgingly), but at that point he had no idea of Kirk’s personal problems, so he didn’t know what he was agreeing to. All this angers him and makes him meaner than usual.
@136 KRAD
That’s not true. We see Klingons in the Kobayashi Maru. There is zero reason for their presence beyond the evident necessity of including the Klingons because they’re popular.
And back to TMP, I think the presence of the Klingons fits nicely into the broader context of the TOS movie he align. Here the Klingons lose three battle cruisers to a hostile alien that a single Federation starship manages to repel with zero damage… which could be interpreted as evidence of inferiority, which could possibly justify their desperation re:Genesis in ST3, and why they would overmine Praxis so badly in ST6. The scene contributes to a broader narrative of the Klingon Empire falling behind the Federation… a theme which continues to play out all the way into TNG and, arguably, DS9.
And while we’re talking Klingons here, KRAD, if you’re still monitoring these comments, that is, what’s the deal with the IKS Gordon/Klingon Empire books? Is the series canceled? Or on hold? I really loved ’em, and while the Prey trilogy was nice, it wasn’t quite the same.
164. JanaJansen – In Obsession, Kirk was going for revenge after something that he felt partly responsible for. He believed that his actions led to the deaths of his crew mates.
In TMP, Kirk is being selfish. He sees a chance to get the Enterprise back and goes for it. Decker says it. McCoy says. As mentioned upstream, Kirk actually has very little to do with resolving the situation with V’Ger. Spock figures out how to communicate with it. Decker’s relationship with Ilea gives tham an insight and the Decker is the one that figures out how to resolve the situation. And even then, Kirk tries to stop him. “Decker don’t” as McCoy and Spock hold him back.
What was Kirk’s plan if he stopped Decker?
@61 I get your response given that I mentioned personal details, but I don’t think that cinema being a storytelling medium is fairly up for debate. I have at least 100 years of cinematic history on my side.
Keep in mind that there is a very well developed story being told here. It may be plodding, but it’s a story. Without some sort of narrative, film would just be long shots of wildlife.
@166/kkozoriz: Whether Kirk made the same mistake in both stories is beside the point. The point is that McCoy, even if he doesn’t “softpedal his criticisms” (to quote comment #159), is well capable of a more empathetic approach, and that this more empathetic approach has worked on Kirk before. So there’s a good chance that it would work here, too. There isn’t any reason to be “brutally honest” or, as I would call it, mean. McCoy could have tried to win Kirk over first and yell at him if that doesn’t work.
“And even then, Kirk tries to stop him. “Decker don’t” as McCoy and Spock hold him back.” – That isn’t being selfish, that’s being protective. Decker knows that. That’s why he reacts by telling Kirk: “Jim, I want this.”
168. JanaJansen – The Kirk in TMP is older, more experienced. He should know better. He’s not a child who has to be treated with kid gloves. McCoy didn’t insult him or talk down to him. He laid out exactly what he was doing and why he was wrong. Sometimes friends have to be brutally honest and not worry about how someone’s feelings are going to be hurt. We’re talking about a threat to every living thing in the universe.
And the Kirk at the end of TMP doesn’t have an idea on how to stop V’Ger. He should understand, like McCoy and Spock do, that sometimes you need to make a sacrifice. Especially since the scene is evocative of Kirk stopping McCoy from saving Edith Keeler. Kirk understood that a sacrifice was necessary to restore the timeline. He should have understood Decker’s decision. They were down to a matter of minutes and Kirk decides that he’d rather protect one person that the billions on Earth?
Kirk has already taken away the Enterprise and, through the action that Decker warned him about, Ilea. Why does Kirk continues to be the one competing with Decker, even after McCoy told him that he was the one competing with Decker as opposed to the other way around? Decker was willing to make the sacrifice. Unless Kirk was willing to take his place, he should have accepted it like Spock and McCoy did.
The entire movie is worth it just for Scotty’s stache and McCoy’s disco outfit. But yes, it’s slow, and it’s not much more than a “The Changeling” remake.
@141 – Jason: You beat me to Bones’ outfit. As for the movie, I watched it again a couple of years ago, and it’s still slow.
@144 – random22: I would watch that too. Hard.
@146 – Chris: Read that, but there was not enough disco.
@156 – pjcamp: Not only this is the wrong movie, but that’s pretty low.
@161 – random22: McCoy was Disco Doctoring, we already established that.
@169/kkozoriz: “Sometimes friends have to be brutally honest” – I totally disagree. Friends have to be honest, but they don’t have to be brutal. Being brutal hurts your friend and serves no useful function.
171. JanaJansen – Brutally honest doesn’t mean being mean. It means not sugar coating something. It’s the difference between telling someone who’s planning on robbing a bank “If you do this, you could get into trouble” and “If you do this you could end up in jail or dead.”. The clock is running and the Enterprise is already late. McCoy doesn’t have time to make Kirk feel better. He needs Kirk to understand RIGHT NOW that his actions could lead to disaster.
@172/kkozoriz: Yeah, well, my point is that McCoy is being mean here. Also, being friendly doesn’t take up much more time than being unfriendly, and you don’t run the risk that the other person closes up and refuses to listen.
173. JanaJansen – He’s not being mean, he’s being direct. He doesn’t call Kirk names or belittle him. What he does do is lay out exactly what he is doing wrong and let’s him know that whatever happens is Kirk’s decision. If anything, Kirk is the one being “mean” to McCoy. He brings him on board for selfish reasons “Dammit Bones, I need you. Badly” and then when McCoy tries telling that he’s acting improperly “You’re pushing. Your people know their jobs” he gets a dirty look from Kirk.
Later in his quarters, he dismisses McCoy.
(Chekov bit removed)
KIRK: Make your point, Doctor.
McCOY: The point, Captain, is that it’s you who’s competing. …You rammed getting this command down Starfleet’s throat. You’ve used this emergency to get Enterprise back.
KIRK: And I intend to keep her, is it that what you’re saying?
McCOY: Yes! It’s an obsession, an obsession that can blind you to far more immediate, and critical responsibilities. Your reaction to Decker is an example.
KIRK: Your …opinion has been noted. Is there anything further?
McCoy: That depends on you.
Noted he says. Not “You’re right” or “You may have a point”. “Your opinion has been noted” is what you say when you have no intention of following whatever advice you’ve asked for. Kirk has no intention of listening. That’s the point. He’s forgotten how to be part of a team.
@174/kkozoriz: Calling someone names or belittling them isn’t the only way to be mean. “You rammed getting this command down Starfleet’s throat” is more than just being direct – it’s being aggressive and accusatory. McCoy has a point, but the way he phrases it, it becomes an attack. And in my book, that’s the worst kind of verbal attack, because it’s almost impossible to react to – you want to say “You’re such an asshole” and “You may be right, let me think about it” at the same time. But those two reactions are mutually exclusive.
So I interpret Kirk’s reaction very differently. I find it composed and mature. I would have said the same thing in his place, if I had managed to control my temper. Don’t defend yourself, don’t become aggressive yourself, but don’t give in, either. Get rid of the other person. Then take your time to calm down and sort through the aggression and the underlying message.
Kirk doesn’t need someone to tell him that everyone is being mean to him and that Nogura was just trying to stand in his way. The exchange with Scotty and Kirk in the travel pod:
KIRK: Two and a half years as Chief of Starfleet Operations may have made me a stale but I wouldn’t exactly consider myself untried. They gave her back to me, Scotty.
SCOTT: Gave her back, sir? I doubt it was that easy with Nogura.
KIRK: You’re right
SCOTT: Well, any man who could manage such a feat, I wouldna dare disappoint.
It’s obvious that the idea of taking back command originated with Kirk himself and that it was difficult to convince Nogura to go along with it. McCoy is pointing out that Kirk’s motivation may not be to save the Earth but to get himself back in the center seat and that he needs to realize that his primary mission is to stop V’ger and not just to make sure everyone knows he’s the Captain.
Kirk’s insistence on pushing Scotty on the warp drive, which leads to the wormhole and the potential loss of the ship because Kirk doesn’t know that he can’t use phasers. Kirk’s pushing aside his own chosen sucessor. If he didn’t think that Decker was up to the job then he shouldn’t have recommended him. If he does think he’s capable, then he’s wrong to remove him as Captain.
Decker – I remember when you recommended me for this command. You told me how envious you were, and how much you hoped you’d find a way to get a starship command again. Well, it looks like you found a way.
THAT is what McCoy is pointing out to Kirk. I just can’t see McCoy saying something along the lines of “Yes Jim, I know that everyone is blind to your greatness. You just need to make sure they know that you’re the only person who can possibly perform this mission. I know you’re the best Jim. Now you need to make sure everyone else knows it too.”
Kirk has very little to do with the successful completion of the mission and yet he’s the one that everyone thinks saved Earth from V’Ger. Spock and Decker are much more responsible for that but Spock is too loyal to Kirk and Decker is dead so Kirk gets the glory by default.
@176/kkozoriz: Since this has nothing to do with what I’ve been talking about, I take it as a suggestion to drop the subject.
@@@@@3 and 30 Lubitsch: Thank you for introducing me to JK Muir’s blog. I do enjoy his writing. I happen to enjoy Keith’s reviews (despite my disagreement with him over this particular film), but as a musical fan I want to read Muir’s book “Singing a New Tune.”
Have you actually READ I Am Not Spock? Because Leonard Nimoy did NOT repudiate Spock in that book; the book is a meditation on identity and a thoughtful look at how much it cost Leonard Nimoy, emotionally, to play Spock and how much the general public wants actors to BE their characters and doesn’t want to hear that the actor is not the character. Far from repudiating Spock, Leonard Nimoy explicitly says that if he couldn’t be Leonard Nimoy, he’d choose to be Spock. But while Spock a both a great character and a great man, there are aspects to Mr. Nimoy that Spock doesn’t contain; he was a poet and a photographer and an actor who played many other roles.
I’ve always thought that Starfleet would have been crazy to promote their most successful starship captain to admiral while he was still young enough to serve as a captain, plus there’s no way that Kirk would have allowed Starfleet to promote him off of the bridge of his ship. And the Spock I saw in TOS didn’t think so little of his human friends or so little of his duty to Starfleet or so little of his mother as to want to undergo Kolinahr. So both of the main characters were put into situations that I thought took them entirely out of character. It’s no wonder the actors had trouble making the characters feel right, given that the characters weren’t WRITTEN right.
I’ll always be grateful to Gene Roddenberry for creating Star Trek, but TMP shows that he really needed Gene Coon and Dorothy Fontana and Bob Justman and all the other behind-the-scenes people from TOS. Because when left to himself, what Roddenberry made was … a hot mess.
And a damn fine singer too…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF5ROpjRAU
#180, @Random 22 — I deliberately left “singer” out because we saw Spock sing in “Plato’s Stepchildren.” And while Spock’s magnificent speaking voice isn’t quite as magnificent when he’s singing, he does carry a tune quite capably, whereas TFF showed us that Kirk and McCoy really can’t. :-)
@179/Corylea: Roddenberry was not “left to himself” on TMP. The basic story was by Alan Dean Foster, Jon Povill worked on early drafts of the script, and Harold Livingston was the producer and primary screenwriter, with Roddenberry doing rewrites back-and-forth with Livingston and others. By the end of the production, Shatner, Nimoy, Wise, and various others were contributing to the rewriting process as well. Now, maybe you could argue that Roddenberry was at fault as the producer for failing to corral the writing team better and guide them into making a more cohesive story, but it’s certainly wrong to say TMP was his solo effort.
@179/Corylea: “[…] there’s no way that Kirk would have allowed Starfleet to promote him off of the bridge of his ship.”
But Kirk has such a strong sense of duty. If Starfleet decided to promote him, I don’t think he would refuse. Now McCoy, that’s a different story…
Do you know the novel Forgotten History by Christopher Bennett (you know, the guy who’s commenting here)? Among many other things, it contains a nice version of Kirk’s promotion against his wishes. Basically, he saves a planet under the watchful eyes of one of Star Trek’s grudging bureaucrats and as a result is charged with a Prime Directive violation. There’s a public hearing, and eventually Starfleet decides to promote him to get him out of trouble.
RIP McCoy’s beard (1979-1979)
I just watched this as part of a NYE movie marathon with my wife who had never seen it….oh my God, the film is basicly one long series of docking and undocking sequences!
Actually the docking and undocking are the best parts. ;-)
Just finished watching the Director’s Edition, and I’ve got to say that its not too bad. A little slow, but an okay Star Trek movie. I’d give it a 6. If they had the updated, and much more naval-looking, uniforms of the subsequent films, I’d probably even go up to 7 or 8. I think this viewing was helped by the fact that its been 15+yrs since I’ve seen it, and so I’d forgotten most of the movie; so most scenes felt pretty new to me. Also, I love the Klingon introduction. It shows us how powerful Vger is, and gives the start of the movie a cool, ominous vibe. And I also love the flyby. Yes its long, but it introduces us to the new ship in a way that I wish they’d do every time we get a new Enterprise. I’m almost as attached to the ship as I am the crew, so much so that I have built and owned a number of Enterprise models, so maybe that biases me.
Much has all ready been said, so I’ll just add a couple more things:
First, there’s been no mention of how TMP’s plot is weirdly similar to TVH. Big planet-destroying alien ship with connections to Earth’s past, needs to be communicated with, in order to stop it from destroying the Earth. Yes, TVH comes later, but it is another connection I haven’t seen mentioned.
Second, unlike what I’ve seen written a few times in these comments, I do NOT think that Kirk necessarily gets Ilia killed. Kirk made the call to try and restrict Vger’s access to the ship’s computer. A 50/50 call for sure, but one which could easily be defended. Its a decision Spock also apparently agreed with, even going so far as to actually smash the computer console with his bare hands. If anything, Spock has as much to do with Ilia’s death as Kirk. Plus, without Ilia’s death, they might never have been able to reach through to Vger, and thus save the Earth. Besides, who knows what would have happened if Vger had been allowed to finish scanning the databanks. We can only guess.
Lastly, everyone seems to forget that Kirk was rushing, and being a little overbearing, in large part because the Earth was in imminent danger of being destroyed. He wasn’t ignoring safety procedures for the heck of it, he was doing it because every second counted at that point, at least potentially.
P.S. As a child I thought that the wormhole forming was kind of a good thing, because it would get them to their destination faster. A’la DS9’s wormhole. Upon viewing as an adult, I wonder whether or not it helped speed them up? Does anyone know if it actually cut down on their time to destination, or if they were still traveling at roughly the same speed? Because this seems like a different kind of wormhole.
@187/dakota_mike: I choose to believe that Ilia had agency in her own death, that she chose to interpose herself between the probe and Spock in order to shield him from it, and that’s why it shifted its attention from Spock to her. Unfortunately, the actors’ movements in the scene are bizarrely stiff and slow-paced, as if they were rehearsing their moves for a faster scene in slow motion, so it’s hard to get a real sense of why Spock moves back and Ilia stands to face the probe. But that’s the way I choose to interpret it.
As for the wormhole, they had to compute a new interception course to V’Ger once the wormhole dissipated, so I presume the wormhole threw them off course. Since it wasn’t a planned phenomenon, they couldn’t control where its exit point would be.
I liked it. It was the most ‘Star Trekkish’ of the movies. “Hey, there’s some weird shit going on; check it out.” And they try communicating with it, they learn as much as they can about it and they do everything but shoot at it, which seems to be the standard operating procedure in the following movies.
I saw this movie when I was 16 and it first hit the theaters. I saw it with my oldest brother and five to six friends. All of us were huge TOS fans. After the movie was over, we looked at each other and said in unison: “That was really bad.” I have only seen it once since then and did not like it any better. IMO, it was poorly acted and poorly plotted.
This is a bad movie. The script is terrible, the acting is terrible, the pacing is terrible, the guest characters are bleh. I like the concept though. It is about exploration and it’s more cerebral than your typical “revenge seeking baddie” Star Trek plot that has dominated the movies as of late. The music is great and the models look amazing.
When you take this movie and the early seasons of TNG, it seems clear that Gene Roddenbury was not a good producer anymore. Or maybe he captured lightning in a bottle with all the people who helped him with TOS (Coon, Justman, DC Fontana, etc.)
It would’ve been interesting if this was a good movie. Maybe Star Trek would’ve gone in a much different direction with more “sci-fi” type stories and less “pew pew.” Though Wrath of Khan was able to successfully combine the two. I find it funny on places like Reddit, the cool, hipster opinion of this movie now is that it’s the best Star Trek movie. It’s not though. It’s a huge missed opportunity.
“I was ten years old, and I absolutely loved it. As I grew older, I began to see the flaws, and came to intensely dislike the film.”
My feelings exactly about this film, and Star Trek V for that matter — loved it when I was younger, hate it now.
Count me among the detractors. For the most part, I agree with Keith’s criticisms of The Motion Picture. I do think the film becomes more interesting once the Enterprise reaches V’Ger though, beginning with that amazing glide over the terrifyingly vast, unknown threat. I wish it hadn’t recycled the revelation from “The Changeling” though; why couldn’t V’Ger have been a probe from outside the Galaxy, curious but uncomprehending of the terror it brought?
@193/Fujimoto: If V’Ger had been of alien origin, though, it would’ve had no reason to target Earth specifically, or to believe it could find the Creator there.
Personally I get very, very tired of looking at V’ger’s glowy innards. Yes, it’s really big! Yes it glows pretty colors! Can we get on with the plot now?! On the other hand I have no problem with spending four minutes admiring the Enterprise. I guess it’s all in what you enjoy looking at.
Finally, Beige uniforms!!! Footy pajamas!!!!
I was 9 when TMP came out, excited to see it after enjoying the series in reruns — and of course the likes of Star Wars on the big screen. The scenes reuniting the gang were electric no matter how ponderous the rest; so many grown-ups lamenting the end result saddened me.
Now, I’ve just watched it again for the first time in a long time, and I get where its proponents are coming from even as several issues tend to align me with the prevailing sentiment.
Various comments and questions raised by the film and the discussion here:
I was surprised to hear the relay station’s crew describe measure the massive cloud in astronomical units. That’s big.
Along with echoes of 2001 and Close Encounters there’s a bit of a “Space Oddity” vibe.
♪ This is Mis-ter Spock to En-ter-priiise / I’m coasting through the do-o-or… ♫
I understand Kirk wanting Bones there as counsel but drafting your old friend out of retirement to quite possibly come die with you is a hell of a thing.
Kirk being allowed to immediately head back out, that-a-way, as Shatner puts it when he tosses off the line, rather than return to Earth for massive debriefing after the climax is ridiculous.
I’ve read in previous TOS rewatch posts that Roddenberry approached the film, per its novelization, as closer to how things really occurred within the conceit that we’re seeing or reading dramatic reenactments of a sort, the series having been a more imperfect recreation of these stories. Were the Starfleet uniforms supposed to always have looked like the film versions, then, or is the new look in fact a diegetic change? What the hell do all the different variations in color and cut mean? Who decided the film’s version of Kirk’s olive wrap/tunic should be a terry-cloth T-shirt? SNL’s Trek / Love Boat mashup in Patrick Stewart’s episode was a dozen years too late!
The most frustrating part of the Enterprise flyby to me isn’t the length or the repetitive shots of Kirk and Scotty; it’s the soundtrack hitting us over the head with the new theme like a barely even metaphorical broken record.
And the worst part of Kirk’s actions to me isn’t that he supplants Decker; it’s that he takes such obvious glee in doing so, not just in captaining a starship, this starship, again but in taking his old friend’s son down a peg. There’s no reason for Decker to literally be demoted to commander, either, as conversations on various series episodes have noted.
I had totally forgotten about Spock’s epiphany after encountering this massive entity’s heart — or more precisely, its core. Nimoy definitely sells the more-stoic-than-ever Spock as well as the open, integrated version, and his transition is particularly intriguing in light of the character’s journey in the next three films.
@196/Arben: “Were the Starfleet uniforms supposed to always have looked like the film versions, then, or is the new look in fact a diegetic change?”
Hard to say about the uniforms, but I’ve always assumed the intent was that the ships and technology had always looked closer to the movie version, and that seems to be the approach taken by the Bad Robot and Secret Hideout versions of the Enterprise, which retroactively give TMP-style details to the pre-TOS ship. And we know that Roddenberry intended that the Klingons had always had ridges.
“What the hell do all the different variations in color and cut mean?”
There’s some info here: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(mid_2270s)
“Who decided the film’s version of Kirk’s olive wrap/tunic should be a terry-cloth T-shirt?”
Presumably costume designer Bill Theiss, along with Roddenberry and Wise. Theiss was TOS’s costume designer as well.
@197. CLB — That last one was pretty much rhetorical but I appreciate the link. (I’ve looked up the various outfits, among other stuff, on Memory Alpha in the past but I’m bad at placing stories by real-world year.)
Beige and taupe are terrible colors for space uniforms! I’m not a fan of the powder blue either. McCoy looks good in medical whites but putting Nichelle Nichols in beige was a crime!
@199/roxana: It was the seventies. People thought avocado green was a good color for cars and appliances. I wonder if maybe there’d been so much air pollution in the previous decades that people just got used to being surrounded by drab, dingy colors.
Very true. God how I hated seventies earth tones!! I could tell a long story here about my desperate search for a decent dress to wear to my graduation in 1979 but I’ll spare you.
I wish I’d known about the upcoming 4k cut before playing the movie a couple of weeks ago. There’s a good interview on Gizmodo about the restoration / refurbishing it underwent, including discussion of how the original theatrical version had to go out with a washed-out, uniform* color scheme to accommodate segments coming in under the wire. Maybe fifteen years ago now I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole on color grading, once known as color timing, and it literally got me looking at film in a new way.
*Ha! No pun intended. As it happens, I’ve been reading the Marvel Star Trek comics that followed TMP since rewatching it and the other day I discovered backup pages in #10 devoted to a look at the movie-era uniforms “from the files of Starfleet Command headquarters”. They do their best to make sense of all the colors and styles. What’s funny is that the full Class-A uniform and slacks of the Class-B are referred to as gray when they appear powder blue as printed and of course as was mentioned far above in these comments those uniforms were actually blue yet came across on screen to audiences as gray.
Regarding the muted color palette and strange tastes of the 1970s, I’m a child of that decade and I have no explanation. There was a boxy, dull avocado or pea green Volvo that I’d spot parked around the small town where I lived and it was probably tied for the coolest ride I’d ever seen with the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am, pretty much its polar opposite.
I was twelve and only beginning to reject TOS for Star Wars fandom, but I was bored out of my mind. To be fair, this was the first really big budget science fiction feature film post 2001 and the Star Wars franchise and I think that the spectacle of both of those created expectations that sent the production in entirely the wrong direction. “Imagine what we could do with Star Trek and modern movie tech”, completely forgetting that TOS barely had modern 60s TV tech and relied very heavily and ultimately with lasting success on character and plot.
This was a waste of time and a disappointment to most fans and the only redeeming thing about it was that it created the possibility of Wrath of Kahn and TNG.
@203/Bill: “To be fair, this was the first really big budget science fiction feature film post 2001 and the Star Wars franchise and I think that the spectacle of both of those created expectations that sent the production in entirely the wrong direction. “Imagine what we could do with Star Trek and modern movie tech”, completely forgetting that TOS barely had modern 60s TV tech and relied very heavily and ultimately with lasting success on character and plot.”
Sorry, but that assumption is misunderstanding the larger context in which TOS aired. For its time, it wasn’t cheap or crude. On the contrary, it was the most elaborate visual-effects undertaking in television history up to then, requiring as many as four separate VFX houses to work on it simultaneously to pull off the sheer volume of optical effects, some of them innovative and experimental, on a weekly basis. For its day, it was a visual spectacle beyond anything ever seen on the small screen, and the reason it wasn’t cancelled despite its high cost and low ratings was that it was cited in surveys as the main reason why people were buying color TV sets, the patent for which was owned by NBC’s parent company RCA. It literally stayed on the air because of its elaborate production values and visual effects, as much as the quality of its writing and acting. TOS got Emmy nominations for its visual effects in all three seasons.
So TMP striving for the best visuals possible was not imitating Star Wars, except maybe in the minds of the Paramount execs. It was a natural extrapolation from how TOS itself had approached things, just ramped up with a decade of VFX advancements and the kind of budget Roddenberry had only dreamed of having on the show.
I unapologetically love this film. My brother and I used to argue when we were kids about whether this or Wrath of Khan was better, and I always defended this one. I love it for the same reason I love other slow, ponderous science fiction from earlier in that era. It’s just my cup of tea. Plus, I love how it treats the characters like real people with significant flaws, and this might be the first movie I ever saw that featured such things, since it came out when I was very young. Anyway, I continue to enjoy it more than any of the films that followed it.
Having just re-watched the film in the way of a brand-new Director’s Cut 4K UHD Blu-ray, I have to say that I was much more involved in the plot, the characters and the overly-long effects sequences. TMP is a lovely homage to more thoughful sci-fi. Yes, the plot is recycled ‘The Changeling’, but wheras you wished Kirk would have flushed Nomad into the Enterprise’s waste system, in TMP, you feel for V’Ger. I find it pretty awe-inspiring that this hundreds-year-old space craft has come home to share what it has encountered and it had no one to talk to. TMP is good sci-fi, something which its subsequent sequels are not.
I’m taking an anatomy and physiology class currently. The human body is composed of 65% oxygen. Coming up way in second place is carbon at 18%. Therefore, shouldn’t V’Ger have referred to humans and other humanoids as “oxygen units” and not “carbon units?”
@207/garreth: Organic bodies are made of carbon compounds, which is why we call them carbon-based life forms, and why the scientific definition of “organic molecule” is “molecule containing carbon.” Carbon is the most versatile and important element in organic compounds, sort of the backbone on which the molecules are built.
Besides, I’d guess off the top of my head that most of that atomic oxygen in the body is probably in water molecules. Water is just the solvent for carbon-based biochemistry.
@208/CLB: Oh, okay. Thanks. “Carbon units” sounds better in dialogue than “oxygen units” anyway.
Something that comes up from time to time in SF is life forms using a basis other than carbon compounds — the Horta in the Trek episode Devil in the Dark, e.g., is actually a silicon-based life form.