Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979
I hated this movie when I first saw it. Too slow, too ponderous, and the crew gape like idiots at a viewing screen for fifteen minutes! What is this poor man's 2001 I am watching? This time, I tried to approach it this time as a 1979 fan who might been there from the beginning, or got into it in the early 70s.
The film's tone acknowledges that fans have been waiting over ten years for more live-action Trek – it feels like a film for a TV show that lasted twenty seasons, not three. When you think about it being in syndication since 1969, it kinda was. Everything plays out like a stage production, gently introducing old favorites to take a bow in the silver spotlight, including the Enterprise. You get the sense that this is a big deal for everyone involved, including Shatner, who was actually unemployed for a while after the Original Series wrapped. The pacing will feel slower to modern audiences, and it's a far cry from the whiplash of Orci and Kurtzman's reboots. An audience full of Trekkies is allowed to bask in the glow of a dream finally realized: Star Trek! On the big screen! But it's also more Star Trek! We finally have this!
When did you first see it? Was it on TV, or in the theatre?
It makes a difference. Like the original Star Wars movie, STTMP was intended for the big screen. I was 16 when it was released, and even though I'd only been a Trekker for 4 years, it felt like a lot longer. Back in those days it was possible to track down every commercial Star Trek book ever published (though I still don't have some of them). I'd eagerly read my monthly issues of
Starlog to get more information about the movie. And when my dad came home from working up north (gas wells), he brought me a present: the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Damn, it was hard to leave that alone until I'd seen the movie (I prefer my movies as spoiler-free as possible, so I won't be reading your review of the third nuTrek movie until I've seen it for myself).
I saw STTMP five times in the theatre, nagging my family to come with me, and other times I'd go by myself. It's the last movie I saw in the theatre that was eventually torn down to make room for other buildings.
What modern fans can't really connect to is that in those days, we were dependent on what was on TV. There was no internet. There weren't even any VCRs then. Some people had audio recordings they made by hooking up cassette players to the TVs, or holding the microphone up to the TVs and demanding that everyone else be absolutely quiet (that's how I got some of my Doctor Who recordings). So any time there was anything new, fans pounced on it, were enthusiastic, and overjoyed about it. Nowadays there's such a blase attitude to it, an inability to understand how it was to experience this era of fandom in real-time. Discussions like this one would have been impossible back then, since fans kept in touch either at conventions, in clubs, via newsletters, or by writing letters. Real letters, sent by snailmail. It's even more so for those who first saw the show in the '60s.
I'll be honest, the reactions to this movie were mixed. There was a
major WTF? reaction to the new type of Klingons. I loved the music, and was enthralled by the scene when Scotty and Kirk took the shuttle trip around the Enterprise and docked. The scenes on Vulcan, with shaggy-haired Spock and Vulcans speaking much more of their language than we heard in "Amok Time" were... fascinating.
Some people hated the slow pacing, but I didn't mind it. I was awed by the scope of V'Ger, and how tiny the Enterprise was by comparison.
Fast-forward 35+ years, and I concede that there were some problems with that movie, and some stuff that was just ludicrous. I've read both the official "Making of" book and also Walter Koenig's book
Chekov's Enterprise, which was Koenig's take on making the movie. It's really interesting to see how everything played out, from the pov of one of the minor cast members.
The scene where the entire crew was assembled had a lot of well-known Star Trek fans in it. Bjo Trimble and David Gerrold are in that scene, for example.
Spock undergoes a fantastic personal journey, transcending both Vulcan and human cultures to address his understated dissatisfaction. He ends his arc with a deeper understanding of himself and for the first time, he embraces both sides of himself, human and Vulcan, emotional and logical. This ends up being the most cinematic, yet subtle character arc in the film, expressed and echoed by V'Ger's longing for something more than a logical existence. The show's best character carries the Enterprise within himself, boldly going forward into a universe equally fraught and compelling.
Absolutely. It's a shame that some of the scene in Sickbay and a couple of others were initially deleted from the movie in favor of more special effects, because they really added to the movie - explained more of what was happening, added to characterization, and so on.
Holy God-Thing. This movie is like night and day after watching the Original Series. I loved this. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is a perfect coda to the TV show, with a final title card that would have worked just as well if the film was the final outing for Trek:
"The human adventure is just beginning."
How far we've come, and how far we are promised we will go.
Just sayin'
So.freaking.boring.
