Marty Michaels

With DVD and the Internet we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to great sci fi these days, so it’s hard to imagine now the excitment of being a Star Trek fan in 1979 and seeing that poster outside your local cinema. Star Trek had been off the air for ten years and the very thought of a brand new adventure of the USS Enterprise was enough to have fans salivating and pulling on their home made uniforms in preperation for queing round the block. The story behind the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture has been told many times, but it’s worth retelling (briefly) here. Star Trek‘s ratings had dropped off towards the end of its run, but became a huge success in syndication. NBC wanted to bring Kirk and co. back to the airwaves in a show called Star Trek: Phase II, but a certain film by a certain George Lucas changed their minds. Thanks to runaway success of Star Wars, the USS Enterprise would once again boldy go where no man had gone before, but not as a mere TV show; this was to be a major motion picture with budget to spare. It would feature all of the original cast (Nimoy had declined to appear in Phase II) and, most importantly for the studios, it would be in the capable hands of Robert Wise, director of sci fi classics The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Andromeda Strain and, erm, The Sound of Music.

To appreciate the film, you need to put yourself into the mind of a fan seeing it for the first time during it’s first run. Deprived of any new Trek for ten years, The Motion Picture packed them in. Seeing Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest on the screen again was enough to make $11,815,203 for the studio in the film’s opening weekend, breaking the record set by Superman. The novelisation of the movie was a bestseller, as were the next 17 books that followed. More tickets were sold for The Motion Picture than any other Trek film until last years’ reboot. In short, the film was a massive success.

The thing is, as excited as the fans were in 1979, time has not been kind to The Motion Picture. The plot, such as it is, in a semi-remake of the Original Series episdoe The Changeling and is perhaps somewhat hard to follow for a first time viewer and lacks any real drama or emotional impact. When an unknown force hidden in a cloud heads towards Earth, Starfleet sends the Enterprise to intercept. Intercept the cloud they do and the ship’s navigator, the Deltan empath Ilia is replaced by a robot replica by the alien force which calls itself “V’Ger.” Spock spacewalks out to V’Ger and attempts a mind meld and learns that V’Ger is self aware. In the heart of the machine, Kirk and co. learn that V’Ger is in actual fact the Voyager Six probe launched in the 20th Century. V’Ger says that it must merge with its “creator” – humankind – and the Enterprise’s first officer, Steven Decker, sacrifices himself to save Earth. A great idea for a 45 minute TV episode, but for a movie with a runtime of 132 minutes it is far too thin.

The best episodes of any Trek series are always the episodes that focus on the human element (The City on the Edge of Forever being a prime example), but The Motion Picture lacks any sense of emotional involvment between the characters and the plot and, in fact, more than once throughout the film characters act very out of character – McCoy being reluctant to join Kirk and Spock crying over what is essentially spilled milk being just two examples. In order to compete with the groundbreaking special effects of Star Wars the effects sequences take precidence over the human element – despite the tagline. Realising this when it came time to make the sequel, Nicholas Meyer wrote a much more personal movie in the form of The Wrath of Khan. Also unlike Khan and the sequels that followed, The Motion Picture is an awfully clinical film; it feels like someone went through the galaxy with a bottle of Mr Sheen before filming started. Even the uniforms have the look of medical scrubs, not to mention looking incredibly uncomfortable.

There are some moments in the film that work, and work very well. The first big reveal of the Enterprise is great (albeit slightly spoiled by a silly bit of direction that made Scotty look totally gay for Kirk), the special effects hold up pretty well and what few humanistic moments there are in the film are quite nice (Kirk comforting Rand after the transporter malfunction, for example), and the characters of Decker and Ilia are interesting as proto-Riker and proto-Troi (though they are frustratingly underused) but on the whole the film has not aged well. Just seeing Kirk, Spock and McCoy on the big screen again might have been enough in 1979, but in 2010, that just ain’t gonna cut it.

Tags: random movie review, star trek, the motion picture