(by Collin R. Skocik)
The five-year mission of the starship Enterprise is over. Our beloved characters have gone their separate ways. When a powerful alien cloud heads directly toward Earth, disintegrating everything in its path, Admiral James T. Kirk, having spent two and a half years wasting away at a desk job, seizes the opportunity to round up his old crew and return to the Enterprise to intercept and stop the alien menace.
After ten years off the air, Star Trek is back! The entire original cast reprise their roles aboard the starship Enterprise in a direct continuation of the TV series! It’s fairly common for a popular movie to become a TV series—usually unsuccessfully. And today (probably inspired by Star Trek)it’s fairly common for a genre TV series to move to the big screen right after its end—or even during its run. But I think Star Trek is pretty unique in being fully resurrected ten years after it ended, with the whole cast returning in a thunderous big-screen movie.
With its resounding music soundtrack, incredible special effects, transcendent ideas, and slow, majestic pace, for the Star Trek fan, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is akin to a religious experience. Never before had the twenty-third century been rendered so real; nor, I would argue, does the Star Trek future ever again come to life so vividly. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture brings the experience of spaceflight to stunning and vivid life. The Enterprise looks big! This is so totally what it will likely be like to travel on a real starship of the future.
Many fans complain that Kirk’s return to the Enterprise takes too long, that he and Scotty fly needlessly around the Enterprise for ten minutes and slow down the plot. But frankly, that may very well be my favorite scene in the whole of Star Trek. Kirk and Scotty share a deep and resounding love for the Enterprise that is fully expressed in that scene. And most of us Star Trek fans share the sentiment. Up to now, most shots of the Enterprise have been quick shots establishing that she’s speeding through space or orbiting a planet or face-to-face with a Klingon battlecruiser or drifting lifelessly or whatever. Here, for the first time, we get up close and personal and see the ship in a splendor that has never been seen before—and will never be seen again.
For some reason, the alien entity, V’Ger calls out telepathically to Spock—ruining his effort to achieve Kolinahr, “the Vulcan ritual that’s supposed to purge all remaining emotions.” Why this would be I’m not sure, although it’s likely V’Ger does this unconsciously. It considers “carbon-based units” to be insignificant and “not true life forms.” It’s more likely that its immense presence in the galaxy attracts Spock’s telepathic attention. “It touches your human blood,” the Vulcan priestess says. Spock, like V’Ger, is searching. “It knows only that it needs,” Spock later says, “but like so many of us, it does not know what.”
Like a number of previous episodes, Star Trek: The Motion Picture deals with the fact that there’s more to life than pure logic and intellect. “Is this all that I am?” V’Ger asks. “Is there nothing more?” V’Ger and Spock are both incomplete despite their pure logic. Spock learns that he needs emotion in order to give his logic meaning and beauty. V’Ger needs to touch its Creator to find out what it’s missing out on.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is not very popular; the usual reason why is because the pace is slow. That doesn’t bother me a bit. I drink in the gorgeous special effects shots, I relish the chance to just watch and absorb what’s on screen rather than have it flit by. Hey, I’m a 2001 fan, so I’m used to that stuff. And I spend hours watching real NASA footage of space missions, so by comparison, movies like 2001 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture are lightning fast!
However, other complaints about this movie are very valid. After waiting ten years for the return of the wonderful Star Trek characters, it’s pretty disappointing that, well, they don’t really do much in this movie. They pretty much sit and watch the pretty colors on the viewscreen. There’s virtually no interaction between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, which was the cornerstone of the series. McCoy’s part is little more than walking onto the bridge, scowling at the viewscreen, and walking off again. Every time a conversation starts to get interesting, we either switch to another special effects sequence or the alarm starts blaring or we switch to another scene. At a running time of more than two hours, Star Trek: The Motion Picture has considerably less character interplay than a typical one-hour episode.
And although I love the movie and appreciate the look and the feel that it establishes, it’s not lost on me that it really doesn’t feel like Star Trek. A lot had happened in the ten years between “Turnabout Intruder” and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Humans had landed on the Moon. The Voyager spacecraft had explored the moons of Jupiter. The Space Shuttle Enterprise had been rolled out and conducted the approach and landing tests, paving the way for America’s longest and most durable manned space program. And a movie had come out that changed cinema forever: Star Wars. Consequently, by necessity, Star Trek: The Motion Picture has a very different look and feel than the Star Trek TV series. And as joyous as it is to be watching Star Trek again, the changes are quite jarring. In fact, it seems it deliberately distances itself from the TV series. Jerry Goldsmith is a musical genius; I personally feel he’s the best composer in Hollywood history, a modern Beethoven. But still, would it have killed him to use a couple of the tried and true Star Trek motifs? Wouldn’t it have been cool to hear the old Alexander Courage theme music and see the title STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE in the TV series’ font?
The Enterprise has been so drastically upgraded that it’s disorienting; Kirk even gets lost! The redesign is beautiful, and very realistic. But it’s only with an effort of will that I can convince myself that it’s the same Enterprise aboard which we’ve had so many amazing adventures. It’s similar to TV’s Enterprise only in its basic shape and the general layout of the bridge. Otherwise, it’s changed in every detail. There’s little sense in this movie of coming home; we’re coming to a new, totally revamped Star Trek. A wonderful Star Trek, yes, but not the Star Trek we knew.
And gadzooks, the Klingons have sure changed! We’ve seen apparent different races of Klingons before—in “Friday’s Child” and “The Trouble With Tribbles,” the Klingons were lighter-skinned than at other times in the series. But that’s a different thing than freaking dragon bumps and fangs! I realize the new look of the Klingons is what they always wanted the Klingons to look like, and with the move to the big screen and huge budget, they could do that. But series continuity! That’s not what Klingons look like! …Well, it is now. The Klingons look like that from now on, through the rest of the movies, Star Trek: The Next Generation and all the spinoffs. Star Trek: Enterprise finally explained the different look with some sort of tie-in to Khan Noonien Singh’s people; I don’t know the whole story there.
Vulcan, which has no moon, appears here to have many moons! Fandom has established that although there’s no moon, Vulcan has a sister planet. Which, from this movie, has many moons. But still, Vulcan looks utterly different than it did in “Amok Time”—and utterly different than it will look in future movies.
We meet Will Decker, the son of Commodore Matt Decker, who we met in “The Doomsday Machine.” He once had a relationship with Ilia, the Deltan navigator; Persis Khambatta, as Ilia, manages to look pretty even though she’s completely bald! These characters presage the characters of Will Riker and Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Actually, a lot of stuff in TNG is foreshadowed here. The look of the engine room is nearly identical to that of the Enterprise-D, and the movie’s theme music was later used as the theme to TNG.
V’Ger is a “living machine” journeying to Earth, searching for its “Creator.” It calls humans “carbon-based units.” It attacks the Enterprise with powerful energy bolts. Kirk tries to reason with V’Ger in the form of the Ilia probe. Does all this sound a little familiar? Star Trek: The Motion Picture is practically a remake of “The Changeling.” The revelation that V’Ger is actually a Voyager spacecraft from Earth is incredibly dramatic, but not exactly surprising. Beyond the obvious disappointment that we’re getting a rehash instead of a totally new adventure, there’s a serious problem with series continuity. As soon as Ilia starts talking about “carbon-based units” and “the Creator,” Kirk ought to be immediately thinking of Nomad. Certainly the viewers are!
Now, truth be told, I actually think Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a better take on the idea than “The Changeling.” It unfolds more dramatically. It reveals that V’Ger is not a malevolent entity, but merely a lost child searching for meaning. It ends with a productive contact, and in fact an evolutionary leap for mankind, rather than senseless destruction. However, all this is hard to fully enjoy without amnesia.
For me, though, the film’s strengths absolutely crush its flaws. The glorious realization of the Star Trek universe, the flat-out Enterprise porn, the tear-jerking beauty of the universe, and the titillating exploration of the unknown are the things I look for in Star Trek—and indeed almost all science fiction. Despite the film’s low rating among fans, I’ve got to be honest—Star Trek: The Motion Picture is probably my favorite Star Trek movie.
(Collin R. Skocik is a fan of the Star Trek franchise and has written synopses of all 79 episodes of Star Trek’s original series and the first six Star Trek films.)
Principled Thoughts 