The Original Series crew reunites to stop an all-powerful alien spacecraft headed for Earth. Kirk has weaseled his way back onto the bridge, demoting its new Captain, Decker. Along for the ride is new navigator Lieutenant Ilia, an empath, who has a romantic history with Decker.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the most cinematic feature in the Trek series, in every way that can be taken. It is by far the most competently made film. It has the finest direction, due to having the finest director in Robert Wise, and it out performs the other films in basic qualities such as camera angles, lighting, over all cinematography, sound design, and scene transitions. No Star Trek film looked better till Abrams threw loads of money at the franchise. The scoring is superb, giving the project a sense of power. This is an epic film, dealing with aliens, gods, the breadth of the universe, massive powers, love, aging and acceptance, and the meaning of life. It also contains a sense of wonder almost completely lacking from the later films. This is a science fiction film with purpose, not just the action popcorn movies that would come later. And it is more than an overlong episode of the TV show. This is a movie of grand scale. It introduces us to new characters, who could have taken their place amongst the original series pantheon if their path did not lead them elsewhere—and did pop up slightly altered in the Next Gen as Riker and Troi. There is emotion here.
Yes it is the most Star Trek of Star Trek films. It is hopeful without making excuses. It points to a better tomorrow while acknowledging our flaws. It suggests that battle is not the answer to our problems.
The Motion Picture could have been, and should have been, the finest Trek picture, but everything didn’t quite work out. It has become a much maligned film, often for silly reasons. The uniforms come in for a fair amount of derision, as if modern fashion sense is a clever basis for judging clothing three hundred year in the future (take a look at three hundred years in the past). Sure, to my eyes, the uniforms adopted for the follow-up film look better, but they only make sense if Star Fleet really is a military organization (which was not the original idea) that spends most of its time fighting on ice planets. I’d rather wear the breezier clothing here than the winter-wear that they went to. And people complain that the special effects have not aged well, which is true, but a trivial matter.
But there are two problems that do weigh the film down. One is understandable; the other is not. The first is the reintroduction of everything. A lot of time is spent showing us who these people are and what the Enterprise is. Each character is given a moment to do something stereotypical so that we know them, and the story slows to a crawl as they do. That seems absurd now, but in 1979, Star Trek was not so well known. The average person did not know what the Enterprise was, or who Kirk and Spock were, and even a majority of science fiction geeks were unlikely to have seen all of the old series. The problem never occurred again, with Star Trek rising out of the SF gutter to the heights of pop culture, but that came later. For this film, the studio felt it necessary to start from scratch and talking to people at the time, I’d say they were right. Unfortunately, these reintroductions are carried out in a clunky fashion. And perhaps things would have been fine if we didn’t know that Nurse Chapel was now a doctor and that Bones hates transporters and that Kirk really wants a Vulcan as a science officer. Yes, they did have to squeeze in a lot, but it wasn’t done with finesse.
That could have been excused if Wise wasn’t so infatuated with the sheer spectacle. Following in the mold of Close Encounters and 2001, the film expects the audience to be in awe of space and the enterprise and the great alien V’ger, but we’re not. Shots linger, then hover, then die, showing us gruesomely unending wiggly lines and clouds, and of course, the Enterprise itself. And because we, as the audience, need time for our reverence, we are joined in this by the crew. For every far-too-long shot of V’ger, there’s two painfully long shots of Kirk and company reacting to the shot.
Even now I suspect Star Trek: The Motion Picture could be the best of the series and generally great science fiction if Paramount was willing to do a new cut that took a hacksaw to the picture and chopped out thirty minutes. But for now, it’s a good, but too slow, movie.