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Oh boy.... To start this series of discussions on the Star Trek films, one must start with 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The movie has, since the time of it's release gained a reputation for being very slow, stiff, and a flop. Some people have come to call it "The Motionless Picture". Is it? Well, let's take a look.
In the mid 1970s, after Star Trek had become a hit in syndication after cancellation in 1969, Paramount decided that they had made a mistake and were going to bring a Star Trek movie to screens. Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator and producer, wrote two scripts, both of which Paramount decided weren't possible or weren't good enough. By 1977, Paramount decided they were going to launch a 4th television network and that a new Star Trek show would be it's flagship. The show was to be called Star Trek Phase II, and would keep most of the cast of the original show sort of like 1973's successful Star Trek: The Animated Series did. Spock would not have been in the show. Leonard Nimoy had grown to dislike his association with Star Trek over the years and declined to participate. A new Vulcan science officer would be added named Lieutenant Xon, a full Vulcan unlike Spock who was half human. The show would also have introduced the new characters of Commander Will Decker and and Lieutenant Illia, who had had a previous close relationship. Illia was to be a Deltan, a race that's so sexually powerful and knowledgeable that Star Fleet required them to take an oath of celibacy in order to serve. Many of these ideas for the TV show would carry over to The Motion Picture.
In 1978, Paramount was briefed on the pilot episode of Phase II called "In Thy Image", which was written by science fiction author Alan Dean Foster. In the meantime Close Encounters had expanded on Star Wars' success at the box office, showing that there was a tremendous audience for science fiction films. Paramount started looking around for science fiction scripts, and when they were told the plot of 'In Thy Image', they decided that the two hour pilot would be better suited as a movie. They scrapped plans for the TV network and for Phase II immediately. (Screen tests, some sets, and 13 scripts had already been done, as well as some actors being hired.) The script for the pilot was slightly redone to make it more cinematic and Robert Wise, director of The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, The Andromeda Strain, West Side Story and The Sound of Music (very varied career) was hired to direct the new $15 million film. They even got Nimoy to agree to be in the film. He required script approval first, as he was still not still trying to figure out if he wanted to embrace the Spock character. (He did not, as is commonly stated, hate the character or the show. He simply wanted to try other things and kept getting pulled back to Star Trek.)
The plot here is pretty simple Trek. There is a huge cloud moving towards the earth that is dissolving everything in it's path. The film starts with three Klingon ships being... erased. Of course, the first line of defense for earth is the intrepid starship Enterprise, the good ole NCC-1701. However, Kirk hasn't been the captain of the ship for years. The current captain is William Decker (who would be the inspiration for the similarly named and personified William Riker in The Next Generation) who is one of the most boring main characters in the Trek films. He has the personality of a load of bricks. However, I think Stephen Collins (7th Heaven) did what he could with the limiting role. Kirk, now an admiral, is having somewhat of a mid-life crisis and has decided that commanding the Enterprise again is the answer to his malaise. So he pressures Starfleet into letting him take command of this mission. Decker is not pleased, however, the rest of the crew seems to be. (Not sure all of them were about Shatner though.) Kirk is not used to the Enterprise now, which has been renovated, and he constantly clashes with Decker, who does know the ship. Joining the crew as navigator is Illia, who had a relationship with Decker before she was in Starfleet. Kirk also convinces Dr. McCoy to come back. (In the novelization we learn he's been a veterinarian since leaving the Enterprise, growing tired of human patients.) Meanwhile Spock has been taking the ritual to cleanse himself of all human emotion on his home planet of Vulcan. However, just as he's about to finish the ritual, he senses the conciousness of the cloud and fails. He sets out to join the Enterprise en route. When he arrives, everyone is very happy to see him, but he's completely emotionless to everyone, quickly trying to leave the bridge to resolve the ship's warp drive problems. (It had entered a wormhole and was on a collision course with an asteroid earlier.) Kirk and McCoy find out what's wrong with Spock, but can not help. However, as the crew studies the cloud and Illea is taken by it's probe, Spock gets intrigued and changes as the film goes on back to his normal self. (V'Ger represents perfect logic, which is what Spock was trying to achieve but could not.) V'Ger (the cloud's name) sends back Illea's form to Enterprise as a probe to study the "earth units" (Crew) and to try to get in contact with it's creator. Oh, and V'Ger is basically a giant space vagina, so apt name (which Illea pronounces as V'Gah)... See?
The plot actually has quite a bit in common with a Star Trek episode called "The Changeling", which is one of my least favorite Star Trek episodes. In that episode a space probe called Nomad is brought aboard the Enterprise and eventually decides that the crew is infesting the ship and are unnecessary as with modifications the ship can run itself and decides to kill them. Well, by the end of the film, V'Ger had decided the same thing about the people of earth and the Enterprise. Why did it have to be like that episode? It's one of the most joked about episodes in Trekdom... and it's a very boring bottle episode (an episode where we don't leave the ship).
I love that teaser trailer. Narrated by Orson Welles, basically just naming the cast and characters against shots of the ship... and then the out of place THX type sound at the end. One interesting thing about this trailer is it's use of lasers at the end. Interesting because unlike Star Wars, which used lots of blue screen and model work for most of it's effects shots, this film used a lot of laser and light effects to create it's illusions. Sure, it used blue screen and model work as well, but the effects here were done by different people than those that did Star Wars. Well, actually, John Dykstra did work on this film's special effects eventually. But first Paramount had hired a company called Robert Abel and Associates to do the special effects. They had done the effects for Robert Wise's 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, but that was not exactly a huge special effects film, despite being science fiction. After a year of work on the effects for Star Trek, no useable footage was rendered. Paramount got Douglas Trumbull to take over special effects work, as he was now available having finished his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Not able to do all the work himself and needing more people to get the film done in time, Trumbull was joined by John Dykstra's special effects crew. Dykstra had been fired from Lucas' ILM by Lucas himself due to disagreement on effects quality and speed of effects work. (Dykstra and his team still won an Academy Award for their work.) Trumbull was told that he could spend as much money as it took to get the film ready by December, which was 9 months away, just as long as it got done. And he did. Dykstra and his team did all the work on the ships while Trumbull worked on the V'Ger cloud effects. And the effects in the movie are actually quite good. They have more of a 2001: A Space Odyssey vibe (Trumbull did the effects for that film) than a Star Wars vibe. The effects are pretty old school, but they actually work better than the blue screen effects in the film. I'm amazed that so many light tricks were used in the film. The transporter effects in the film are made from laser light refracted by broken fancy glass ashtrays. The wormhole is not animated as I had thought, but is an actual laser effect. Sadly, the wormhole scene is one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes in the film, as everyone speaks in slow voices and are blurred. Especially funny is Chekov speaking deep and slow.
And that's one of the problems with the film. It's just... stiff. And I know that's a decision made on purpose, but it just makes the movie feel sooooo long. The crew is supposed to have been apart for a while and Kirk is having a mid-life crisis. Spock is having one too, deciding to get rid of his humanity to behave as a full Vulcan. That's why Kirk is so military and why Spock is so distant and emotionless. They do thaw out as the film goes on, but that doesn't start until Spock comes into the film around the one hour mark. The television show was always part comedy, intentionally and unintentionally at times. For Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it's mainly unintentional. Dr. McCoy has the usual sarcastic wit to him, but Kirk doesn't. In one of my favorite lines, after Spock states that V'Ger is like a spoiled child, McCoy wonders if they should spank it.
Let's talk about some of the other issues the film has, shall we? How about those jump suit costumes? I know this is the disco era, but man was that a bad decision. Gone are the blue, gold and red uniforms in favor of grey... pajamas. And Shatner has his most obvious toupee in this film. Watch it in blu-ray and be amazed. To add to that, the crew other than Decker, Kirk, Illea, and Spock all get just a few lines. I mean, sure, this happened on the show too, but in comparison with the later films in this series, it's kind of sad. The film is also quite a bit too long. Much as has been said about how long the special effects shots last, especially the reveal of the Enterprise. Well, part of that is due to the fact that they had no time to edit those shots as they were being done up to the last day before the premier. And they actually wanted those scenes to last a while. They figured the diehard fans of the original show would be in awe of their favorite ship so detailed and in scale on the big screen. Let's face it, the movie was sold as a special effects film. Paramount was giving people what they thought the people wanted after the big sci-fi films of 1977. But it doesn't work. The long effects shots seem to be there to add to running time. Even the critics back in 1979 agreed with that assessment. In fact, I think the only thing the movie gets 100% right is Jerry Goldsmith's iconic score. He created a theme that is more popular than Alexander Courage's theme to the original series. His theme would eventually be adapted as the theme to The Next Generation. It's not a John Williams type score, but more experimental and mysterious. It's not giddy adventure music outside of the theme. The score was one of the three Academy Awards the film was nominated for. (It won none.)
The film, which went way overbudget to $46 million, went on to make $139 million. That's $446.9 million worldwide adjusted for inflation. That'd be quite a tidy sum even today, but it didn't meet Paramount's expectations, as they were hoping for another Star Wars. The critics were divided on the film. Most thought it slow, boring, and that the actors didn't have their hearts in it. I have to agree. The film is a struggle to sit through (I did it 3 times in the past 3 days, I should know.) and pales in comparison to every single Trek movie that comes after it. This movie is basically a fancy two hour TV episode that should have only been an hour. It's got it's moments and the effects are pretty cool, but if you want to put anyone to sleep, this is a good film to show them. Out of the two big sci-fi films (Alien is horror, not sci-fi, and Moonraker is too silly for me even to consider) of 1979, (both of which were the last to have overtures before the movie began, by the way), stick with the cartoonish but dark The Black Hole. At least it's fun, even if it isn't as smart and is more clearly trying to ride on Star Wars' popularity. At least The Motion Picture did well enough to warrant a sequel... But they wouldn't spend as much money on it. And by jove, maybe they finally found a good formula!
Take us out!
