A while ago one of the cable channels ran all of the “classic” movies back-to-back, so I recorded them and watched them over a few days. The first movie really was the worst. No - I take that back, Star Trek V is! - “row row row your boat” anyone?
I was in college when the first movie came out, so a whole bunch of us went as a group. We were pretty excited; one of the group’s big rituals was to watch the original series in the dorm’s TV break room; it was actually in color, which was new to me! We were so very excited going in, but pretty quiet on the way out. It was colorful, the warp jump was pretty cool, and the slow pan past the Enterprise in the space dock was inspiring. On re-watching, the warp jump is just another special effect, and the space dock scene is interminable. The one thing I noticed was the theme was the same theme in The Next Generation (of course I wouldn’t have known that in 1979!)
After watching it, I went to the [Wikipedia-STTMP] (Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Wikipedia) article; it was a rough project to get developed and financed. Lots of good info there.
I love reading threads like this. The breadth of opinions and experiences is amazing. There are people here who regard it as the purest representation of Star Treks ethos and others who think it the most boring thing on the planet. First time recent watchers and people who saw it first run back in the 70s. And multiple people who felt the need to point out the TOS episode it was based on long after it had been been pointed out already. There was even one who poster who sandbagged WOTK as as “unscientific” and another who watched Blade Runner in a matinee in the early 80s and doesn’t know or care that it was one of the most highly regarded sci-fi films of all time.
You all are great. Never change. This is what the SDMB is supposed to be.
It’s a character study of Picard and Data that has them defeat an old villain. It has good external and internal conflict. It’s like TWOK, except it’s the good guy with the Ahab complex.
And, yes, the action is good, too. As is the ability for newcomers to enjoy it, without it devolving into the anti-intellectual mess of Star Trek (2009).
Also note that with II they took the easy/safe route to make a good movie, a battle. Sort of reminds me of a game series, Outpost which was a builder sim which flopped, but Outpost 2 they changed it to a RTS war type game.
I happened to rewatch TOS recently, for the first time in decades, and I think people here are overstating how cerebral the show was. It had its intellectual moments, sure, but it was also stock full of fistfights, gunfights, swordfights, bickering and sex - there was probably more sex in the first three seasons of Trek than in the following thirty-odd. Honestly, if TMP were really trek, Kirk and the bald robot chick would have at least made out a bit.
TOS wasn’t a work of genius. It was pulp sci-fi that just happened to be slightly smarter than anything else on TV, and TMP completely failed in capturing that.
The special effects were actually pretty good. Given the inordinate amount of time the director spent with loving attention showing us the exterior of the Enterprise it’s clear they were pretty proud of their creation. Everything from the Klingons to V’ger looked pretty good with the worst offender being the horrible uniforms they were wearing. As far as the movie goes, yeah, it’s boring. They had a good seed for a story, back when the probe’s name was Nomad on that one episode, but the story just plodded along at an uncomfortably slow pace.
The Ahab complex thing is good (apart from the fact that they fail to kill Picard – the Star Trek franchise even now remains wedded to the TV ethos, afraid to be truly edgy or shocking), but the part I liked was Zephraim Cochrane, which was a well-written character given an excellent portrayal by Cromwell. Nothing at all like milquetoasty Glenn Corbett critter from Metamorphosis. The Montana scenes have a gritty realness to them (which is the aspect of ST:Enterprise that I found appealing).
I saw some pretty silly looking sound stages and absurdly transparent California-countryside “Let’s throw up some shacks and say it’s a rough society” sets. It looked cheap as hell and it makes no sense at all for people living in a Fallout-style shantytown to up and decide to build a spaceship. The movie’s awful.
Actually, MOST Star Trek movies are bad; it is a testament to the power of the franchise that it’s managed to produce thirteen movies (if my addition is correct.) They seem to have given up on movies for now, though, and are concentrating on making (mostly) bad TV shows. Lower Decks is a lot of fun though.
In fact, “Balance of Terror,” episode 14 of the 1st season, is one of the best of the series and the plot revolves around the Enterprise trying to destroy a Romulan ship. (A science fiction ripoff of The Enemy Below.)
It should be noted that while the first movie was largely a rehash of “The Changeling,” it had elements of other episodes too. Specifically “The Immunity Syndrome,” in which the Enterprise has to penetrate an energy barrier to deal with a killer amoeba (it was pretty damned big!), and “Metamorphosis,” which ended with The Companion and Commissioner Hedford merging to become one being, all for the love of a man.
I hadn’t picked up on that last connection (however tenuous it might be) until an old friend pointed it out to me.
Yeah, just skimming through some of the contemporaneous reviews, I don’t see anyone slamming the effects, and I do see a couple of reviews saying that the movie seems to be a set up for showing them off.
I love the original trailer for this, by the way, including the very familiar voiceover artist.
I saw it during its first run. I was an enormous Trekkie back then (discovered TOS in 1977 at the age of 13 and by the time TMP came out I had bought pretty much every Star Trek paperback I could get my hands on.) I ate, breathed, and slept Star Trek back then.
I remember being very disappointed by TMP. I wanted to love it. I was primed to love every minute of it. I don’t think newer fans can comprehend what a big deal it was to finally, after ten years of waiting, hoping, fan fiction, and art, to have new Star Trek. I was a johnny-come-lately, and even I understood the anticipation. It was huge.
But yeah, the movie didn’t do much for me at all. It was soooooo slow. The plot was weird. There were big chunks where nothing happened. I didn’t like the pajamas. The thing I remembered liking the most wasn’t even in the movie, but the novelization (because of course I bought the novelization): the scene with the transporter malfunction, where the person rematerialized with their internal organs on the outside. I can’t remember if that was in the movie, but the book’s description was so gory and fascinating, it stuck with me to this day.
I don’t agree with that. Part of what makes the Ahab complex work is that Ahab could have seen the error of his ways, but didn’t. So it’s perfectly fine for someone to make the opposite decision, as long as it makes sense for them to do so.
I would view killing off Picard as being edgy for the sake of being edgy, rather than seeming natural. Picard was acting out of character due to trauma. He’s normally quite rational and logical, so it was more narratively satisfying to have him realize that he’d lost control and correct himself. I find that part where Lily forces him to confront it really works, because we know that Picard isn’t the type of person who would keep on letting his emotions rule him once he becomes aware of them.
Given that it was competing with the likes of Lost In Space, that wasn’t a very high bar.
People often claim that they want more cerebral stories in science fiction TV and films, but you’ll find the critics of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris as entertainment far outweigh professed fans, and even film critics who appreciate the merits of these films often label them as “plodding” or “lugubrious”, seemingly missing the point that this is a more realistic portrayal of actual space exploration and contact with alien intelligences. There is a reason that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is about a murderous conspiracy to prevent a peace treaty rather than the Excelsior conducting a survey of gaseous anomalies.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, however, manages to be both slow and trite. The story concept is not a very original idea, the character development is facile and unengaging, and the biggest problem is that the resolution is a deus ex machina; there was no cleverness on the part of Kirk or the crew, and even Spock was essentially just an expositional mouthpiece. It is not a well-constructed story and is awkwardly padded out to feature length without even adding much in the way of cerebral content.
Thanks, Infovore. I could almost have written this, word for word.
The movie was slow-moving, especially once the Enterprise was making its way deeper into V’ger, but I was mostly OK with that at the time, I was so glad to see Kirk, Spock & Co. back in action. I immediately noticed that the storyline was pretty much a retelling of “The Changeling,” but was also simply delighted to see the new starship in spacedock and then in action, and to pay my first visits to a Klingon warship and to a much more fully-realized Vulcan. The sfx were very good for their day, as I recall. The movie’s tone and message were consistent with Roddenberry’s hopeful, progressive, humanist vision of our future, which I’ve always appreciated.
Terrific Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack, too, which I still listen to now and then.
The movie scene wasn’t quite that horrific, but it was pretty intense (especially compared to the rest of the movie).
And then a few scenes later, they’re back to chuckling over Dr. McCoy’s aversion to having his molecules scattered around the galaxy…
