The saddening reality is that it is a dull film: an often boring film, a stultifyingly predictable film, a tragically average film.
Harlan Ellison
I waited 10 years, for this?
Anonymous Trekkie
Every couple of years or so, I sit down to rewatch Star Trek: The Motion Picture, just so I can finally write that definitive disquisition in defence of this much maligned movie. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is, unfortunately, only ever spoken about in terms of being a testament to failed ambition. One that has bold ideas but suffers by being a tedious, muted (in every sense of the word), slog.
Watching this movie always triggers a rollercoaster of emotions. It begins when I see that Paramount logo, when Jerry Goldsmith’s glorious new theme begins to play, and I can’t help but be sucked in. The title screen then flashes before me with that bold proclamation that this isn’t just Star Trek, but Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It’s THE MOVIE goddammit! It’s bigger. It’s more. It’s consequential.
And it starts out great. Three Klingon ships are engaged in battle with a giant luminescent cloud. We hear Goldsmith’s Klingon Battle Theme for the first time (which is now the definitive musical cue for everyone’s favourite warrior race) and we see how much the Klingons themselves have changed. They’re bulkier. Scarier. They’ve got ridgier foreheads. They look and feel more expensive. As a Star Trek fan, this is the moment you realise that you’ve arrived.
Everything here looks and sounds like the way God intended Star Trek to look and sound. Sure, it’s a little weird having Kirk and Scotty fly around in a transport and stare at the Enterprise for almost five whole minutes. (Even with that score serving as glorious punctuation.) But you can forgive a little self-indulgence. When this movie landed in cinemas in 1979, It had been a whole decade since anyone had seen the Enterprise, and even then, she had never looked this good.
Gene Roddenberry had wanted to put Kirk and his Enterprise crew on the big screen even when the original series was still on air, but it was only after the overwhelming success of Star Wars in 1977 that Paramount started looking for something that could compete. Outer space adventures now had box-office cachet, and the studio started active development of the movie that would finally bring Star Trek to cinemas.
They eventually landed on a script, hired a four-time Oscar winner to direct (Robert Wise won Academy Awards for both West Side Story and Sound of Music), reunited all of the original cast, and sent them off into the unknown, on one more mission that would explore those classic Trek themes of identity, consciousness, and what it means to be human.
Here, the earth is facing an unidentified existential threat and the crew of the Enterprise need to boldly go and figure out what it is and how to stop it. This is a plot that they’ve revisited in Trek, on screens both big and small, numerous times with varying success. It worked incredibly well in The Voyage Home and First Contact and failed miserably in The Final Frontier and Generations.
Passing judgement on The Motion Picture, however, has always been a lot more complicated. I’m not quite sure what it was that first had me raise one eyebrow in concern. Maybe it was their drab new uniforms. Maybe it was the fact that none of the cast seem to express any real emotion. Or that every action and reaction seemed to happen in slow motion.
I think it might have been that moment at which the Enterprise enters that big, endless, omnipresent cloud. And absolutely nothing happens for about 10 whole minutes. Now, don’t get me wrong, all of this is stunning. It is a veritable feast for the senses. But that’s all it is. One long, beautiful journey into nothing. From this point on, what we are subjected to is a really big budget homage to Stanley Kubrick. There’s a whole lot of silent staring, dialogue that is made up entirely of abstract questions and pseudo-philosophical patter, and some pretty, flashy lights.
Was this Roddenberry’s revolt against NBC executives for turning down his original pilot for being “too cerebral?” Was this how he always envisioned utopia? No fistfights. No drama. No spaceships crashing into other spaceships.
But no story? Surely that’s a bridge too far.
I can appreciate the confidence in trying to tell a story about our collective pursuit in search of purpose. Of wanting Star Trek to be more than just pew-pew science fiction but big idea science fiction. But I also feel like they forgot that they were making a movie. One that requires more than just a bunch of familiar faces that you recognise from a TV show from way back when.
The idea of a returning NASA probe which, along its journey through the universe, somehow acquired sentience, is a great one. This just wasn’t, in any way, the best way to tell that story.
On the one hand, this is the most majestic that Star Trek has ever looked. On the other, it is this bland, draggy, meandering mess of a movie, that often substitutes stunning imagery for character and narrative. Heck, this thing left such an enduring scar that every Trek movie since has been a reaction and a response to the criticisms levelled against The Motion Picture.
Trek on the big screen has always been a mixed bag. From the highs of The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, and The Undiscovered Country to whatever the hell The Final Frontier was, Star Trek will build you up just to break your heart in the worse possible way. Star Wars fans know what I’m talking about. As does anyone who wasted their lives on that last season of Game of Thrones.
As a fan, I approach every new Star Trek effort with tremendous anxiety and apprehension. My first viewing almost always has a voice in my head going, “please don’t suck, please don’t suck.” And while recent efforts at the franchise have been, on the whole, really satisfying, even putting to rest the infamous “odd movie” curse, I still keep returning to this original sin.
God knows I want to love this movie. God knows I try. Almost as hard as an Irish Catholic couple who are struggling to find hope in a loveless marriage. I’ve read Susan Sackett and Gene Roddenberry’s book, “The Making Of Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and Edward Gross’ “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years,” and every Starlog article in between, all in the hope of finding some redeeming note, some moment of great intention that somehow justifies this unmitigated mess.
Sometimes, I chalk it up to age. I think that maybe the older I get, the more I’d appreciate Gene Roddenberry’s relentless pursuit of God. Then again, maybe I should take the same advice I would give that hypothetical Irish Catholic couple. “Let it go. You’ve tried your best. There’s love to be found elsewhere.”
