Star Trek didn't have the most audacious start. The show was cancelled in 1969 due to low ratings. It did, however, do substantially better in syndication (partly due to a shift in how ratings were measured). Paramount tried to make good on the show's popularity (read: increased value), but the franchise suffered through a cheaply made animated incarnation in the mid 70s while a second live action show, called Star Trek: Phase II, languished in Development Hell. But then came Star Wars, and for a brief moment anything even remotely sci-fi was box-office gold in the eyes of studio bosses, leading to Phase II's pilot script "In Thy Image" being swiftly converted into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Gene Roddenberry's initial conception of Star Trek as a show was "too cerebral" for NBC who demanded he action up his ideas a bit. Honestly, it was a good idea. Roddenberry was a good sci-fi writer, but he was no Rod Serling and left too much to his own devices he could get hokey. There was no way that Star Trek woundn't end up being campy (William Shatner's acting didn't help), but being forced to be more mainstream helped the show go down easier. But it's clear watching this first film incarnation that Roddenberry and director Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still) were determined that Trek be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the result combines all the least accessible elements of the show. It'd be tempting to write it off as "one for the fans," except Trekkies mostly ignore it as well.
The plot involves a massive, possibly evil, space cloud that's headed straight for Earth. You know it's Star Trek when something as goofy and innocuous as a cloud can be anthropomorphized into a galactic threat. It helps that the cloud is a pretty decent special effect, executed by legendary FX wizard Douglas Trumbull (2001, Blade Runner), and that there is something far more interesting at the center of the cloud.
What's at the center of the cloud you ask? Not so fast! Before we can find out the answer to that we first need to reunite the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise and have a lot of gratuitous character conflict. The reunion takes its time so that everyone can have their "moment," but those moments tend to be distracting and unnecessary. Did having McCoy (Deforest Kelley) dress like a hippie really move the story along, establish theme, or do anything? Did anyone believe that McCoy, the squarest man on the Enterprise, would ever let his beard grow that long? If that's not bad enough, Wise also focuses on new characters like Decker, the Enterprise's new captain, his former girlfriend Ilia, and their hackneyed, Airplane!-style romance.
Kirk (Shatner) fares much better, though his plotline still feels forced: he's now an admiral and, upset that he's not in command of his beloved ship anymore, uses the cloud crisis as an excuse to get it back. Decker, perhaps out of spite, stays on to make Kirk feel old by reminding him he doesn't know the new tech in the refitted Enterprise. It's nice that the film is realistic about the cast's age (a theme that will continue throughout the films), but the role of Decker should have been given to Spock (Leonard Nimoy), a normally central part of the Trek chemistry who in this film, doesn't even step foot on the Enterprise until the halfway point. It's is a shame because Spock's arc, as tossed off and convoluted as it is, is the only one that has anything to do with the cloud.
Okay, so Kirk and Co. finally get to the cloud and the film properly starts. It's clear that Wise wanted to make an smart, adult sci-fi film. Just look at the references: there are long, hypnotic 2001-esque shots of the Enterprise traversing the interior of the cloud and the alien ship hidden inside. We learn that (spoiler alert) the giant spaceship at the center of the cloud was built by a mechanical race that views people as infestations, which is very Philip K. Dick, as is a fantastic sequence of Spock exploring the ship's memory banks. Later, one crew member is confronted by an artificial reconstruction of a lost love one a la Solaris. To top it all off we later learn that the ship is piloted by (seriously, spoilers) Voyager 6 (or V'GER), an old NASA satellite that has been supped up by the machine planet and, having presumably absorbed all knowledge in the universe, returned to meet its creator. The problem being that having been modified by a digital intelligence, V'GER can't accept that its creator might be biological and threatens to destroy all life on Earth if Kirk doesn't produce something its programing can accept.
This is all really, really cool stuff, Wise and the screenwriters were clearly up on all the hippest sci-fi of the day, but they completely fail to recreate the effect. Part of the issue is that in those long, exploration passages, Wise mistakes spectacle for content. The scenes inside the cloud are pretty and atmospheric as hell, but have nothing to do with the themes of the film and give us nothing to go on. 2001 was about the evolution of man being shepherded by people from "out there," and as mysterious and obtuse as that film is, Kubrick was pretty up front about that theme so that the audience has something to ponder while looking at all the weird stuff. But Star Trek: The Motion Picture doesn't do that. There are no hints, little conceptual cohesion and, until the last act, little sense of the intellectual exploration that is a cornerstone the Trek brand. By the time we get to all the cool stuff, we've frittered away the runtime on atmosphere and watching Kirk frump around having a sassy mid-life crisis (everything with Kirk is sassy). So all the interesting implications of the twists have about five minutes each to be explored before being solved in a quick, simplistic way, that conveniently disposes of some of those new characters we don't care about.
As a Trek film, it's too all over the place, short changing the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship that's always been the heart of the Original Series in favor of new characters who don't really matter. As a piece of hard sci-fi, it's too thin and too long. Trekkies would eventually get good Trek films, but this isn't one of them. It's got great ideas, if only it used them.
Grade: C+
Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country
Generations
First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis
Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis)
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