I was a Star Trek fan since I was a little spud. Although I don’t remember it, my parents told me that, as a toddler, I watched the original Star Trek series with them when it first aired in the late sixties. But it wasn’t until Star Trek was in syndication in the seventies that I really got into the series. Aside from being a thrilling SF adventure, Star Trek was a constant, soothing reminder for me that we humans would still be striving for a brighter future, no matter how dire the present day appeared--which was a very reassuring thing to hear for a boy growing up in the seventies.
When I first heard that Star Trek was returning in late 1979 as a movie, I was extremely happy. I remember being thrilled at the ads for the film that appeared on the back of comic books--which showed a redesign of the Enterprise that didn’t quite match the final refit ship seen in the movie, but I didn’t care. I finally saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture with my father during a wondrous science fiction double bill weekend with (The Black Hole). And my teen self loved it.
Taking place a couple of years after the end of the series, ST:TMP shows Admiral Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise hurriedly getting their recently reconditioned ship ready when a giant alien entity--which already wiped out three Klingon battle cruisers and a Federation space station--starts heading straight for Earth. As luck would have it, the Enterprise is the only Federation vessel within the region that can intercept the intruder, and there’s no guarantee that the modernized vessel can even stop this incoming threat.
Directed by Robert Wise--who also directed such classics as West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and The Day The Earth Stood Still--ST:TMP, the movie, faced a similar problem as the Enterprise did in that it was still being worked on almost right up to its premiere. As a result of this, the film was not able to be seen by a preview audience, which would normally give the filmmakers valuable information as to what worked and what didn’t. Overall, as a film, ST:TMP wound up being very uneven. Despite the fact that I loved the film when I first saw it, even I had to admit that ST:TMP is overlong and ponderous, especially in its middle section.
But despite its flaws, I was still a big fan of the movie, for no other reason that it reunited the original cast of Star Trek for a new series of cinematic adventures. TMP also aspired to be true to the original series by having its heroes solve problems with their heads instead of their fists. The fact that the brutish Klingons tried to defeat the intruder with their military might, and failed, is very telling. Kirk, Spock and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise would later eschew the use of force in favor of analyzing the problems before them, which led to much better results for all.
This is truly classic Star Trek in a nutshell: try and understand the problem and then create a solution without blasting at it with your weapons--although if they needed to resort to force on Star Trek, they did. But one of the points of the show was that force should always be the last resort.
Another thing that ST:TMP did well was to resolve the whole half human/half Vulcan issue that Spock wrestled with in the show. ST:TMP saw Spock coming to grips with who and what he was and finally being at peace with it. And the marvelous score for ST:TMP, composed by the legendary Jerry Goldsmith, is wondrous. If you can, try and catch the Director’s Edition of ST:TMP, where Robert Wise reworked the film more to his vision, and it wound up being much better for it. I prefer the Director’s Edition because it finally feels like a finished film that’s more tightly edited (with new special effects).
But no matter what version--theatrical, or Director’s Edition--of Star Trek: The Motion Picture that you see, it’s still recommended for devout Star Trek fans, as well as those who enjoy their science fiction to be of the more cerebral kind. --SF
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