Now, hold the phone. Wait a minute. Stop the presses. Hold the mayonnaise. I believe Star Trek is the first major motion picture franchise that ever existed or that has ever existed where the first dang picture in the franchise is the worst? Is it true? Am I just shitting? No, I'm not. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is probably the single greatest folly Star Trek ever partook in, and this includes Star Trek Discovery.
At the time of its pre-production, Star Wars as tearing theater competition apart and winning Oscars, pretty much making it the biggest film of the time at that time. Paramount Pictures did not want their big-screen Star Trek debut to be seen as "cashing in", so they most likely decreed to director Robert Wise to not make the film feel similar to Star Wars in any way, shape or form. Unfortunately, it bit them in the ass. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is not fun, exciting, thrilling, enthralling or even remotely fast-paced. It's often referred to as "The Slow-Motion Picture" because of the lack of action, events, cuts, or even scenery changes for much of the movie. It's basically like if speed regulations mandated that Space Mountain couldn't go any more than five miles an hour. Sure, you'd finish the ride, but it's going to feel like you're in there an eternity. But honestly, the movie is just over two hours in length, and there are no ship-battles, ship-to-ship confrontations; there are cool spaceship shots, though. They just go on forever and ever with seldom cuts to relieve the lack of fluid motion in an otherwise interesting story narrative.What is this narrative that carries this stiff-motion tortoise through its journey? There is a quite large alien force descending toward Earth and the crew of the newly refit USS Enterprise are dispatched to stop it. Seems like your typical episode of the original show. The original cast even returns, looking mildly older and pudgier than we remember them from the series finale ten years prior: Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Lt. Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery Scott "Scotty" (James Doohan) and Lt. Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). They're joined by two new crew members, Capt. Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) and Ilia (Persis Khambatta). FUN FACT: Movie trivia for Star Trek: The Motion Picture says that Ilia is "Deltan", meaning she comes from the Delta quadrant...I guess. What's funny about that? Well, her race is supposedly incredibly toxic with pheromones and mating hormones, meaning she can make anyone super horny and ready to boink just by looking at her. Supposedly, humans can't survive one round of sexual intercourse with a Deltan. Random tangent, I know, but...weird.
So Decker is in charge of the newly refit USS Enterprise until Kirk comes aboard and usurps him for no reason, other than "I'm the star and it's in my contact." After Kirk takes over commanding an almost totally different Enterprise than the one he commanded in the show, he kills two people in a matter of two minutes. This'll average out to about a death a minute if we keep going at this rate. The Vulcan replacement for Spock is fried in a transporter malfunction, along with a new officer beaming on board with him. Soon after the launch of the Enterprise to intercept the anomaly, an off-balance warp-whatever causes the ship to enter a wormhole. This slows time down, a cool distortion affect that causes laughably delivered slow dialogue. Kirk tries to do something with the phasers to clear an asteroid out of their path to save the ship, but former Captain Decker belays the order to save the ship, later explaining that whatever caused the warp drive mishap rendered the phasers useless for some reason. So that means that just after taking command of the mission, Kirk's killed two people and endangered the entire ship once already. Fun stuff.
The slow pace of the entire movie causes the illusion that the dialogue scenes don't go anywhere. There's important things being discussed in most scenes, but because it feels like that that's all going on, it just feels slow. The Enterprise eventually meets up with and picks up Spock, who was on Vulcan getting his remaining emotions wiped out so that he can become 100% pure Vulcan (I guess). I don't know, isn't this the third time he's tried to have all remaining emotions purged? I feel like that's a regular occurrence. I'm no Trekkie after all, so I guess that's my lack of Trek knowledge poking through. Eventually, the crew comes across the entity, and after a painfully slow process of entering its confines and trying to find the center of the anomaly, called "V'Ger", Ilia is captured as the entity boards the ship and takes her away. She later reappears as V'Ger itself, a probe using Ilia's body as a recreated mechanism to "observe and record the carbon-based units". She demands to know the secret of V'Ger's creation, but Kirk only promises to give the secret to the center of V'Ger herself. With that, the Ilia probe allows the USS Enterprise to the center of V'Ger. Inside the center of V'Ger, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Decker find that V'Ger is actually Voyager 6, the old drone sent into deep space by Earth many years ago, returning to Earth to find its creator. The machines upgraded the probe to fulfill its mission, and on its journey the probe gathered so much knowledge that it achieved consciousness. Spock realizes that V'Ger lacks the ability to give itself a focus other than its original mission; having learned what it could on its journey home, it finds its existence empty and without purpose. Before transmitting all its information, V'Ger insists that the Creator come in person to finish the sequence. Realizing that the machine wants to merge with its creator, Decker offers himself to V'Ger. As Decker merges with V'Ger, the trio escapes back to the Enterprise and leaves as V'Ger, Decker and Ilia probe merge together to create a new form of life that disappears into another dimension. Kirk and the others then direct Enterprise back toward Earth for her next adventures.Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an abysmal start to an otherwise legendary movie franchise. The Motion Picture fails across the board. This movie tried to capitalize on the success of one of the biggest science-fiction/fantasy films of all time in Star Wars and ended up mimicking 2001: A Space Odyssey. The uniforms look cheap, the acting is dry, Shatner is at his Shatner-est with his deliveries and hammy acting, the dialogue scenes go on forever, the non-dialogue scenes go on forever, there's very little action and the action there is, you could blink and miss it. The special effects are pretty good, can't say they aren't. There's just a lot of time to enjoy the visual effects shots. The refit Enterprise is so cool because they give you a near four minute mundane scene of Kirk and Scotty boarding the ship to do final preparations. The movie's pacing is horrible. There are some scenes that are so soft and quietly spoken that you wonder if there was a mic issue in the shot. The movie is boring, mundane, slow, yes, but at least it tries to have a decent ending. The techno-babble that Star Trek is known for can be lost on the average viewer who drifts in and out on their smartphones while the movie is going on. To this average viewer that isn't a Trekkie, like myself, if anything steals your attention during crucial dialogue scenes, you're going to miss something important that won't make the movie make sense later, and because the movie is so long and drags out constantly, you're not going to feel like rewinding it to find out what you missed. Oddly enough, I say skip this one. Blow it off. Forget about it. There's nothing that doesn't happen that isn't important in later films. There's not a whole lot of story content, very little action, and many of its production and story elements are totally omitted from future installments. There's no mention of the V'Ger crisis ever again in the rest of the films. Skip this one and get started right with Star Trek II.
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