I was an only child in the early 1970’s. I was being dutifully raised by my single mom, and babysat daily by Captain Kirk and the intrepid crew of the Starship Enterprise. Star Trek was doing well in syndication at that point, and could be seen daily on television stations around the world. I can honestly say I would not be the geek I am today if not for my exposure to Star Trek in my formative years.
By 1979, another franchise had taken full custody of my pre-teen affections. Star Wars had been released (and re-released) for several years at this point. I vividly remember flying my cardboard X-Wing fighter around the living room when a commercial for Star Trek: The Motion Picture came on. Needless to say, I was intrigued. After all, it would still be another year before the Empire Strikes Back, and I had very fond memories of Star Trek. I was stoked! I was finally going to get to see what my friends on the Enterprise had been doing since I last checked in with them.
Pajama Party at the Roddenberry House!
I remember going to see this movie with my grandma in Los Angeles. The theater was packed. People were excited!
The movie started… and that movie was loooooooong. I think we had to put my grandma in a retirement home sometime during the Enterprise fly-by scene. I was engrossed completely, sure. Nothing like this had really been seen before, except for Star Wars and maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey. The problem, though, was that those movies were actually telling stories, while Star Trek: The Motion Picture seemed to be intent on pleasuring itself (slowly, and in public) while staring in the mirror and whispering its own name.
Pretty much this. For two freaking hours…
Was the movie any good? Oh, hells no. But it was 1979, so a lot of people convinced themselves that it was high-freaking-art in a cocaine induced orgy of mass hysteria. We were lucky, too. If anyone had actually noticed how boring this movie was, Star Trek: the Wrath of Khan would have never happened.
ST:TMP was an interesting experiment, to say the least. In 1975, Paramount studios saw how well Trek was doing in syndication and started looking at re-launching the series with a movie. Not a single writer came up with a script that the suits liked, so they scrapped the movie idea in 1977 and started work on a second series for television, called Star Trek: Phase II.
Then, something funny happened. Star Wars defied all the odds and ushered in the modern blockbuster. The suits at Paramount held firm, until Close Encounters of the Third Kind followed suit a year later. Paramount decided to take the plunge, dusted off the pilot script for Phase II, and set out to make some of that Space Money for themselves.
(Space Money? That’s Gold-Pressed Latinum to you!)
Set five years after the (now famous) five year mission of the original series, ST:TMP starts with a Fiendish Space Cloud menacing the Federation. Klingons are mere gnats to this whispy Cosmic Menace, so Starfleet does what anyone would do: they fire up the Kirk Signal. James Kirk is an Admiral now, and yearns to be back in command of a starship. Dr. McCoy has become something of a bearded hermit and has to be drafted back into service. Spock has gone meta-hippie on Vulcan, but decides he needs to join up with his BFF Kirk and check out the anomaly that is menacing Earth. The rest of the crew spent the years between the original series and the Motion Picture crammed into a closet somewhere on the Enterprise.
“Yep, right where I left them!”
There are a couple of new characters introduced, too. Captain Will Decker is in command of the newly refitted USS ENTERPRISE. He’s an early Will Ryker prototype, and would probably have had a lot more to do if the Phase II series had happened. Then there is Ilia, who has Gene Roddenberry written all over her. Star Trek was very much a product of the 1960’s; short skirts, go-go boots and smoldering looks were about all a woman needed to be in Starfleet. By 1979 Roddenberry’s idea of what a woman’s role in space would be hasn’t changed much, and Ilia is celluloid proof of this. She’s gorgeous, top-heavy, and has her winking vow of celibacy logged with Starfleet Command. Neither character gets to do much: Decker is demoted by Kirk, citing his “experience”, while Ilia is abducted by the Cosmic Menace early on. Decker spends most of the movie whining about Kirk, and Ilia spends most of her screen time, well, jiggling. Both are essentially killed off by the end of the movie.
ST:TMP does have a few things going for it: We get our first look at what a Klingon is supposed to look like. The new theme for the movie is epic, and carries on as the de-facto Star Trek theme well into the Next Generation. The model work for the new Enterprise is stunning, and still looks incredible to this day. We get our first look at what a Klingon really looks like. And while the special effects look pretty dated today, they were cutting edge at the time.
Let’s look at the cons, though: The pacing is stunningly slow, even the “action” scenes crawl. Spock actually spends 10 minutes of the film floating towards a cloud. The costumes look like Pajama Night at the Roddenberry house, with lots of late-70’s earth-tones dominating the color scheme. The “acting” really isn’t, most of the drama in this movie is people staring vacantly off set. The Big Bad Cosmic Menace? It calls itself V’Ger, and it’s about as threatening as a big old bag of cotton candy. I won’t spoil the big reveal at the end of the movie, because if you manage to make it through Star Trek: the Motion Sedative, you should at least get the weak-sauce “surprise”.
Somebody drop a beat? Please?
There was really no way that a slowly paced, drawn out space opera was going to compete for geek affections with Star Wars, let alone the Empire Strikes Back. Empire was still a year away, but there wasn’t a Star Wars nerd in the country who wasn’t combing through Starlog Magazine every month looking for information. Trek’s re-launch looked to be a misfire, but there was something truly great coming for Trek fans. Star Trek: the Motion Picture was ultimately little more than the watered-down appetizer course for a bigger, better, and far more filling dish yet to come.