I rewatched Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the first time in a while, catching it on Paramount+ (as an aside, my experience with Paramount+ has been pretty bad–videos crashing out, resetting your progress, no “Continue watching” which is either baffling or just open contempt for the viewer [or both], and movies or shows not showing up on the site but appearing if you do a search, which in this case specifically applies to this movie).
There are a few things most people remember about the first Star Trek movie:
- It is deliberately paced (ie. slow)
- The scene where the retrofitted Enterprise is revealed goes on for about five hours
- Space pajama uniforms
- Illia coming back as the galaxy’s sexiest alien probe
Now that it’s 44 (!) years later, how does it hold up? It’s…OK.
The problem isn’t that the pacing is slow (and it is slow), it’s that there’s a lot of padding where nothing much happens. You get the feeling that director Robert Wise was trying to really set the mood of travelling into an unknown and alien realm (boldly going), but you could probably lop off 10 minutes of the footage of the Enterprise moving deeper inside V’ger without it hurting the continuity at all.
And that initial pass of the Enterprise is silly. My reaction, even knowing full-well what to expect was still:
- The new Enterprise. It looks nice!
- Going around the ship, still looks nice!
- Still going around the ship. Shouldn’t they have docked by now?
- Why is this scene still happening?
- I am going to the bathroom. Will the scene still be going when I return?
- The scene still runs after returning from the bathroom for another minute before Kirk and Scotty’s shuttle finally docks with the Enterprise.
You could cut another five minutes from this sequence, and it would still be long, but it would end just as you started to get squirmy.
The effects are fine for a movie of this age–they should be, as they cost a fortune and made Paramount go cheap on every Trek film to make sure it didn’t happen again. The space pajama costumes are very 70s, and while I appreciate what they were trying, subsequent TV series (and movies) did a much better job of looking like uniforms, while retaining the colour and style of the originals.
The main issue with the movie, though, isn’t the looks or the pacing, or the effects–it’s the story, or more specifically, the execution of it. You basically have:
- Unknown entity of unimaginable power is heading for Earth
- It vaporizes every bit of technology it encounters
- Only the Enterprise is in range to intercept before something probably really bad happens to Earth
This is a fine premise.
The problem is the way it’s presented, where the Enterprise crew gets pulled into the mystery box of V’ger, then just hangs around on the bridge while V’ger does stuff and they react to it, trying to figure out what to do next. Mostly they can’t do anything.
What this means is there’s a lot of nothing much happens. The cast sit and stand and talk about V’ger and that’s most of the movie. It’s just not very interesting, let alone exciting. There’s one scene where MCcoy comes onto the bridge–this is specifically shown. Everyone watches V’ger on the viewscreen. McCoy hangs around for a bit, never says, a word, then leaves the bridge. Why? Who knows!
Still, I admire the film for not having a typical villain or space shootouts and other stuff people usually expect to see in a sci-fi movie1These are not bad things, but they became super common after the success of Star Wars, which came out only two years earlier.. They tried going for “big idea” and while it doesn’t make for riveting viewing, it’s not bad, either. Some of the interior design of V’ger is downright funky. It was neat watching Kirk and others step off the saucer of the Enterprise to meet V’ger, giving a great sense of scale of the ship. There are a few funny lines here and there. The cast does what it can with a script that demands they mostly react to things they can’t see.
In the end, this was not really the way the Star Trek crew should have returned, but it did make Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan look even better in comparison.
