Star Trek

Star Trek: The Motion Picture re-review

You’ll be seeing a lot of this ship.

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.

Mini re-reviews: Aliens and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

I’ve been on a science fiction movie nostalgia trek (ho ho) for a while now, and here’s a couple of mini review of two recent rewatches, both of them direct sequels to their first film.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). At the time this was pitched as the movie that “saved” Star Trek after the slow and, some would say, ponderous first film, which focused on a Big Idea. The sequel ditched the space jammy uniforms and brought back a classic villain from the original TV series, and swapped out the mystery of V’ger with a cat and mouse chase between Khan and Kirk.

The movie holds up remarkably well 41 years later. Some of the effects work is dated, but the scenes of the Enterprise and Reliant flying blind in the nebula and nearly colliding, are still thrilling to watch (just ignore the fact that no one actually looked out a real window to see where they were going). Kirk struggling with mortality and getting older is a great emotional frame for the film, and Shatner doesn’t ham it up under the hand of director Nicholas Meyer.

Ricardo Montalban clearly relished playing Khan, and Meyer allows him to ham it up–but never to the point of making the character appear a fool. He also gets the most quotable lines. “Revenge is a dish best served cold. And it is very cold in space.”

Still recommended after all these years, and probably still the best of the original cast movies.

Aliens (1986). What an odd movie series this is. The first two films are great, the second two are pretty bad, and they all have weirdly long gaps between them, defying Hollywood convention to crank out sequels. The gap between the first and fourth Alien movie is 18 years!

But here we have the first sequel, coming in seven years after the original and in terms of the timeline, 57 years after the events of Alien, when Ripley’s pod is found, and she is brought out of hypersleep.

For some reason, Disney+ (where I watched it) does not offer the Special Edition, which is both good and bad. You miss the early scene of the colonists going about their business before the alien infestation, which helps to give context to what comes later (though you can also argue it also kills the mystery when the marines first arrive at the settlement to find no one there). Likewise, there’s a terrific sequence with automated turrets missing from the original cut, where you see their ammo get depleted…and the aliens keep coming. AND you also don’t get the scene where Burke confirms to Ripley that her daughter had died two years earlier, which really helps provide motivation to her character for the rest of the film.

All that said, everything else that makes this a great sequel is still there. Effects-wise, it mostly holds up, though some of the models are clearly models (in the same way that today’s CGI is often very clearly CGI) and any shot of the dropship where it is not shot against the starry expanse of space looks shockingly bad, to the point of distraction. Everything else, crucially including the aliens themselves, still looks great.

I’d forgotten what a complete spaz Bill Paxton’s character was. Several others in the movie repeatedly tell him to shut up and calm down. It’s great. This film is definitely a James Cameron joint, as he loves his military hardware and foul-mouthed grunts. There are scenes where weaponry is lovingly explained. There’s testosterone spilling all over the place. And it is all neatly undercut when the characters realize what they are up against.

Sigourney Weaver gets a lot more to do here, and this is clearly her character’s film and story. She makes it work with a terrific performance, aided by a solid supporting cast. Paul Reiser, better known as the lovable, quippy husband on Mad About Her, is perfectly slimy as the human villain, cold and calculating until his inevitable and appropriate end.

I could quibble about a few plot contrivances and conveniences, but they ultimately don’t detract from a story that expands on Alien, while providing its own terror-filled ride. Still very much recommended, although watch the Special Edition if you can, the added scenes really do flesh the story out more.

Star Trek: The Animated Series, my great (?) idea

Beam my idea up! (please)

Star Trek: The Animated Series, which aired 1973-1974, was kind of like the fourth season of the original series, with most of the cast returning to voice their characters, and a lot of the series’ writers onboard, too.

It just had one small problem: the animation was terrible. It was a Saturday morning cartoon, and in the 70s that meant cheap animation done quick.

My idea: Take the original voice work and redo the animation to modern standards. It could be a bit stylized, and you’d probably want to keep it non-CGI, but there’s a galaxy of room for improvement here. Sound effects and music could be retained, or reworked, on a case-by-case basis.

Package up the refurbished episodes (22 in total) and put them on a nice Blu-ray with bonus material and doodads. Also make them available for streaming. Oh, and include the original versions of the episodes, for purists who prefer terrible animation.

Make it so! (I know, wrong series. Kirk doesn’t have any good catchphrases that fit here.)

Star Trekpalooza (with bonus Forbidden Planet)

Over the weekend I had a rare chance to watch several back to back Star Trek: Next Gen movies as part of some Space network marathon and it has made me revise my opinions of several.

I saw the last segment of Insurrection and all of Generations, First Contact and Nemesis. Here are my new and improved opinions:

First Contact: This is still easily the best of the Next Gen movies. Yes, the concept of a Borg Queen is inconsistent, Crusher gets pushed into the background in favor of Alfre Woodard’s character and it combines two of the most tired tropes in Star Trek — saving Earth and time travel. But thanks to a lithe script, some excellent set pieces and tight performances by the cast, it all holds together and becomes more than the sum of its proverbial parts.

Insurrection: I only caught the last few scenes and it reminded me of what a dull and plodding movie it is. They somehow managed to make the action sequences limp and lifeless despite having the cool new Enterprise tooling around. Going from First Contact to this was a huge letdown. Even as a TV episode, Insurrection wouldn’t rank among the better ones, with its ‘simple folk on Amish planet’ plotline and not giving a damn if they blew the whole thing up.

Generations still comes off as a disjointed narrative, with too many different threads, many of them feeling only loosely connected to each other. The whole ‘Picard’s family dies in a fire’ (a fire? Really? In a time where they brag about no disease or poverty they somehow still manage to have fires that still burn down houses and kill people? Okay!) was utterly unnecessary and forced Patrick Stewart to spend a large amount of the film moping around. But the writers apparently couldn’t come up with anything better for Picard in the Nexus than ‘a family of mawkish, Stepford-style children dressed as if they were from the late 19th century so the tragedy of his real family was deemed necessary. When Picard looks out a window of his imaginary Nexus home and says, “This can’t be real” it’s a bit of a “Well, duh” moment. Which also demonstrates how hanging the whole movie on the Nexus was dumb to begin with. The plotholes in this movie are at least Galaxy class in size. Here’s just one, though: If Picard was able to leave the Nexus at any point in time, why did he not leave when Soren could be safely apprehended aboard a ship instead of mere minutes before he blows up an entire star? Because that wouldn’t have given us a scene of Kirk falling down and dying. Yes, Kirk’s death comes at the, er, hands of a rogue walkway that collapses. How noble!

Nemesis: I have always thought of this as being the worst of the Next Gen movies because of the poor matte effects, the overall cheap look of the film, the silly dune buggy sequence and the unnecessary and unconvincing sacrifice of Data as an attempt to wring a few tears from long-time fans (not to mention the cop-out of having B4 suddenly become more Data-like at the end). However, while all of these flaws are still present, none of them bothered me the same way they did back when I saw this in the theater when it came out in 2002. The story stays focused on the silly main plot (a lot of nonsense about a less-than-believable evil clone of Picard wanting to, uh, destroy the Earth or something for reasons that are never entirely clear, but which I can best surmise as “So I will be famous!”) and the pace keeps moving forward. In the end I have to say I found Nemesis more interesting than Insurrection, if not actually better, so I think I’ll now put it slightly above Insurrection in my list of Next Gen movies. My new ranking is thus:

1.First Contact
2. Generations
3. Nemesis
4. Insurrection

The gap between #1 and #2 is pretty big. The gap between #2 and #3 is smaller, while the space (ho ho) between #3 and #4 is rather small.

It’s too bad that the Next Gen cast didn’t get a decent batch of movies for their theatrical run. When most of your efforts rank about as highly as Star Trek V, it ain’t good.

***

I also managed to catch most of Forbidden Planet on AMC, which I’ve somehow never see before. It’s a bit of a jolt to see a young Leslie Nielson playing it straight as the commander of a military force that travels on a spaceship that looks strangely like a UFO. Overall I enjoyed it and it reminded me of how the pacing and plot sensibilities of movies have changed so much in the last 50 years. Forbidden Planet has its action but most of the film is simply talking or even one character demonstrating things to another. The enemy for the most part is literally unseen and the ending is not based on action but a psychological twist. There is allegedly a remake in the works (IMDB lists it as a 2013 project) and I can imagine the bigger, louder lasers already, the relatively simple ending being drawn out into a huge firefight and several unnecessary subplots tacked on. We need more science fiction movies that are about ideas and not just action. I expect the worst.

Finally, I caught the first 20 minutes or so of Fantastic Voyage. They emphasized several times that the shrinking process could only last 60 minutes maximum and then went through multiple phases post-shrinking of the sub and crew before finally injecting them into the guy’s body. I was expecting the project lead to send them a wireless message (yes, despite having all of this very fancy tech, they could only communicate through Morse code) telling them that they only had five minutes to complete the actual operation. Still, I love the tone of the movie, which can be described as serious-but-fun.