Official trailer
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the most expensive screensaver in cinema history. Paramount gave Robert Wise a budget that dwarfed the entire television series and Wise spent most of it on shots of the Enterprise from every possible angle while Jerry Goldsmith’s magnificent score played underneath. The film treats the ship as the star and the characters as supporting cast, the exact inversion of what made Star Trek worth adapting from television to cinema.
My rating: -10. I hated it, with the special resentment I save for films that had everything and blew it. The film confuses the container with the content. The Enterprise matters because of what happens aboard her and who commands her, and her nacelles have nothing to do with it. A film that spends ten minutes on the ship’s exterior and five minutes on Kirk and Spock has its priorities exactly backward, and I spent most of the running time waiting for the crew to be allowed to act.
The Fly-Around Problem
The sequence that reveals the refit Enterprise, Scotty ferrying Kirk to the ship via inspection pod while the camera lovingly documents every detail of the redesign, runs for approximately ten minutes. Nothing happens in those ten minutes except photography. No character development. No story progression. No thematic content. The camera shows the ship from every angle available to it while Goldsmith’s theme swells underneath.
It’s a product reveal. Paramount spent an enormous amount of money redesigning the Enterprise and wanted to show it off, and Wise gave them what they wanted. Car commercials have more plot. By the fifth slow pass over the hull I wanted Scotty to dock the damn pod, and the film keeps circling like a buyer who can’t decide on the paint. The result plays like an extended advertisement for itself.
The same problem comes back with V’Ger, the massive alien cloud entity at the center of the film. The crew spends a huge share of the runtime drifting through V’Ger’s interior while the camera documents its architecture. The architecture is impressive.
I don’t care. A two-hour film with a story to tell can’t hand this much of its clock to set design, and the V’Ger sequence loses me completely.
The Characters We Came For
The original Star Trek television series worked because of its relationships: Kirk and Spock, Kirk and McCoy, the dynamic of a crew that had been through extraordinary things together and trusted each other with a specificity that took three seasons to build. The Motion Picture has access to all of those relationships and uses almost none of them.
The script gives Kirk a character conflict, he manipulated his way back to command of the Enterprise and isn’t sure he made the right choice, that it mentions in early scenes and then drops.
Spock arrives from Vulcan having failed to achieve Kolinahr, carrying unresolved questions about his hybrid nature, and the film’s climax resolves these questions in a way that happens too quickly to feel earned. McCoy is brought back against his will and is angry about it for two scenes. Then the film moves on to documenting V’Ger’s architecture.
The Wrath of Khan, released three years later with a fraction of TMP’s budget, understood that the series was about specific people facing mortality and the costs of their choices. It gave Kirk, Spock, and McCoy real arcs that engaged with who they’d become after the events of the series. TMP gave them uniform redesigns and a mission statement.
What Works
I’m angriest about the cast. Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley walked in with the richest set of relationships in television science fiction, and the film gave them a couple of scenes of friction and then parked them to watch the special effects along with the rest of us. McCoy’s grumbling is the most alive the movie ever gets.
Goldsmith’s score is real and shouldn’t be understated as an achievement. The Enterprise theme that became the main theme for The Next Generation television series originated here and is one of the great pieces of franchise music in cinema history. The visual concept of V’Ger, a NASA probe transformed into an alien intelligence by contact with a machine civilization, is interesting science fiction, and the film handles it with more thematic care than most of its other elements.
The resolution, where Decker merges with V’Ger and the evolved Ilia probe to create something new, is the film’s most philosophically interesting moment. A human consciousness merging with alien intelligence to create a new form of being is consistent with Star Trek’s core optimism about consciousness and its potential. It arrives too late and too quickly for the film to fully honor it, but the idea is sound.
Does Star Trek: The Motion Picture still hold up?
Star Trek: The Motion Picture gets its -10 by taking enormous resources, great talent and the best source material a studio could ask for and turning all three into a slideshow. I can forgive a dull film. I can’t forgive a dull film that had Kirk, Spock and McCoy on the payroll and kept them waiting in the corridor while the ship posed for pictures. Goldsmith’s score is excellent and the V’Ger idea is sound. Everything else is the most expensive screensaver in cinema history.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Cast and What They’re Not Given
DeForest Kelley’s McCoy is brought back to the Enterprise against his will, furious about it, and given approximately three scenes in which to be furious before the film moves on to documenting V’Ger’s architecture.
Leonard Nimoy’s Spock arrives from Vulcan having failed to achieve Kolinahr, the Vulcan discipline of complete emotional purging. That should be a rich character premise. The film mentions the failure, gestures at its significance, and then sets it aside in favor of the mission.
William Shatner’s Kirk is given a conflict about whether he made the right choice to manipulate his way back to command of the Enterprise, and this conflict is raised in the first act and then functionally abandoned.
Three strong character setups. None of them developed. The film had the material for a real examination of who these people had become after the events of the television series and chose instead to show you the ship from every available angle.
The Wrath of Khan, released three years later, corrected all of this.
Nicholas Meyer understood the series as a story about people instead of as a franchise requiring visual commemoration. His Kirk faces real mortality. His Spock makes a sacrifice with earned weight. His McCoy is present as a full character instead of a cameo. The contrast between the two films is the clearest demonstration of what TMP got wrong.
The V’Ger Concept and Its Squandered Potential
The central idea, a Voyager probe returned as a massive alien intelligence, incomprehensible scale achieved through contact with a machine civilization that took the probe’s mission parameters and executed them at civilizational level, is real science fiction. The concept is internally coherent, extrapolates from real technology in ways that feel possible, and generates real philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between tool and creator.
V’Ger’s quest, to find its creator, to join with organic intelligence, to evolve beyond machine consciousness, is the film’s most interesting element and the one given the least time relative to the fly-around sequences. Decker’s merger with the evolved Ilia probe to create something new is the film’s most Star Trek moment: the optimistic belief that consciousness can transcend its origins, that the meeting of human and machine might produce something better than either. It arrives in the final minutes and has approximately four minutes of screen time.
A film that spent its runtime on the characters and the V’Ger concept instead of on photographic tributes to the Enterprise redesign would have been a significant Star Trek film. The screenplay had the material. The production chose wrong.
Goldsmith’s Score
Jerry Goldsmith’s score is the film’s one unambiguous achievement. The Enterprise theme, used as the main title theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation throughout its television run, originated here and is one of the great pieces of franchise music in cinema history. The score communicates grandeur, exploration, and the emotional tone of Star Trek’s optimistic humanism better than anything else in the film.
The score is also doing more than its share of the film’s experiential work. In the fly-around sequences, Goldsmith’s music is the reason those sequences feel significant instead of merely prolonged. Remove the score and the experience of watching the Enterprise filmed from every angle becomes obviously what it is: an advertisement for a redesign. The score generates meaning that the images alone can’t sustain.
Goldsmith is the only person on this production I’d thank. That theme is so good it almost tricked me into thinking the fly-around was an event, and I resent the film a little for spending his music on a parking maneuver.
