Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Plot: Eight years after the end of the original 5-year mission, a strange energy cloud of immense power is detected on a course heading to Earth, destroying everything in its path. The Enterprise, now in space dock undergoing a refit, is the closest ship available to respond. James T. Kirk, now an Admiral in charge of Starfleet Operations, chafes at his planet-bound duties. He pulls strings to take the command of the Enterprise away from her young captain, Willard Decker, and prepares to floosh out to meet the anomaly which threatens the existence of Earth. Before he leaves, he must assemble the team he needs to support him, which means calling a certain crusty Chief Medical Officer out of retirement, and recruiting a Vulcan science officer.
Thoughts: Star Trek: The Motion Picture is class. STTMP is quality. STTMP is profound. While honoring the great television series that preceded it, STTMP pushes Star Trek through a doorway into new realms of spectacle, sound, and psychological complexity. It’s a warmer film than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s grander than almost any other science fiction film you could name.
Sorry–I know I’m not supposed to like it. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to think about STTMP, even if they haven’t seen it for 20 years. I hope I don’t disappoint too many people, but I don’t subscribe to the “odd is bad, even is good” syllogism for Star Trek movies. I plan to keep an open mind this month as we re-watch the first four films, but as I write this, I’m not sure that STTMP isn’t the best film of the series.
I know I’m getting a little grandiose here. I think it’s okay to indulge a little bravado over things that are truly important, like debating Star Trek on the Internet.
I know people criticize STTMP for being slow. I don’t agree (when I watch it, I am mesmerized), but it is a film that creates its own specific gravity, its own sense of pace. The key to this is Jerry Goldsmith’s score. This is not just a great film score, but it feels like an important one–and not just because the main theme provides the title music for Star Trek: The Next Generation. I sit and listen to Goldsmith’s overture to the film–an overture!–and I am transported.
Goldsmith’s score, not unlike John Williams’ score for Star Wars, sets up perfectly what the film, and its vision of the future, is about. This Trek is not a home for speeder bikes and space battles. It is a place for grown ups, for big ideas, and for what Neil DeGrasse Tyson calls “the cosmic perspective.”[*]
STTMP is the story of a piece of technology sent out into the universe on a wish and a prayer, that goes to unexpected places and comes back in a form we could neither recognize nor anticipate. It raises the question, familiar from episodes of TOS, of what it means to be human. What value does the emotion and intuition that fills our subjective experience have, compared to the computational power of machine intelligence? What place, and what importance, can we ascribe feelings such as longing and camaraderie in such a vast universe? STTMP ends with the birth of a new form of life, and we learn again to have empathy for that which is alien, and bear witness to another existential threat resolved not through military might, but through the application of intelligence, empathy, and understanding.
This is the essence of Star Trek, through and through: a story that demands that its characters (and the audience) expand their minds; a story that evokes wonder.
It’s easy to spot the similarity between the plot of this film and TOS episode 2.3, “The Changeling,” which also involves a transformed satellite returning from the far reaches of space in search of its Creator. This is no bad thing; that episode is a highlight of the Original Series, but they could only afford to film it as a bottle show, with all the action taking place on board the Enterprise. The machine’s search for the Creator echoes and provides a safe way to reflect upon the similar yearnings embodied in the history of world religions. There’s no dishonor in revisiting this story.
I found, on this viewing, that the film also reminds me of two other Trek classics. In TOS 1.10 — “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the crew is confronted with an ancient, superior technology, and a ship of immense size. They must put aside their suspicion and fear and find a way to prove their potential for nonviolence. That episode also features a crewmember, Lt. Bailey, who asks to be left behind, not for reasons of fear or despair, but for the thrill of discovery; out of a desire to transcend his former life and evolve as a person, and a representative of his species.
I was also reminded of TOS 2.9 — “Metamorphosis,” in which a totally alien intelligence, called The Companion, forms a bond with a marooned human space traveler, Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive. Although the alien does not even have corporeal form, The Companion and Cochrane bond over their shared experience of loneliness, and create a symbiotic existence. Given the opportunity to sever this bond, Cochrane chooses to remain with the alien, rather return to walk the paths of humankind.
Besides the pure science fiction at its core, the rest of what I love about STTMP is the way it expands upon the established world of Star Trek. The special effects and model work is just gorgeous, underscoring at all times the vastness and wonder of space, and the smallness and fragility of the individual. The crew has really changed. Although only 10 years had passed since Star Trek went off the air, William Shatner in 1979 arguably looks and sounds more different from young Kirk than he does from his public persona today, 35 years later.
The Kirk which the film shows us is a very flawed character, one whose flaws will continue to be developed over the course of the film series, until, arguably, he unwittingly becomes the villain of Star Trek VI. Shatner holds the screen very well. He’s always interesting to look at, even just watching the Enterprise through a shuttlecraft window. He shows us Kirk thinking on screen, which is harder to do than it sounds. None of the Star Wars characters are thinking heroes; even Captain Pike from “The Menagerie” and “The Cage” isn’t a thinker. Kirk’s strength comes through the use of his brain, and Shatner shows us that this is true despite the profound weakness of the character, which he compensates for by relying on excellent friends.
I admire that they didn’t try to make the rest of the crew look glamorous, or any younger than they really were. The characters of Janice Rand and Christine Chapel are barely recognizable. The actors, Grace Lee Whitney and Majel Barrett, could have been made to look much more like their television personas through the use wigs and makeup, but the film is too honest for that.
STTMP was a hit that made big money ($82 million in unadjusted dollars) and launched Star Trek as a movie franchise. I don’t think this was some weird fluke: STTMP earned what it got by being fabulous. Legendary director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story,) did his work well. Most of the criticisms I hear amount to complaints that the film doesn’t dumb itself down. But I realize this isn’t the majority opinion. What did you think?
[*] “The cosmic perspective” means that a proper appreciation of the grandeur of space and time, and the smallness of our place within it, combined with an awareness of the limited extent of our knowledge, causes the petty divisions between us that lead to violence, war, and misunderstandings to recede, and we are inexorably united.
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