1979 - STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE

With the restart of the series coming out in May, it's time for a few comments on the first Star Trek movie with the original cast. My anticipation was high when the film was announced, the film was clearly being made to cash in on all the money "Star Wars" had made. In spite of that albatross, I had a strong interest in seeing the film. They had the original cast back, Gene Roddenberry the creator of the original series was the producer and Robert Wise a very good director was hired to direct.

What went wrong:
1. Basically the script had no dramatic tension, and was pretty much a rehash of a Star Trek episode called "The Changeling" and that wasn't a particularly good episode.

2. Robert Wise had apparently never seen an episode of Star Trek and didn't understand the mythology of the series.

3. Apparently nobody liked Roddenberry who as it turned out was a 2nd rate talent at best and somewhat of a jerk overall.

4. Paramount rushed the production because of worries that the science fiction craze started by Star Wars would be over by the time the movie came out.

5. The actors were never able to modulate their television style acting for the film.

6. There was an over reliance on spectacular special effects which was used to cover up the weak script, this lead to many long boring "flying thru space" scenes particularly the V'ger flyover which was endless ( in fact I got up and went out for a potty break, came back and still hadn't missed anything).

7. Some weird bald chick who was supposed to be the hot sexy thing in the movie . There was always a hot sexy thing in a Star Trek episode, but she just looked weird and struggled big time to act. Her running around in a short skirt at the end of the film actually distracted from the revelation of the V'Ger entity which tended to negate the dramatic tension of the scene.

 

As they say the list is unfortunately, endless. Paramount let Robert Wise rework the movie a few years later and while it mostly involved cleaning up the special effects and tightening some of the scenes, I don't think it was is a major improvement to the film, it does look and play a lot better. This is the edition I own. "Star Trek" wasn't "Star Wars", it was never about space battles and special effects. What it was about was about was presenting an optimistic view of the future where the human race has finally put aside their differences and is working together for a greater purpose. Maybe this is somewhat of a naive philosophy today, but it was a positive message. I believe that this was one of the reasons the show developed such a large cult following. It will be interesting to see if the reboot of the franchise will contain any of these themes.

 132 minutes.