Review of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) by Gareth R — 14 Nov 2010

Ten years after their TV show ended, the crew of the Enterprise finally got promoted to the big screen. In making this happen, someone clearly wondered what could be done to make Star Trek a better fit for a two-hour feature film, and the answer they came up with was very probably: "Make it like 2001." Stanley Kubrick's proverbial "good science fiction movie" was still fresh in people's memories, so there's some sense in doing that. But 2001 is an epic, the story sweeps along like a glacier, its characters are mostly just placeholders and its visual style is all-important. None of these things really applied to Star Trek, which was an entirely earthier and more humanistic storytelling machine. Star Trek: The Motion Picture doesn't work for this reason. It just ain't Star Trek.

Time has moved on for the Enterprise crew, particularly Captain Kirk (William Shatner) - now an Admiral and out of the captain's chair. When a destructive blue cloud begins moving towards Earth, the newly refitted Enterprise is sent to put a stop to it, and Kirk uses the opportunity to get back his command. He's soon back with old friends, including Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who has cut short a Vulcan ritual of attaining "pure logic" in order to help. Meanwhile Commander Decker (Stephen Collins), who was set to be Captain, is stuck on the sidelines.

A gigantic unstoppable space creature does make a decent threat for a Star Trek movie. It's sufficiently big to require a film, rather than just a TV episode. But it's how you handle it that makes a decent story, and a bewildering amount of the film is taken up just with characters looking at it.

As the Enterprise approaches V'ger, the mysterious cloud, no expense is spared on special effects. We see all sorts of weird stuff on the inside, and it's mostly unclear what we're looking at, but it looks quite spectacular anyway. Sadly, twenty minutes of reaction shots from the Enterprise crew does not constitute action, or character-development. Robert Wise's fascination with 2001 is blatant in these scenes: nothing happening, not a damn thing, but characters looking at strange space phenomena. Pity (and praise) Jerry Goldsmith, who somehow manages to wrangle a decent musical score from scenes of nothing at all happening. (Particularly astounding is the first reveal of the Enterprise, where Kirk and Scotty circle the entire ship twice, just gazing at it. Goldsmith very nearly runs out of themetune during this long, boring scene.).

Yes, much has been said about the slow, reaction-shot-heavy filming style of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But this is not why it's a boring film. Not entirely, anyway. Wise was wrong to emulate 2001, particularly in the wake of the much more exuberant Star Wars, which frankly shook up the science fiction universe just as Kubrick had done. The real, fatal problem is what The Motion Picture does to the characters.

Take Kirk. He's got the Enterprise back after years of obsession - that is his entire dramatic conflict in the film, and he has already achieved it before we even see him. All that really comes of this is a few polite spats with Commander Decker, who has his own ideas about how to run the ship. Then there's Spock, who is undergoing certain emotional troubles partly thanks to V'ger. These are barely articulated at all, almost as if there are scenes cut; Spock is if anything gruffer, and less interesting than usual. McCoy (DeForrest Kelley) shoulders all the funny lines, and appears to be the only person on board who still finds some appeal in star trekking. The rest of them, kitted out to a man in some of the drabbest and least practical costumes in the entire Trek franchise, spend all their time either looking on or looking mildly shocked.

All the important character development belongs to Commander Decker. He has a curious relationship with the ship's navigator, Ilia (Persis Khambala), and their romance becomes the crux of the plot by the end, just as any doubts you might have about the film's 2001-fixation get utterly obliterated by the let's-call-it-what-it-is Star Child ending. The Trek crew we know and love, whom we are here to see, are basically peripheral to the story. It is a vast miscalculation to give all the important stuff to two brand new, but also boring and expendable characters, rather than the people who made the show popular, and the movie possible.

Star Trek was never about slow, ponderous science fiction. That's not to say it wasn't clever: noted science fiction writers like Richard Matheson were among its staff, and the plots could be complex, even baffling. What made it popular was the human interaction, the colourful characters (and, not to go on about it, costumes), and the understanding that even weighty scientific concepts must first be entertaining to be worth doing. The Motion Picture is based on two particular episodes of the series, as well as that damn Kubrick movie, and it drains the excitement and colour from both of them.

That's not to say nothing exciting happens in the film. There's a transporter accident so horrifying it brings to mind David Cronenberg's The Fly; and there's an accident with the warp engines that almost gets the Enterprise blown up before it even reaches V'ger. But tellingly, both these events are completely superfluous, besides allowing Spock to come aboard via a dead man's boots. In the whole movie, there are really only enough important plot points to count on one hand. V'ger comes, V'ger goes. Two hours, for this?

It's not all bad. Slow and monumentally boring it may be, but it is often remarkable to look at. The costume and set design are uniformly awful - whenever there's a group of Starfleet officers standing around, try firstly not to laugh at what appear to be T-Shirts and pyjamas, and secondly to pick out one interesting colour from the lot of them. My eyes got thirsty looking at them. But the model shots of all the various spacecraft are excellent, Jerry Goldsmith's music is as rousing as possible, and although the crew have very little to do - keep an eye on Doctor McCoy, who spends almost the entire movie hilariously twiddling his thumbs on the bridge - they're good enough at their roles to acquit themselves.

It makes a pretty good science fiction movie. It's just a lousy piece of Star Trek.