Several years after the series was cancelled, the development of Star Trek: Phase II began, which was originally intended as a series before evolving into Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although audiences unfairly compared it to faster paced Star Wars, The Motion Picture was a beautiful film. Do you think that it was successful as a new beginning for the franchise and do you think the values of The Original Series seemed dated compared to the 1979 adventure?
Image courtesy CBS/Paramount
John Trimble: Star Trek: The Motion Picture suffered from having a script written for a TV episode turned into a movie script. Gene got the blame for the poor box office showing, but it was Paramount’s fault for a bunch of poor decisions. Also it suffered from comparison to Star Wars, which was/is a whole different animal.
Jeff Bond: I vividly remember being crushingly disappointed by The Motion Picture when I saw it in a theater in 1979. For me it did not have the character interaction, the fun and the sense of adventure that I loved about the original show. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate it much more and I can enjoy it as a kind of audiovisual experience, and as one of the purest distillations of Gene Roddenberry’s utopian ethos. Certainly its outright pacifism was hugely daring given that it was greenlighted as a theatrical film due to the success of Star Wars, and at that point “space adventure” films were entirely about laser battles.
There’s no doubt that The Motion Picture established the validity of Trek as a movie franchise and its remarkable look, due to the efforts of artists like Mike Minor, Syd Mead, Richard Taylor, Andrew Probert, John Dykstra and Douglas Trumbull still influences the look of Star Trek and other science fiction movies and TV shows today. I still would have loved to have seen what director Philip Kaufman of The Right Stuff could have done with a Star Trek movie–his treatment for the project was insane, but he was a director working at the height of his powers in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s as he showed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Right Stuff. He would have made a very adult film (he said that the exploration of sexuality was one thing that Trek was a great platform for) and it may have been an utter fiasco, but I do think it would have been a bit more daring than the G-rated The Motion Picture.
Peter Briggs: My take’s pretty much Jeff Bond’s. In 1979/1980 I was entrenched in trying to find out everything about special effects (I thought that might be a career path), and there seemed to be a lot of articles about Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the best in the late lamented Fantastic Films magazine.) I was identically disappointed in the film at the time, although loved Goldsmith’s score. I still have a thing about V’Ger: I remember Harlan Ellison mocking the duration of the V’Ger effects sequences in articles, but those are now my favourite parts. I’ll fast forward through to get to them, rather than fast-forward through them. V’Ger’s conceptualization was amazing, years ahead of its time…and still very alien. (If anyone wants to hear some V’Ger music, go listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Scott Of The Antarctic soundtrack. You might be surprised.) I’ve still probably watched The Motion Picture more times than is healthy. Certainly more than Search For Spock or The Voyage Home.
I can’t agree with Jeff about Phil Kaufman’s abandoned take on the project. That, and others that were mooted for the film, were just bad ideas.
Rich Handley: I am an unabashed fan of The Motion Picture. I know that it takes a lot of flak from people who refer to it as “The Motionless Picture”, and there is a certain degree of truth to that commentary on its pacing. But it’s a beautifully made film with wonderful acting from Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Khambatta and Collins, and I genuinely care about Decker and Ilia, while being thoroughly pulled into Spock’s emotion-vs.-logic personal dilemma. Plus, the effects still hold up to this day. I rewatched the movie a couple of months ago and was impressed at how great it still looked, more than 40 years after it was made. In fact, its effects hold up better than those in several of the sequels.
Sure, the plot is rather similar to that of “The Changeling” (I have to admit I do get a chuckle out of the movie’s other nickname, “Where Nomad Has Gone Before”), and sure, none of the cast have much to do in it besides the Big Three, but The Motion Picture still ranks among my favorite of the films, alongside The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Counter and (I’ll probably be lambasted for this) Insurrection and Beyond. I love the music (I listen to the soundtrack quite frequently, in fact) and I think the cast has never looked more fit and timelessly heroic than they do here. I even very much like the space pajamas, and I love V’Ger.
Image courtesy CBS/Paramount
I find V’Ger endlessly fascinating, in a way that Nomad really wasn’t. The film doesn’t just repeat “The Changeling”–it surpasses it. I love movies that don’t have villains, and The Motion Picture is one of them, as is The Voyage Home. V’Ger is no more evil than the whale probe–they’re simply alien intelligences seeking understanding, and they have no evil malice toward mankind… we’re simply standing in their way. Once they attain the enlightenment they seek, they move on and leave us be. The dangers in The Motion Picture and Star Trek IV are concepts, not evils. There’s no revenge, no screaming fits of fury. There’s just the barrier of human knowledge. That, to me, is an extraordinary way to approach storytelling–not hero meets villain, but rather mankind meets philosophy. Revenge has been a key motivator in the last six recent Star Trek films (First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, the 2009 film, Into Darkness and Beyond), and while I enjoy them all, I wish Star Trek would go back to doing films like The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home. Enough with the revenge–it’s time for another thought-provoking morality play. That’s Star Trek.
As to your specific questions: I definitely think it was a great new beginning for the franchise. Without The Motion Picture, we might not have had the other films, because had Phase II aired, the franchise might have simply ended after three classic-era TV shows, or it might have remained a TV franchise thereafter and never transitioned to the big screen–and I suspect that although the shows tend to be better than the movies, it’s the movies’ success that is more responsible for Star Trek surviving beyond the 1970s, due to how the Hollywood machine works from a financial standpoint.
Some final thoughts: The Motion Picture’s brilliant soundtrack became the basis for that of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and V’Ger’s evolution reminded us that the human adventure is just beginning, deftly setting the stage for new frontiers to be explored–which, of course, they were. I view The Motion Picture as an under-appreciated and unfairly maligned masterpiece that deserves recognition as a landmark story in Star Trek history. It revived a flagging franchise, allowing Trek to become something truly spectacular, and there was great beauty among the sterility.
Steven Thompson: I was privileged to see Gene Roddenberry “in concert” in the mid-70s talking, among many other things, about plans for the Phase II series. I had a ticket to see him again a couple years later but he canceled that tour with the announcement that preparation was underway to turn Phase II into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
By that point, I was a hopeless Trekkie/Trekker and I doted on every little bit of newspaper coverage. I even wrote a fan letter to Persis Khambatta when I saw her on The Merv Griffin Show nearly a full year before the movie was released! She sent me back a postcard written in endearingly awkward English saying she had just finished shooting her role a few days earlier.
When the big day finally arrived, I was comfortably seated in a packed theater for the first showing, expecting another Star Wars, only even better because this one would have all of my old friends in it.
I loved it! Or rather I TOLD myself I loved it. What was not to love? Star Trek was back. It was big and colorful with trippy spfx! Of course, it was also long, and ponderous, and let’s face it, pretty dull in spots. Plus, what was with those leisure suit uniforms?
Still, I named it my personal Movie of the Year that year. It really was Star Trek, no question about that, and at that point in time, after a full decade of false hopes and false starts, and having to settle for cartoons, comic books, and novels, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was real…and that was enough at that moment in time. More importantly, it was enough to inspire better Star Trek going forward.
Bob Greenberger: What Jeff said. I remember being thrilled with the Orson Welles-narrated trailer even though it showed precious little. I was seriously excited to see it and it was the one and only time I ever sat in line for a film (five hours after buying 42 tickets for the dorm).
Once I got past the thrill of seeing the new uniforms and spiffy new ship, the disappointment grew by the frame. This was slow, turgid, and lacked the spark of camaraderie that I loved on the original series. V’Ger was Nomad and no one made the observation. The new characters were interesting but were also gone by the end so it reset the status quo. It had such squandered potential.
The various re-edits, notably the director’s cut, makes a bad film better but it all comes down to a script that robbed the characters of their personalities and a director who was a bad fit, much as I love Robert Wise’s other work.
Ian Spelling: I saw The Motion Picture at Sunrise Mall in Massapequa on opening weekend. It was playing on multiple screens, all but one of which were sold out. The one that was not sold out, the air conditioning was broken and they had a sign at the ticket window stating that it was about 100 degrees in the theater. We went anyway. The film was and remains slow. The performances across the board are too sedate, well, except for Walter Koenig screaming. But my god, that visit to the Enterprise? Going to warp? Any shot of Persis Khambatta? It was visually stunning. Great music. And the story, for all its flaws and its familiarity, was pure Trek. I’d still watch IV, II and VI before I if I were binging The Original Series adventures, but I has its moments.
Larry Young: Here’s my opinion of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In 1979, this was the biggest thing to ever happen to me. It was like my mom talking about the Beatles getting back together:
Carol Pinchefsky: Star Trek: The Motion Picture was clearly successful in that it made millions at the box office and that it spawned sequels, which led to more series, which led to continued Star Trek. That said, it never resonated with me. The values of the original series remain timeless.
John Kirk: I think I was too young to fully appreciate Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I do remember feeling disappointed at the long sequences of extravagant visual special effects – to my adolescent mind, it was a slow film. Also, I was also enough of a fan to realize that it was a very similar storyline to the The Original Series episode, The Changeling”. But, it was Star Trek on the big screen and I was excited, nonetheless.
Again, it came back to the development and evolution of the characters for me. In this respect, the film seemed like a personal journey for the main characters. Kirk was an Admiral; Spock was trying to purge all emotion through Kohlinar and McCoy was more grumpy and bearded! It was interesting that they also seemed more flawed. Kirk required the assistance of the previous Captain, now demoted to his Executive Officer, for operational awareness of the Enterprise. He didn’t know the Enterprise any more. McCoy was irked with Christine Chapel’s promotion to MD status and resented being pressed back into the service.
I was looking for new developments with the supporting cast as well. While Christine Chapel had become a doctor, that seemed to be about it, despite Scotty’s new mustache. Uhura, Sulu and Chekov fell back into their familiar roles and I didn’t catch that Janice Rand had also returned to the crew until a few re-watches later. I was a bit frustrated by that lack of growth in the cast.
The presence of Will Decker and Ilia was a bit of a novelty, to be sure, especially given their shared backstory, but they weren’t enough of a draw for me.
The redemption of the fim for me was that the individual journeys of Kirk, Spock and McCoy had reached their destinations. Kirk had regained his sense of command and his relationship to the Enterprise. Spock has discovered that pure logic wasn’t enough and even McCoy had settled back into accepting his role of being the Ship’s doctor. In that sense, the film had managed to re-establish the franchise and reminded the world at large that Star Trek hadn’t gone away.
John E. Price: The Motion Picture has many, many aspects that make it nearly unapproachable to a modern audience that has had decades of reboots and origin stories and cinematic universes from which to draw a common movie story-telling language. The Motion Picture does nothing that a modern scifi movie does, let alone the first movie in a planned series. That cannot be held against it, of course: it wasn’t a planned series of movies, it wasn’t a reboot, it wasn’t the birth of a cinematic universe. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was an ambitious movie that strove to be much more than just a two-hour episode and for that alone it should be lauded. Instead of putting Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in a familiar, feel-good setting, the movie starts all of them in distress, which again, is hard for an audience to understand without context. The movie takes the audience along for the ride as the crew remembers how to be Star Trek. It’s a pretty little meta-narrative that works more and more with each viewing, but that’s a level of commitment not required from later installments benefiting from that character evolution.
Also, the movie gave us the refit 1701, the most gorgeous starship ever made.
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