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| L to R: Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Kirk (William Shatner), and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) |
At the time of its original release, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" earned a lukewarm reception from crowds and critics who were simultaneously happy to see their favorite sci-fi characters on the big screen but disappointed by the slow, plodding, ponderous story of an old spacecraft from Earth that had fulfilled its data-collecting mission just a little too well. In 2001, a digitally remastered director's cut of the movie came out and was more warmly received by critics than the original theatrical release. In 2022, as part of a 55th-anniversary commemoration (that really began in 2021), more audiovisual touches to the film were added in the spirit of director Robert Wise's desire to make a movie worthy of his vision. I just watched the 2022 director's cut last night. If the name Robert Wise isn't familiar to you: he's the gent who also directed "The Sound of Music" and "West Side Story."
It is the twenty-third century. Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), back from commanding his five-year mission, has risen in the ranks to become an admiral, and he is now tied to a desk. Science officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), a child of two worlds, is on his father's home planet of Vulcan, where he is about to go through the Kolinahr ritual to purge the remnants of emotion still simmering in his psyche. In Klingon space, a small squadron of Klingon warships moves to intercept an immense alien cloud. They attack the cloud with photon torpedoes, which the alien easily absorbs before retaliating with its own energy projectiles—crackling, coruscating spheres that both destroy the Klingon vessels and absorb them into the cloud as data. The nearby Terran space station Epsilon Nine witnesses this brief conflict and transmits information to Starfleet Command before it, too, is absorbed and destroyed. The cloud is on a direct heading for Earth. Kirk, frustrated at having become a desk jockey and eager to return to space, leverages the approach of the menacing alien cloud to reinstall himself as captain of the Enterprise, which is undergoing a major redesign and refit under the supervision of Captain Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) and Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan). Decker is none too happy to find himself temporarily demoted to the rank of commander and the role of first officer aboard what is essentially a brand-new ship that he knows better than Kirk does. When Vulcan science officer Sonak is killed in a freak transporter accident, Decker is also tasked with the role of science officer.
Kirk knows that the Enterprise's refit is days away from being complete, that simulated test runs still need to be done on the warp drive and other systems, but with the cloud reaching Earth in a little over two standard days, Kirk pushes the Enterprise's departure time to twelve hours from his arrival on board despite the dangers of rushing what is supposed to be a careful and thorough process. The rest of the original bridge crew is there to greet Kirk: communications officer Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), helmsman Sulu (George Takei), and weapons officer Chekov (Walter Koenig). Even Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett)—now Doctor Chapel—is back and eager to work with McCoy, who says he doesn't want another MD around second-guessing his diagnoses. Joining Sulu at the front console is navigations officer Ilia (Persis Khambatta), a Deltan. In the novelized version of the story, we discover that Deltans look human, but they emit powerful pheromones that can drive an undisciplined male human into a sexual frenzy. Kirk, despite being known for his many amorous exploits, seems unaffected by Ilia's presence, and Ilia reassures Kirk that her oath of celibacy is on record. Chekov and Sulu, however, have very brief moments where they look unwontedly horny. Deltans are, despite their sexual attractiveness, known to be loyal and exclusively committed mates, and it turns out that Ilia has a history with now-Commander Decker.
The Enterprise launches, but because of a matter/antimatter imbalance in the warp drive (not enough time to run those simulations), the starship creates a wormhole that also sucks a random asteroid into itself, where it threatens to impact the Enterprise. Kirk orders Chekov to fire phasers to destroy the asteroid, but Decker yells to belay that order and use photon torpedoes. The strategy works, and when Kirk later questions Decker on why he countermanded Kirk's phaser order, Decker explains that the redesigned Enterprise increases phaser strength by routing power through the engines. Since the engine imbalance is what caused the wormhole, the phasers would have been nonfunctional, hence the need to use torpedoes. Kirk is abashed and thanks Decker for his timely actions, which saved the ship. As the Enterprise safely drops out of warp and begins to repair its engines, a mysterious courier vessel appears, approaches the Enterprise, and drops off a single passenger: Mr. Spock, who did not complete the Kolinahr ritual because he felt an immense consciousness calling out from space, emanating from the same cloud now bearing down on Earth. Spock is unusually frosty toward everyone, but with his genius intellect, he is able to help Scotty repair the warp engines' matter/antimatter imbalance, allowing the Enterprise to be on its way. And in another blow to poor Decker, Spock's commission is reactivated, and he resumes his traditional position as science officer, leaving Decker solely in the role of first officer.
The rest of the movie plays out a lot like the final part of "2001: A Space Odyssey," with the Enterprise meeting and entering the cloud, moving toward the massive entity's innermost workings. The journey is quiet, eerie, and phantasmagorical, and in the end, the crew discovers that the entity, which calls itself "V'Ger" (pronounced "VEE-jerr"), is none other than a 300-year-old Voyager 6 probe, sent out by Earth to collect data. A fall through a black hole brought V'Ger to a planet inhabited by living machines that enhanced the probe, turning it into a superpowerful data collector, able to simultaneously destroy objects and record them. As it went along, acquiring a universe's worth of knowledge, V'Ger became sentient and began to wonder at its purpose, and while its mind was dominated by pure logic, it began to experience one overriding desire: to meet and join with its creator. In reading V'Ger's mind, Spock discovers that V'Ger is motivated by the sorts of existential questions that drive organic life: Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more? The search for the creator, then, is a search for ultimate meaning and transcendence. Because V'Ger is a machine consciousness enhanced by machine consciousnesses, its prejudice is toward machine life, and it initially doesn't recognize humans and aliens as "real" life forms, seeing them instead as infestations aboard the starships that V'Ger sees as real. Kirk's biggest hurdle, upon learning all of this, is convincing V'Ger that human beings had created it, and that if it wanted a sense of fulfillment, it would have to evolve. V'Ger had been interacting with the Enterprise crew through a humanoid probe based on the form of Lieutenant Ilia, whom V'Ger had assimilated. Decker, understanding the needs of the moment and responding to his own need for fulfillment, agrees to meld with V'Ger through the Ilia-probe. We see a fantastical light show as the melding happens, and the threat against Earth disappears, and we're given to understand that V'Ger—and possibly humanity as well—has undertaken the next step in its evolution. This was a birth, with V'Ger now free to create its own sense of purpose instead of fulfilling the imperatives of its antiquated programming.
"Star Trek: The Motion Picture" has its heart in the right place. It's driven by a thinking man's story, with all the usual big-picture, ultimate-meaning philosophical questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and what attracts an intelligent conscious mind. It's also consistent with the spirit of the original TV series, being a voyage of discovery leading to an encounter with a new form of life. It's also a movie that's very much in love with the redesigned Enterprise. Later critics have referred to this aspect of the film, with its slow flybys, as "starship porn." An early scene has Kirk in a large-windowed shuttle while Scotty lovingly pilots the craft around the new Enterprise, giving Kirk a chance to drink it all in from every angle. Another thing the movie does right is in how it reassembles the main cast, many of whom—like Kirk and Spock—have gone on to seemingly bigger and better things, only to discover that there was no fulfillment to be found in those pursuits. V'Ger, as the thing closest to an antagonist, is massive and mysterious: a complex core surrounded by an energy cloud two astronomical units wide* (an AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from the earth to the sun, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers). It's interesting to watch the progression as the Enterprise moves into the innards of the alien entity, from wispy outer cloud to weird and vastly undulating inner workings to creepy data-storage areas where Spock, flying outside the Enterprise on his own private tour of V'Ger's guts, sees a host of recorded stars, planets, galaxies... and a ghostly simulacrum of Ilia herself. The movie is brimming with heady images and ideas. And the thing that carries the movie throughout its 132-minute run time is Jerry Goldsmith's excellent, ambitious, and now-iconic score, which got appropriated by the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
But this was a rushed, flawed production, and complaints about the movie have accumulated over the years. There's the lack of chemistry among the main cast, with only DeForest Kelley standing out for some of his funnier and more emotional lines. Otherwise, it's not just Spock who's frosty toward everyone: the entire bridge crew seems rather distant, drab, and unemotional. William Shatner's acting betrays its trademark stiffness and over-the-top quality, an awkward remnant of his stage work as a classically trained Shakespearean actor. Line deliveries from the rest of the cast are often stilted, pretentious, and over-pronounced, frequently matching the ponderous pace of the movie—a pacing that hasn't been improved in the 2022 director's cut. And while the musical score is awesome, some of the movie's other auditory highlights border on the bizarre and the corny. Jerry Goldsmith invented an instrument called the Blaster Beam to create the weird sound effect, like a vibrating twang, that we hear every time we see the V'Ger cloud. In my opinion, this effect didn't age very well, and I recall disliking the sound even as a kid in 1979. Another auditory nightmare was the synthesizer-generated "burbling" noises at the heart of V'Ger, which I suppose were meant to convey the idea of V'Ger thinking to itself. People behind the scenes speak of Robert Wise with great respect, but if "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is any evidence, he's not very imaginative in his use of cameras—favoring long, slow tracking shots and wholly conventional pans—and he doesn't seem interested in pushing his actors to their peak. Nicholas Meyer does a much better job, in all respects, with "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan."
There's also the matter of the digital remastering and other tweaks done to create the 2022 version of the film. Some documentaries I saw on YouTube showed filmmakers claiming that this new version was what Robert Wise would have wanted to make had he had the time, money, and especially the digital resources. In these same documentaries, examples of improved visuals are shown, and all of this is what tempted me to buy the 2022 version in the first place. Watching the film for myself, though, proved to be something else entirely. I had thought that the crew working on the 2022 version would clean up all of the old, poor-quality effects and replace them with digitally superior sounds and images. But from what I saw, most of the bad stuff from 1979 was left in. Black matte lines around starships, free-floating astronauts, and shuttlecraft remain to distract us. The exterior shots of Kirk and Scotty inside their shuttlecraft still look oddly warped. A scene in Kirk's ready room with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy has a painfully artificial, unfinished, sloppy look to it. Meanwhile, the added shots from the 2020s—the ones that clarified what V'Ger's core looks like—didn't feel necessary to me. And I suppose nothing could be done digitally to improve the awful acting of the entire bridge crew during the accidental-wormhole scene. One scene was only partially improved: the one in which V'Ger sends a lightning-like probe to the Enterprise's bridge to collect data from the ship's memory banks. In the original version, as the probe moves across our field of vision, it's obvious that the probe itself is the special-effects dividing line between the left and right halves of the screen... and those halves are poorly aligned. Once you see this, you can't unsee it. In the new version, this misalignment has been minimized but not erased, which I found hugely disappointing. Watching the "improved" version of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was as frustrating as watching George Lucas's "improved" editions of the original Star Wars movies: so much that Lucas ought to have cleaned up never got cleaned up.
If we had time machines, I would recommend some changes to the story based on slightly better storytelling and characterization standards, which have evolved since the 70s. First is the elephant in the room: the interactions among the crew members all need to be less stiff and more natural. Second is costume design—although the uniforms in "Star Trek II" would turn out to be a vast improvement over this film's drab, pale blues and grays and beiges and whites. Third is the need to give the less major bridge-crew members more to do (by "Star Trek III," this aspect of characterization had much improved). One missed opportunity was in the scene where V'Ger fires its destroying/absorbing projectile weapon at the Enterprise, which survives the first blow thanks to its vastly improved shielding. Unable to survive a second such attack, the ship relies on Spock to think up a solution. Spock realizes that V'Ger's processing power and communication speed are so fast that entire encyclopedias of information have in fact, been communicated, but in only a millisecond. Capitalizing on this realization, Spock decides to retransmit the same friendship hailing signals they had been sending, but orders of magnitude faster so that V'Ger can understand them. V'Ger fires a second deadly projectile, and in a tense moment, Spock transmits the sped-up hail just in time for the projectile to disappear, doing no further harm to the ship. To my mind, the way to fix this scene would be to make the data-transmission job a two-part relay between Spock and Uhura. Spock figures out what V'Ger needs in order to understand the Enterprise crew; Uhura, grasping the situation immediately, says "I'll take it from here; just gimme the data to transmit," then she works her communications-officer voodoo on V'Ger, ending the threat in the nick of time. Surprised by Uhura's speed and precision, Spock is impressed despite himself; he and Uhura share a look. Teamwork. Job well done. And that interplay would have legitimized the Spock/Uhura romance in JJ Abrams's version of the Trek universe. Spock is attracted to Uhura's nimble, capable mind. I'd have gotten behind that kind of girl-boss moment. Uhura in classic Trek is often given short shrift, but she's the communications officer, and one of the central themes of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is nothing less than communication. The more I think about it, the more I think Uhura really should have been a much bigger part of this story. The first season of "Strange New Worlds" gives its version of Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) a chance to show how her linguistic talents allow her to approach difficult situations from unexpected angles. Without a doubt, Nichelle Nichols deserved a chance for her character to shine that way, too.
I would also change the nature of V'Ger somewhat. V'Ger, as written, betrays some of the same screenwriterly inconsistencies that we see in the portrayal of Vulcans. In the classic lore, Vulcans aren't incapable of emotion; they're actually fiercely passionate, and the only way out of their genocidal past was for one philosopher, Surak, to arise and show the race a more peaceable path to enlightenment and fulfillment through the disciplined application of logic. But despite their supposed mastery of emotions, Vulcans are often shown desiring things, with curiosity being a particularly powerful form of desire. Vulcans are insatiably curious, and Spock sees V'Ger as a kindred intellect because it, too, wants to know everything. But Spock also claims that V'Ger is a being of surpassingly pure logic, which is inconsistent with V'Ger's lightning-filled, ship-shaking "tantrum" when Kirk refuses to disclose information about the "creator" toward the end of the movie. V'Ger also threatens to destroy all life on Earth, which doesn't seem logical at all. There are also the typical AI and philosophy-of-mind questions about how the simple collection of knowledge can give rise to consciousness—a folk idea that one often stumbles upon in older, less sophisticated science fiction. This is like collecting sand and expecting the sand grains to improbably assemble themselves into a complex sculpture. There should have been more in the script to flesh out how V'Ger gained consciousness. Perhaps mind was a gift from the world of living machines who perceived and understood V'Ger's basic purpose: Know all that is knowable. How the sentient V'Ger explored the vast cosmos for centuries and never realized that organic life was legitimately real is also beyond my comprehension. The writers really could have done a better job.
In all, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is a bit like the child that only a mother can love. People who don't appreciate the Trek franchise would probably end up bored to death if they tried to watch this movie, and even Trek loyalists will usually admit that, if they like "The Motion Picture," it's a warts-and-all kind of liking. No one is really hailing this as a masterpiece, and even with the supposed improvements (some improvements, like lighting and color grading, are too subtle for a Joe Schmoe viewer like me to notice without it being pointed out in some documentary), the basic story remains the same flawed, clunky basic story. I won't go so far as to say that the movie is a slog; it's not, and part of me has a bit of a soft spot for it. But compared to a Meisterwerk like "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," this movie does not rank high on the Trek totem pole. As with many films that I like but can never quite love, this one is a bundle of missed opportunities, and a sentimental favorite only for some.
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*In redoing the audio track for the movie, someone must have realized that the original dialogue needed to be changed. In the 1979 version of the movie, we hear that the cloud is eighty-two AUs in diameter, which would make the outermost reaches of V'Ger's being twice as large as the average diameter of the distance from the sun to Pluto. For dramatic purposes, this would make V'Ger preposterously large: an object that big wouldn't so much enter our solar system as destroy it. So in the 2022 director's cut, the audio has been changed to give V'Ger a more plausible—but still awesome—size. 2AU is big.
Another nice review. If I saw this movie way back when, I've forgotten it. One thing sounded familiar: "an undisciplined male human into a sexual frenzy." I wonder if Filipinas share ancestral blood with Deltans?
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