Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Plot Summery: Kirk in mid-life crisis returns to Enterprise selfishly determined to reclaim his former glory. He bumps our young hero from the captain’s chair: the capable Decker who is further complicated when long lost love returns in the form of Lt Ilia, the irresistible Deltan who has been forced to take an oath of celibacy so as not to take advantage of a sexually inferior species.

Meanwhile, Spock has just failed Kolinahr, a grueling ritual to wash away his emotions, and is barely able to communicate with the human crew. Only Bones has enjoyed retirement having grown a long beard and lounging about in disco leisure suits with big gold necklaces. After a bit of grumbling, he sets himself to unraveling the Gordian knot of emotional baggage.

Don’t blame Robert Wise for all the problems of this film. Wise was stuck with the production Gene Roddenberry had proposed for for Star Trek: Phase 2, an aborted TV series that was planned to launch Paramount’s television network. Plenty of money had already been spent, actors cast and signed to contracts, but when StarWars launched Hollywood’s sci-fi sweepstakes at the end of the ’70s, the studio couldn’t wait. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was put on the fast track. Paramount simply added that tab and many of the contracts to this film’s whopping $40,000,000 budget.

It was Douglas Trumbull who was responsible for the much criticized V’ger sequence and also for the Enterprise drydock masterbation scene. He is credited as “Second Unit Director”, but had free reign over the fx — which is most of the film. They were late to be finished, and because of their great expense they were spliced into the film “as is” literally at the eleventh hour, too late to hold screenings or for Wise to trim. In the Director’s Edition commentary, Wise says the studio wanted a specific running time to make good on guarantees to theaters. Paramount execs had set a firm Christmas release date for ST:TMP and prevented Wise from trimming down the over-long fx sequences.

Trumbull was also responsible for 2001: A Space Odyssey which StarTrek closely follows. Another long musical journey through special effects so a nerd can fantasize about becoming an evolved super-thing via technology sans women. Very Freudian, and a recurring theme in Trumbull’s films….

Trumbull now makes motion-simulator rides, something he calls First-person cinema. The approach to Enterprise is like one of those rides. If you are waiting for a movie then it is boring, but if you are waiting to see the ship then it is a great scene! I’m not a fetishist of big machinery, but I like it in films where ships and other objects that play a role in the film are given their due. It helps me as a viewer realize how the characters must see “her”, and I never understood the female gender for ships until I saw this movie.

Kirk is returning to his great love after a long absence, and Trumbull unveils her seductively through this feminine lace of drydock. When you finally see the ship head-on she is the color of the moon and for the first time I saw Enterprise as a swan and not as a jet-propelled pancake. For me this scene works because it plays romantically. If Enterprise is nothing more than a way for Kirk to get to the action then she could be any ship, a barge or a tugboat.

Her interiors are Contemporary style, rooms are painted shades of beige or grey while corridors and furniture are mostly orange upholstery. The lighting is dramatic and dark yet air-conditioned and cozy, like a posh hotel where you could wear your pajamas all day. Engineering is bright silver with lots of John Dykstra’s blue laser reflected on mylar lightshows, paying homage to sci-fi in general rather than TOS’s campy pastel machinery and back-lit jewel buttons. Dykstra also “updates” the Klingon warship in his signature greeble and surface clutter he’d done for StarWars and Battlestar Galactica, a technique that hid imperfections and gave scale to models (now dated and obsolete in the age of CGI).

Futurist and self-promoter Syd Mead contributes many recognizable features to V’ger. Ron Resch creates Eplilon9’s geometric array. And Robert McCall supplies cheesy album cover art to represent V’ger’s limitless memory of planets and stars. Alison Yerxa animates the gossamer but endless journey through V’ger’s cloud.

Although Commander Decker and Lt Ilia are killed off in in a 3-way sex merging with prodigal space probe V’ger, but the young hero and his empathic alien ex-girlfriend resurface in Star Trek: Next Generation as Commander William Riker, and Lt Deanna Troi. The series and it’s successful spinoffs would be used to launch UPN, Paramount’s television network.