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.
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2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)

I’m stunned that people debate the meaning of 2001 ad nauseum without ever mentioning the incredible design of the interiors: the orange chairs in the lobby of the space hotel, the banana leather padding and turban-headed flight attendants of the Pan Am transport, the minimalist meeting room with glowing white walls at Clavius, and of course Discovery’s dizzying interior with the rotating gravity ring. HAL’s unblinking red lens is as iconic as the monolith: a black post-modern slab that keeps turning up in the oddest places. Finally, the Louis XIV furniture in the futuristic zoo cage is such a perfect visual analogy to the time displacements and overlaps Bowman experiences in the alien’s time-space. For the design alone, 2001 is a masterpiece that would be difficult to top in any era.
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The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

30 years before Steven Spielberg made E.T., Patricia Neal originated the archetype of a single mother who discovers her son is spending too much time with an alien. “Sci-fi Mom” can be found in the retro animated Iron Giant, and also in Spielberg’s classic masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What’s the pattern here? Are fatherless boys more likely to attract aliens because they look for a father in every stranger…? Perhaps over mothering has left the boys gullible and needy, susceptible to the influence of dominating spacemen…. Maybe it’s just because if left unsupervised, boys will get into all kinds of trouble…. Ugh, what’s a single mom to do!

Although an undisputed classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a product of its time. It was made in the paranoid Eisenhower-era of wise old scientists and panic-stricken mobs, when suddenly a messianic alien named Klaatu lands in Washington DC (the center of the universe in 1951) with his robot enforcer Gort. Klaatu (née Mr. Carpenter, née Jesus the Christ) delivers a message of universal peace — OR ELSE! He explains that the worlds he represents haven’t so much solved their differences as made violence illegal, enforced by a race of Gorts who will immediately destroy any aggressor. His peace message is actually a warning: Kill each other all you want here on Earth, but if your wars spread to other worlds the Gorts will get you.
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This Island Earth (1955)

Two attractive scientists are kidnapped and taken on a joyride to another planet by their alien employer. His home world is so desperately out of resources they need the inferior humans to help them improve their power supply. But time is running out and it may be too late!

This first encounter with an alien species is an acid trip in vivid 3-strip Technicolor, but dry and unemotional like an Arthur C Clark epic. The actors stand around explaining things to each other while molecule sculptures blink and rotate like a moderne chandelier run amok. A large psychedelic console unit, the Interocitor, is a videophone, autopilot, and death ray all-in-one. At one point the spaceship is attacked by triangles that hurl sparkling balls at them, but they escape. Then they are attacked by a deranged slave bug, but they escape. Etc, etc. Occasionally the aliens strike a pose like the Abraham Lincoln statue, making them seem aloof and too preoccupied to get emotionally involved.

There aren’t any surprises here and that’s the surprise. It’s oddly refreshing to watch a sci-fi drama without the cliches, no sassy mouthed princess…, no wild west gunslinger or WW1 pilot…, no druids…. What you get is pure ’50s science fiction adventure that slowly unfolds from the mundane, to the mysterious, to the monumental as our stunned Earthling tourists witness the death of an alien civilization!