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Tag: Robert Wise

Has it Really Been 41-plus Years Since ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ Came Out? Part 4

Promo shot of Kirk confronting the V’ger-created version of Ilia, as McCoy and Spock observe, in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

Picking up where we left off:

We’re 83 minutes into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Kirk has taken back command of the Enterprise from Will Decker to deal with a huge alien object heading toward Earth that destroyed some Klingon ships and a Starfleet space station. Decker’s day gets ruined further when his ex-lover, Lt. Ilia, shows up. Spock leaves behind his yoga practice on Vulcan to join up and then fixes the ship so it works. They arrive at the alien object, get sucked in, and Lt. Ilia is killed by a probe and re-incarnated in the shower. 

And now, the conclusion of Star Trek: The Motion Picture!

Scanning the Ilia probe in sickbay, which has some nice effects on the display.

Dr. Chapel examines Ilia in sickbay, mostly to use the set and make the point that even though Ilia’s now a machine she’s still capable of common biological functions like, uh, crying? And Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett, gets in a few more lines to keep her a part of the series. 

Decker sees Ilia’s still alive and she responds by whispering his name. Spock and Kirk both have the same idea: It can’t hurt if Decker distracts it with sex. It takes a big man like Kirk to admit the younger officer is better suited for this task, which according to Starfleet tradition falls to the captain.

The torn door makes no sense, but OK.

The effect of Ilia bursting through the metal door is weak at best. They have to hide its cheesiness with quick cuts. 

Spock proves how invaluable he is by recognizing almost immediately that Decker sexing up an alien probe is unlikely to solve his personal problem or make the movie more interesting.

I guess Simon is still a popular game in the 23rd century.

Decker takes on his assignment with limited gusto, giving Ilia-lite a tour of the ship that the real Ilia never got to see. Kirk and Bones spy on them from the captain’s quarters. But there’s not much to see: The long gazes between Decker and Ilia are as cold as they are drawn out and boring. The big news is that Ilia reveals V’ger’s plan to digitize the Enterprise and store it in a library — like an early version of iTunes. Of course, Decker’s horrified, as any good vinyl man would be.

The interiors of the USS Enterprise are really pretty dull in this movie. I hope Kirk and Bones are having some Saurian brandy.

Back to Spock, who decides the only way to get this movie moving is to steal a space suit and penetrate V’ger himself!

Meanwhile, Chapel and McCoy are tagging along with Decker and Ilia. Since Ilia was only on the ship for about 10 minutes before she was vaporized by V’ger, it’s really not clear when she and Chapel became friends. I suppose they could have met on a previous assignment, but that’s exactly the kind of seemingly broken plot point the novelizations love to fix and, in this case, do not. 

Given this crew member’s mustache, I have to wonder if he frequents those areas of the ship Gene Roddenberry says are set aside for forming friendships.”

As usual, Bones has the best lines. When he notices Decker becoming aroused (either through those funky monitor belt buckles everyone wore or just by looking at his skin-tight gray pajama uniform), he basically tells Decker that fucking a machine is a terrible idea — an opinion he surely formed from watching first hand his pal Kirk in action. The pacing is really bad in this scene, with even Goldsmith’s score failing to give it any energy whatsoever.

Robot Ilia is truly indistinguishable from the original, save the glowing neck gem.

The countdown to Spock firing the thrusters on his suit marks the return of the dreaded procedural aspect of this movie. He can just hit fire and it would shave a few moments of boredom off the proceedings. Everything about this sequence takes on a huge amount of innuendo. The V’ger “orifice” is very biological looking and the sequence has this weird sense of trepidation on Spock’s part. There’s also a sense of obtaining forbidden knowledge, of lost innocence or, perhaps more in line with Roddenberry’s predilections, deflowering. Nimoy does a good impression of Keir Dullea in “2001: A Space Odyssey” here.

Could they not have put the rocket a little higher up on Spock’s back so it doesn’t look like he’s propelling himself with internal gas?

Once he’s inside V’ger, Spock’s journey becomes one of the visual highlights of the movie. The images are all pretty great and spot-on, though it’s hard to figure how Spock travels through all of this so quickly.

Nice effects here. Clearly inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Roddenberry’s influence can be felt here — there’s lots of tunnels. And balls. Heh.

I really enjoy these abstract images from inside of V’ger, as they’re just weird enough to defy explanation and are well done from a VFX perspective.

Even the giant Ilia looks cool, and the mind meld was a good throwback to the elements that made the original series so much fun. It’s clearly trying to play to “2001,” and while it falls far short of that, it’s an admirable attempt and gets closer than you’d think.

Spock attempting to mind meld with the giant Ilia plays like he’s emotionally reaching out to his partner postcoitally. Of course, doing so breaks his brain — and gives him the tools to move on and get a life. As we’ll see later. And it is Kirk who comforts him after the trauma.

Spock mind melds with V’ger. It’s clear how as he usually has to touch another person to do so. The effect is cool, but the use of miniature photography is pretty clear.

There is an alternate version of this sequence that sees Kirk join Spock on this journey. The two of them encounter a little bit of action inside V’ger, with some alien things attacking Kirk, and Spock fending them off. That version is in the Marvel Comics adaptation, and photos of the filmed sequence are easy to track down online.

William Shatner as Admiral Kirk floats past the memory wall in a sequence cut from “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

There also is the extended version shown on ABC and released on VHS that show unfinished shots of Kirk standing in the doorway and jetting out to follow Spock. They are truly unfinished, meaning you can see the set scaffolding at the side of the screen because the matte painting effect wasn’t finished. Showing these on TV with the pan-and-scan 4:3 aspect ratio made it only slightly less obvious.

Though unfinished, this shot was used in the extended version of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” despite the rest of the ship not being finished. The 4:3 ratio of old TVs and some good old-fashioned pan-and-scan helped cover it up.

But the finished version is much, much better, even if Kirk is left out of Spock’s adventure and can only ferry him inside to see McCoy when it’s all done. 

I think this moment excited fans who wanted a Kirk/Spock relationship. But despite the key revelations, this scene falls flat.

Having finally become a man, Spock sees the meaningless of his life so far and laughs at the joke that it is! This is very significant for the character and the story. Kirk and McCoy don’t look like they buy it. And they’re trying hard to make it work, but the script here is weak and the direction can’t save it. The grasped hand, knowing nods, Kirk’s flat summation of all this as “incredible” — it’s flabby, undefined and just plain weird.

Back on the bridge, it should be clear for even the densest of viewers with Spock’s reveal of a “radio” signal that we’re seeing a re-hash of the TV episode “The Changeling.” The let-down is palpable, even as V’ger threatens to kill everyone on Earth.

Spock has the logic to see through V’ger’s emotional needs and outbursts to guide Kirk to the right solution in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

So thank god for Kirk! When you have an omnipotent, logic-driven, god-like mechanism threatening you, he’s the guy you want on your side. He invented this defense, and quickly sets about — with help from the newly enlightened Spock — shutting down V’ger’s logic with a contradictory emotional argument. This bargaining also plays into the poker element that was part of Trek from the start (“The Corbomite Maneuver”) and continued to play a major role in The Next Generation.

I wonder if anyone working on the movie thought it was weird that V’ger’s yonic orifice gets all electric as soon as it gets “angry.” And as soon as Kirk complies, it opens up for him.

We’re now 105 minutes into the movie.

A key moment that closes Spock’s arc was cut from the theatrical version of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

It’s somewhere around here that a key scene was deleted. It shows Spock shedding a tear for V’ger, claiming that as Spock was before he came aboard the ship after failing to achieve Kohlinar, so now is V’ger. This is a pretty important scene to cut! This gives closure to Spock’s arc for the movie and helps establish the mental framework of V’ger that leads to its decision to merge with Decker. Everyone involved admits this omission was a mistake, and every subsequent version of the movie

I always hated the matte painting of the ship as they exit for the final walk to V’ger. The proportions are wrong. They fixed this in the Director’s Cut.

The proportions are all wrong in this matte painting effect.

The reveal of V’ger is pretty impressive. By all accounts, this was an impressive set but also a dangerous one because it was elevated off the stage floor to accommodate all the light effects and more than one crew member took a tumble.

The final V’ger set was an impressive elevated structure.

The use of the Voyager 6 probe was pretty smart — it connected Star Trek to then-current space projects, such as the early Voyager and Pioneer probes that captured such amazing photos of Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. Star Trek always relied on having just enough real-world scientific plausibility to be convincing and this really establishes the movie as a work of science fiction as opposed to the space fantasy or space opera of Star Wars.

And it could have been really almost profound in that 2001 way — if only it hadn’t been done before multiple times in the original series of Star Trek.

Admiral Kirk reveals the true identity of V’ger as Voyager 6 in the climactic moment of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

On thing that couldn’t have been done on the original series was to have the human and god-like alien consummate their love in a cosmic merger. The patterning of Ilia shows itself to have had a greater impact on V’ger than might be evident on a first viewing. V’ger-Ilia now has enough emotion in it to get all doe-eyed and whiny about needing to lose its virginity to its god.

V’ger-via-Ilia is hot for Decker.

That’s a damn weird idea to think about, and this movie deserves credit for at the very least squeezing it in at the last minute. It’s a shame it’s not more rewarding, as neither Ilia nor Decker have developed personalities that make the audience care for them as much as they do for the classic crew members or even the Enterprise itself.

Decker connects the wires that will trigger his merger with V’ger. I wish there had been more time in the script to develop this motivation and give it some depth.

While it kind of makes sense for V’ger, I have no idea what’s going through Decker’s mind beyond the prospect of being somehow re-united with Ilia inside V’ger. But to do that, he’s giving up being a starship captain, and even his humanity. I’d think Starfleet captains would be a little more dedicated to their missions to fall prey to a trope that’s essentially “going native.”

Decker begins to merge with V’ger amid a sparkly, um, cloud of white, um, light.

Despite all the story problems, the movie does a fine job selling the merger of Decker and Ilia thanks to some good practical effects and visual effects. The light and wind blowing on Collins on set works extremely well with the glitter effect added later. And Ilia’s little swagger as she walks over to join him finally gives viewers an idea of why she’s so unforgettable to Decker.

This whole idea of Decker joining with Ilia/V’ger is a bit hokey, but this effect was well done with practical lighting on set and effective use of then-current VFX.

Even better, the glitter effect spreads rapidly and effectively. It’s one of the cooler moments in the movie, watching it spread from V’ger as Kirk, Spock and McCoy haul ass back to the ship, and then it dissipates in a massive cloud of light that reveals — with a great flourish from Goldsmith’s score — the Enterprise triumphant.

More nice effects as V’ger vanishes in a nice bit of sturm-und-drang.

And just like that, we’re ready for our denouement. This scene could have been taken straight from one of the episodes, which gives viewers a sense of hope that future adventures would be a bit more fun.

So what happens after Decker and Ilia/V’ger consummate their relationship? They have a baby; this one is called “more Trek.”

And to complete the weird double entendre undertones of the movie, the climax has produced what Dr. McCoy calls a “baby.” Spock, having now found peace for himself, is happy to stick with the ship as it heads off on more adventures.

I think the USS Enterprise jumped its cue here, because the music continues for quite a while at the very end of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

So we end with another loving shot of the Enterprise being caressed by Goldsmith’s rousing score before it warps off into expected sequel land, indicated by the final card before the credits.

The final card of the movie, and a fitting prediction for the eventual heights “Star Trek” would reach in the 1980s and 1990s.

As most fans know, the critics were not terribly kind to the movie. Neither were many fans.

The movie opened Dec. 7, 1979, with a solid $11 million opening-weekend gross. It went on to a domestic gross of $82 million, which is pretty impressive. Other reports put the worldwide gross at $139 million.

The old rule of thumb was that a movie had to make two-and-a-half to three times the production budget to earn a profit. What the exact budget was on the movie ranges from about $35 million to $45 million. By that metric ($45 million times three is $135 million), Star Trek: The Motion Picture defied its troubled production and poor critical reception to become profitable solely via box office receipts. So profits from licensing and merchandising for everything from action figures, toys, novels and comic books to soundtrack albums, costumes and McDonald’s Happy Meals is gravy on top.

And that doesn’t include the revenues from the then-nascent home video market. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a hit on videodisc, video cassette, pay TV services like HBO, and — as mentioned in a previous post — garnered a big broadcast deal with ABC that saw the extended version air as a three-hour Sunday Night Movie event.

To bring this all back around to comics, I’ll next take a look at Marvel’s adaptation of the movie and the short-lived monthly comic book series thast followed. Stay tuned!

Has it Really Been 40.5 Years Since ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ Came Out? Part 3

So let’s go through the theatrical cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Right from the start, everything is much more serious than it was in the original series. In case you don’t know why there’s a long blank screen while “Ilia’s Theme:” plays, it’s because this was one of the final movies Hollywood released with an overture. These were common on prestigious pictures especially in the 1950s and ’60s, though the practice had largely faded out by the early 1980s. I remember the 1980s well, and the previews — once accurately known as trailers for appearing after the credits of a feature — ran before the movie. These days, there’s about 20 minutes of rules and previews before most movies, so I doubt anyone would have the patience for an overture.

 

The credits also are serious, appearing as white text on a black background as the theme music plays — over and done with, lickety split. This movie has two possessive credits: A Gene Roddenberry Production and A Robert Wise Film. I’m not a fan of possessive credits because they suggest that one person (or in this case, two) made the film, which is (almost) never true. But it does reflect the behind-the-scenes jockeying for position detailed in the previous post. 

tmpcard

Of all the parallels with Star Wars, the opening is the most obvious as the camera imitates the massive Star Destroyer zooming overhead with a loving pans and pivot around a  trio of powerful Klingon warships on their way to intercept V’ger. 

The Klingon design here is much more extreme than we’d seen in the original series, or would see later in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The ridges on the Klingons’ skulls are huge and they have fangs.

Mark Lenard, who played a Romulan commander in the original series and Spock’s father, Sarek, in the original series, features and TNG, is unrecognizable as the Klingon commander. It is nice, though, that they gave the role to a fan-favorite instead of an unknown actor.

And the Klingon theme and development of a gutteral Klingon language all have stood the test of time.

The new Klingons are nothing to V’ger, who at this point is so amorphous a presence that it’s not easy to always know exactly what’s going on here. As with most sequences in this movie, the opening is overly long. There’s lots of procedural shots showing how the Klingons order the firing of photon torpedoes, etc. And the Starfleet response on the Epsilon 9 station is a scene that similarly takes an indirect route to achieving its purpose in the story, which is revealing the threatening object is headed for Earth. 

What’s disappointing is the Klingons appear here and are done with. I think some good action elements could have been brought into the movie if the Klingons returned later in the movie to conflict or cooperate with Starfleet in solving the V’ger mystery.

Mark Lenard, left, as the Klingon commander in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." Mark Lenard, left, as the Klingon commander in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

The visual effects here are elaborate but definitely shaky. Adopting the techniques ILM used to great effect in Star Wars, the models are detailed and the motion is smooth and to scale.

The compositing is the tricky bit and it shows the limitations of the era’s techniques. There’s lots of lighting mismatches and an obvious patchwork look to many of the effects. All of this was very hard to do, by the way, working with film and pre-digital optical printers. Even ILM struggled to get it right, as you can see from the transparent matte effects in the original version of The Empire Strikes Back

David Gautreaux as Epsilon 9’s Commander Branch.

Epsilon 9 offers a first look at the new Starfleet, which is sleek and posh and unimaginably dull at the same time. The new uniforms can’t help but look like pajamas, with their muted pastel tones and leisurely cuts. I’ve read Gene Roddenberry always thought we’d evolve to unisex clothing and that the sexy bodies underneath the clothes would shine through no matter what. Obviously, not an accurate prediction — ever, I’d say — but it does save on costume designs, if not fitting and fabrication.

Behind-the-scenes photo of Leonard Nimoy as Spock on the Vulcan set.

Next, we cut to Vulcan, which looks terrible. Our first image is a glimpse of Spock as a Vulcan monk with long, ragged hair looking up at the hot sun amid. It’s supposed to look like a rocky plain with steam from lava rising up, but it comes across like Spock’s looking for dropped quarters and empty bottles in the parking lot of a cheap Hollywood liquor store. The matte painting is awful. The supposed giant statue looks like the work of a small child and the moving planets are scientifically inaccurate and just plain dumb. 

Shot of Vulcan that’s mostly a matte painting.

To be fair, this was not how this sequence was meant to look and this was one of the big casualties of the visual effects production difficulties. But to spend that much money on this movie and this is the result is … unfortunate, as Spock would say.  

Storywise, we find out Spock’s been trying to achieve pure logic, a state the Vulcans call Kolinahr. He’s about to graduate, when the siren call of V’ger spoils it and the priestess declares he’s failed. Further mucking up this scene is the dubbing of Vulcan language over actors who are obviously speaking their lines in English. The lip synch is bad and the trick obvious, cheesy and, well, unfortunate.

Kirk’s shuttle zips past the Golden Gate Bridge to Starfleet Headquarters.

We then cut to Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. I think this is the first official reveal of its location, as Kirk travels past the Golden Gate Bridge in an air shuttle on his way to reclaim command of the Enterprise. Again, the matte painting of the interior is weak and obvious. You can see the borders of the matte painting and the figures in the distance are not moving.

Shatner looks good as Kirk — he’s in shape, had his hair done (or at least Shatner could afford a new toupée), has a spiffy white admiral’s uniform, and brings some energy to a short exchange with a hapless Vulcan named Sonak.

Interior of Starfleet Headquarters. Most of this is an unfortunately very-obvious matte painting.

By the time we get to the next bit of dialog, the movie’s pacing problems are already becoming clear as the next setting, an orbiting Starfleet station, is over-established with multiple long, slow shots of its operations and more of Goldsmith’s lush score to tell us how majestic it all is.

Kirk beams up to an orbiting office platform where Scotty tells him the transporters aren’t working, so he has to drive Kirk over to the drydock where the Enterprise is preparing to launch. Slowing down the movie even more is some clunky exposition explaining the unlikely circumstance of the Enterprise being the only ship Starfleet has around its home planet to send out to intercept this mysterious object that’s threatening its home world.

The refitted USS Enterprise is revealed in drydock.

The reveal of the Enterprise is a sequence I happen to adore, despite going on and on and on some more, while advancing the story exactly not at all. Most of it has to do with Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing musical score, which gives all the loving shots of the upgraded, ready-for-action, all-new Enterprise its 2001-inspired gravitas. The cuts back to Kirk and Scotty “watching” all this as a grip moves what looks like a garden lattice in front of the lighting is pretty bad, as are the optical effects placing them in the pod. But the shots of the Enterprise are gorgeous, lush and detailed. This is the USS Enterprise that the fans always wanted to see, and even though everyone deep down knows this sequence is masturbatory, it’s still quite, ahem, satisfying. 

Now, things start to pick up a bit. Kirk returns to the bridge and is welcomed back by Uhura, Sulu and Chekov, who are still right where we last saw them. I do like that some of the new crew are loyal to Decker and wary of Kirk. Had this become a series, that would have been an interesting conflict to resolve.

There’s a couple odd things I always notice in this scene, which is much longer in the extended edition: One is the practical effect that looks like they hung a pair of legs from the ceiling with a disc attached to the feet to make it look like they were using some kind of levitation technology to change the lightbulbs.

The second is the blurring effect from Wise’s use of a split-diopter lens. That’s a lens that splits the frame into more than one depth of field — in this case, a character like Kirk is in focus in the foreground and the background immediately behind him is blurry, while the other half of the frame has a character further back on the bridge in focus. I find it distracting and puzzling since it’s so obvious. 

A split diopter lens was used in this shot to create different depths of field.

Now we get at our first look at one of the longest-running sets in Trek history: the engine room. This was revamped and reused all throughout The Next Generation and well into other series and Next Gen sequels, complete with the silly little elevator between levels. 

And we meet Captain Willard Decker. It’s not overtly mentioned in the movie, but I always thought Decker was the son of Commodore Decker, who went mad and rammed the USS Constellation down the throat of the alien menace in the original series episode “The Doomsday Machine.” Playing Decker is Stephen Collins, who was a rising actor at the time who’d appeared in numerous TV guest starring roles. After Trek, he starred in a series called Tales of the Gold Monkey, which was a short-lived attempt to cash in on the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, was married to “V” star Faye Grant, and then starred as a preacher in the long-running series 7th Heaven opposite Catherine Hicks of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home fame, before accusations of sexual impropriety with underage girls effectively ended his acting career (and marriage). But that’s neither here nor there at this point.

Stephen Collins as Commander Willard Decker.

Decker personifies Kirk’s fears that he’s too old, too out of date, too washed up to live up to his glory days as a Starfleet captain. (I’m sure this reflects Roddenberry’s own insecurities after being unable to replicate the success of Star Trek.)

It stands in sharp contrast with the admiration Will Riker shows Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I think Riker is a much more likeable character than Decker would have turned out to be, but we’ll never really know.

A pair of Starfleet officer die a horrible death without having to watch the rest of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

The transporter accident is easily one of the most messed up and scary sequences in any version of Star Trek. I don’t know what made that screeching noise, but it’s damn creepy with the images of the figures distorting in the transporter beam. Kirk’s not too convincing in telling Janice Rand that it’s not her fault. And I really kind of want to know what the pile of flesh that returned to Starfleet headquarters looks like.

Another interesting note on this scene comes from the novelization of the movie, written by Roddenberry (much more on that later), in which he reveals Kirk’s romantic relationship with Vice Admiral Lori Ciani, who was the other person killed in the transporter accident. 

Fans populate the extras in this recap scene from “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

At this point, we’re a half hour into the movie, so what’s a better idea than a plot recap on a huge, expensive and mostly unnecessary set? That’s exactly what we get as Kirk assembles the crew on the two-level recreation deck. The crowd here is full of fans who had helped keep alive interest in Star Trek over the previous decade. Among them: uber-fan and author Bjo Trimble and “The Trouble With Tribbles” scripter David Gerrold. It’s a straightforward update, then advances things a bit with Uhura taking a call from Epsilon 9 in which we learn the object is 82 AUs in diameter. AU stands for Astronomical Unit and is the distance from the Sun to the Earth, about 93 million miles. So 82 AUs is about 7.6 billion miles, making it at least as large as our solar system as measured by the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. There also is a nice, slightly scary moment in this scene in which a spacewalking astronaut is floating toward the camera as Epsilon 9 is digitized in the background. The figure moves abruptly as the shockwave hits, in a way reminiscent of how Stanley Kubrick moved his spacewalkers in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stephen Collins as Cmdr. Willard Decker welcomes Persis Khambatta as Lt. Ilia aboard the bridge of the USS Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

But before the Enterprise can launch, we still have a few more characters to introduce. First, there’s Lt. Ilia, played by the beautiful and exotic but (appropriately) stiff Persis Khambatta. I thought (and still do) that her shaved head is a great look. I think it would have been really fun to see that character on a weekly series, but it was not to be.

Roddenberry had put a lot of thought (probably too much) into the super sexed up Deltans, almost none of which makes it to the screen. I wonder if every TV show on Delta would be classified by humans as pornography? They were supposed to exude super pheromones that made all the human men around her crazy excited. I think it’s funny that the most obvious portrayal of this on screen comes from Sulu, as George Takei was not yet out as a gay man when the movie was made. Khambatta looks exotic but her performance is very reserved and almost robotic, so the sensuality she was supposed to exude doesn’t play at all in the movie. Her declared oath of celibacy comes across more like she’s some kind of a nun in a convent. Again, if this had gone to series, I’m sure the character and her impact on the men around her would have been more fully explored. 

DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy accepts Captain Kirk’s request for his help in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

And, finally, McCoy comes along to give the whole shebang a few lively moments and remind everyone why they liked this stuff in the first place. First, he looks like he’s been having a great time with that beard, weird medallion and leisure suit. And, as always, McCoy gets the best lines, ranting against Kirk for being “reactivated” to Starfleet duty. DeForest Kelley was, by all accounts, a very gentle and kind man, but as a performer he was at his best when he was griping and complaining as he does here, with gems like: “And they probably redesigned the whole sick bay, too! I know engineers, they love to change things!”

With everyone introduced, the movie now — finally! — has to get going with its plot. We’re 35 minutes into the movie, by the way. And we get more fanfare and procedural jargon as Kirk orders the headlights turned on and Sulu obliges. It takes a long time to get this ship actually moving and out the door. The movie should be taking off, but it’s done so slowly, with Kirk staring at screens and even checking the rear view window — perhaps to see if the plot was following the ship — that it moves like sludge.

A time-distorting wormhole sneaks up on Kirk faster than the plot in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

The movie can no longer delay having something happen, but it looks like the filmmakers had yet to figure out the plot, so the wormhole sequence is dropped in like filler. Even more amazing, the big threat from the wormhole is that it slows down time. In a movie that’s struggling to find a heartbeat, it’s hilariously apt, even at the same time it looks pretty cool. The weird jiggling motion everyone does, but especially on Ilia, reminds me of the sequence in Airplane! with the line, “She’s starting to shake! She’s starting to shimmy! … ” Some of this approach to danger appears to come from Gerrold’s criticisms in his book The World of Star Trek, where he argues for scientific accuracy and the drama of a countdown as opposed to explosions rocking the actors out of their chairs.

Kirk takes criticism from McCoy and Decker in stride.

Livingston earns some of his paycheck here by tying all this into Kirk’s rather limited character arc for the movie. He pushes the crew to warp speed before they’re ready — we know this because McCoy literally tells him so — and then Decker has to come to the rescue because only he knows the new ship well enough to get them out of it.

This is rehashed in a decent sequence in Kirk’s quarters as Decker speaks his mind and McCoy backs him up. It’s well shot, well directed and well acted. The biggest difference between Decker and Riker is that the former is more confident — he’s already made the rank of captain and being demoted frees him up to criticize Kirk in ways that Riker never would have dared with his admiration for Picard. Kirk doesn’t come off well in this — he’s pretty clearly obsessed with regaining control of the Enterprise and Bones is correct in that it blinds Kirk to more important priorities. This idea came up more than once in the original series, but usually in a way that was flattering to Kirk and his devotion to the mission. Here, it’s a defect and a bit of a downer.

The orange-colored corridor on Deck 5 for the scene in which Ilia and Decker talk always has and always will remind me of an episode of “The Love Boat” I saw as a kid in which Captain Stubing was trying to get a specific, obscurely named color of paint for the Lido Deck. This scene would not have been out of place on that show. (And wouldn’t Roddenberry have loved to “cast” Charo on Trek.)

Thankfully, the wormhole incident has slowed down the plot enough for Spock to catch up with the Enterprise 45 minutes into the movie. The feature-level makeup for Nimoy is excellent, and Spock looks better and more alien than ever in his return to the bridge. There’s a weirdly corny bit here with the crew’s reaction to seeing Spock: Uhura gasps, Sulu says “Why, it’s Mister …” and Shatner completes it with “Spock!” And then repeats “Spock!” like he can’t think of any other words. 

Leonard Nimoy sports an updated and much improved look for Mr. Spock.

Spock, of course, is a superstar. And everyone defers to his magnificence, including Decker. With Spock in charge, they get the warp drive working well. I always liked the warp effect in this movie, with the rainbow refractions and swirling stars. It was altered for the later movies, but this one is the sharpest. 

Spock, Kirk and McCoy catch up in the fancy new officer’s lounge aboard the USS Enterprise.

The scene in the officer’s lounge is a good one, with Spock explaining himself to Kirk and McCoy. It works because there are obvious conflicts at play here, but it’s not until the end that the script goes completely on the nose. But the dialog is good and it’s well acted. Remember that, because it’ll be a while before you see it again.

And here’s where Roddenberry’s novelization weighs in with some real weirdness. After solving the warp drive issues, Spock heads off to meditate in the section of the Enterprise where crew members go for quickies.

Spock made his way to the extreme forward area of the engineering hull. It was here that a labyrinth of forcefield generators and spider-webbed hull supports provided a maze of odd-shaped cubicles which some architect-psychologist had designed into comfortable and private alcoves, each with its individual view of the stars. This was in some ways the most pleasant area of the starship, being as it was a casual design afterthought and without the purposeful efficiency of the rest of the vessel. It was popular as a place for the many pleasures which a crew member might find in solitude or in new friendships. 

As he entered, Spock’s ears caught the sounds of humans at love, which told him that privacy was still respected in this area of the ship. He moved quickly on, wishing his hearing was not so acute at times like this — it was the beginning of coupling he had heard and it distracted him. Odd this human need to continually rub this and that part of their bodies together, particularly since humans conducted it while fully rational, sometimes even intermixing it with conversation, which was certainly far from any definition of passion by Vulcan standards.

— Pages 125-126, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture — A Novel” by Gene Roddenberry, Pocket Books, first printing, December 1979.

Imagine trying to get that past the NBC censors.

The USS Enterprises cruises over the surface of the alien V’ger.

Fifty-five minutes into this movie and the Enterprise has finally intercepted V’ger. For some reason, it reminds me of the scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, where you start to think that, thanks to Soviet technology of the time, Kelvin is going to drive to the alien planet and you’re going to watch it in real time. But at least we’re finally here. Commence the plot! 

The Kirk-Decker exchange is good — Kirk is changing. Spock’s connection with V’ger is deeper and more telepathic than previously shown. The second probe attack has some weird timing issues and apparently a missing sound effect that makes the probe’s lack of impact anticlimactic. I’m sure Roddenberry came up with Kirk’s weird self-adjusting chair, which looks like it’s designed to cover up unwanted erections more than anything else. 


George Takei tries to figure out what Lt. Sulu is looking at on the bridge.

As the Enterprise penetrates V’ger, it’s just weird to watch Ilia and Sulu staring at the screen with no idea what they’ll be looking at in the finished film. The images are in some cases very good and interesting and in others less so. The first view of V’ger is of a very yonic (look it up) structure. The images of the ship itself are much better than those in the cloud. But the movie is still yawning along at a terribly slow pace. We are now 72 minutes in as we see the mushroom and complete the first flyover of the V’ger ship.

V’ger’s probe attacks Spock while Ilia realizes she’s about to be written out of the movie.

I’ve always wondered about this strange effect during the scene where the probe is on the bridge. There’s a distortion around the vertical column of light that makes it look like the background behind it has been stitched together imperfectly from two separate images. I like Chekov’s line: “Absolutely I will not interfere!” And I think the images on the bridge monitor screen as V’ger scans the computer are from the Star Trek blueprints set you could buy in the 1970s. There is a bit cut from the sequence in which one of the security guards gets zapped. And it really is unclear why the probe chooses Ilia to digitize and store instead of, say, Spock, who smashed the computer to stop V’ger’s scan. Maybe the probe is a male and was attracted to her pheromones. Decker shows his potential as a series character with that final line: “This is how I define unwarranted!”

But before we can even miss Ilia, V’ger’s anus puckers up and sucks in the Enterprise. The biological look of all this stuff can’t be unintentional, but did it have to be so strangely graphic?

Chief DiFalco, who takes over the now-toasted Ilia’s navigation duties, is played by Marcy Lafferty, Shatner’s wife at the time. Spock’s line foreshadows the Borg: “Any show of resistance would be futile.” (The Borg and V’ger would likely get along like Deltans at a school meet and greet.)

And then Ilia’s back — in the shower, of course. They call it a sonic shower, but she’s clearly wet, so it’s not clear what the difference is. And how does that bathrobe appear? 

Ilia steps out of the sonic shower wet and fully dressed. What?

It’s 84 minutes in and Ilia mentions V’ger’s name — the first time we hear it — and its desire to join with the creator. Pixar movies can evoke an entire range of human emotions in that time frame. And, once again, as Ilia is examined and it’s revealed every function of her body is duplicated in exhaustive detail, it becomes clear that this movie’s focus on exploring the unknown includes as primary concerns: What is this alien life form, and can we fuck it? And there’s no clearer acknowledgement of time’s passing and Kirk’s “maturing” in this movie than the machine’s preference for Decker.

Next: The rest of the movie, and the answers to the questions everyone is asking!

TMP Poster

Has it really been 40.5 years since ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ came out? Part 1

Bob Peak’s distinctive artwork for the release poster for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Note: This is a post I meant to write about six or seven months ago, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Stuff happened, but I still have a lot to say on this topic. So here’s a belated tribute to the movie’s anniversary, told in three parts.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of the most divisive entries in the decades-long canon of Star Trek.

Much like the return of Star Wars twenty years later, Star Trek: The Motion Picture faced high expectations from a fan base that had patiently waited a decade for a continuation of the beloved series. Weighed down by behind-the-scenes production problems that have become legendary in their own right, the movie upon release was heavily criticized for its languid pacing, meandering direction and lack of action. Coming just two years after Star Wars had sparked a sci-fi and visual-effects boom, the movie was not-unfairly dubbed Star Trek: The Motionless Picture and Spockalypse Now by fans and critics upon its release Dec. 7, 1979.

Despite its many flaws, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was an unlikely hit. It failed to generate toy sales and licensing revenue along the lines of Star Wars, but Trek fans tenaciously indulged in enough repeat viewings to deliver an impressive domestic box-office take of $82 million and a worldwide gross around $175 million. That made it the No. 5 film of the year, ahead of Ridley Scott’s Alien and just behind Apocalypse Now, Rocky II and The Amityville Horror. Kramer vs. Kramer was the year’s top-grosser, with $106 million in domestic ticket sales.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture also ended up being a hit in the then-new secondary market of home video, becoming a top rental on videocassette and the short-lived videodisc format upon its release in 1981. And it was further boosted by its airing as an ABC Sunday Night Movie in 1983, which restored some 12 minutes of footage cut from the theatrical version. The restored scenes had a huge impact on the story, including as it does a scene where Spock comes to terms with his own internal conflicts and sheds a tear for V’ger. The extended edition was released on home video to become the definitive version for fans. And a director’s cut was released on DVD in 2000, with Robert Wise going back in to polish the edit and finish several sequences that fell victim to tight deadlines.

All the fun stuff on this one is in the details, so let’s get into it. Most of the information here I’m pulling from several books, including Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens’ Star Trek: Phase II — The Lost Series, the 1984 edition of David Gerrold’s World of Star Trek, William Shatner’s Star Trek Movie Memories, Gene Roddenberry and Susan Sackett’s The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Herb Solow and Robert Justman’s Inside Star Trek: The Real Story.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture had a long development history. Production on the original Star Trek series was never smooth, from the original 1964 pilot starring Jeffrey Hunter as Capt. Christopher Pike that NBC rejected, to the then-unheard-of second pilot with William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk, through the fight to save the show from cancelation and its eventual demise. Most accounts from people who were there portray an often-chaotic production.

At the center of it was Star Trek creator and executive producer Gene Roddenberry, who himself was a source of much controversy. Roddenberry-approved versions of the show’s history always portray him as a lone creative voice fighting unimaginative network executives. But other points of view from folks like Harlan Ellison, Shatner, producer Bob Justman and exec Herbert Solow are decidedly less flattering toward Roddenberry as both a person and a producer.

Spock Walk
Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, explores V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

After Trek ended its original TV run in 1969, Roddenberry tried to move on to other projects with little success. He wrote and produced the feature Pretty Maids All in a Row, a screwball romantic comedy which starred Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Roddy McDowell and featured Trek veterans Jimmy Doohan and William Campbell. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. And his Trek-like attempts to do more sci-fi concepts on TV struggled to find an audience, with Genesis II, The Questor Tapes and Planet Earth all airing as TV movies but failing to make it to series.

Realizing Trek would likely be his one and only golden egg, Roddenberry moved back to the property in the early 1970s as Star Trek’s syndication success was skyrocketing. He succeeded in getting Trek back on the air as an animated series, but that was (unfairly, I think) dismissed by pretty much everyone as kids’ stuff, with the real goal being a live-action reunion of the original cast on the small screen or the big screen.

Entire books have been written about the back-and-forth between Roddenberry and Paramount on the issue of reviving Star Trek. Those plans were constantly in flux, taking the shape at various times of a low-budget feature series similar to Planet of the Apes, a series of 90-minute TV movies, a weekly hourlong TV series and, again, as a feature film of some kind. What eventually clicked was a return to the TV series format as Star Trek: Phase II, which would premiere in 1978 as the flagship show of Paramount’s planned fourth television network.

Most Trek fans know what follows: Roddenberry reworked the series, taking on suggestions most notably from the detailed and loving critique offered by “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode writer David Gerrold in his 1972 book (revised in 1984), The World of Star Trek. Among the changes: Kirk was too valuable as the captain of the Enterprise to go into dangerous situations each week, so an executive officer was created to handle that part of the job in Willard Decker. Decker also had some emotional baggage in his relationship with the ship’s new navigator, Lt. Ilia, who was from a planet where sexual relations was just how they got along. (This idea was never explained beyond the idea that Deltans just had sex with each other at the drop of a hat and it was normal for them. Being promiscuous is one thing, but the idea that you’d go into, say, a business meeting and do something sexual as a form of greeting is, well, strange and, frankly, sounds more than a little exhausting.) Chekov got promoted to chief security officer and Nurse Chapel, played by Roddenberry’s wife Majel Barrett, was promoted to doctor. When Leonard Nimoy refused to return to the daily makeup routine that Spock called for, Roddenberry created a replacement in Xon, a full-blooded Vulcan science officer who instead of trying to control his emotional side like Spock sought to discover that side of himself as a way to better work with and relate to his crew mates. (If any of this sounds familiar, just change the names of Decker, Ilia and Xon to Riker, Troi and Data, and you’ve got half the crew set for Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

The success of Star Wars lit a fire under Paramount, which invested a lot in developing Star Trek: Phase II. What’s especially interesting is that the show never had a chance. Announced in the summer of 1977, it was clear by early August that Paramount’s fourth network didn’t have the support to ever get off the ground. In the book Star Trek: Phase II — The Lost Series, the Reeves-Stevens write that Paramount’s then chief Michael Eisner decided in a meeting Aug. 3 that the pitch for the pilot “In Thy Image” was feature worthy and in that moment the series was dead. But it was a secret kept in that meeting for four long months, during which time scripts were written that would never be produced and sets half-built while behind-the-scenes machinations progressed on the real project, which was the feature. The great expense was apparently justified by the idea that if Paramount decided a year after the feature to return to TV, they’d have a dozen scripts already in the can and ready to go.

Meanwhile, the production cast Stephen Collins as Decker, Persis Khambatta as Ilia and David Gautreax as Xon. Coming on as director was Robert Wise, a true Hollywood legend who started as an editor on Citizen Kane before directing such classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music and West Side Story. Heck, even Leonard Nimoy agreed to come back, demoting Gautreaux to a cameo as the commander of the Epsilon 9 station in the final movie.

Leonard Nimoy, Robert Wise, Gene Roddenberry, DeForest Kelley and William Shatner on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

It looked at this point like a feature would be smooth sailing, but the production was anything but. The script, first and foremost, needed to be updated to work as a feature. Veteran TV writer Harold Livingston was brought on board and began running afoul of Roddenberry, who constantly interfered in the scripting process by poorly rewriting pages that didn’t need it and setting everything back with substandard work. Livingston quit and was re-hired several times by Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Roddenberry, it seems, was trying to earn a screenplay credit by any means necessary, with his rewrites providing evidence he could submit to the WGA to earn that credit — and the money that came with it. (Roddenberry pulled a similar stunt with original series composer Alexander Courage, writing lyrics to the show’s theme song that were never meant to be used as a way to earn half the writing credit and therefore half the royalties from the tune. Courage never again worked on Star Trek.) Final writing credits went to Foster for story and Livingston for screenplay. You can read one version of the script here.

So production began without a finished script, which is never a good idea. With the movie shot almost exclusively on sound stages, production proceeded largely in story order. That explains why the movie’s plot is so vague for so long, treading water with lengthy re-introductions of the crew members and the USS Enterprise. DeForest Kelley’s Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, as usual, point out the idiocy of this with one of the movie’s best lines: “Why is any object we don’t understand always called a thing?”

At some point, clauses in the contracts of Shatner and Nimoy kicked in to give them story approval, so production slowed down again as everyone tried to figure out an ending to the movie. There were reportedly days where scenes were written in the morning for the cast and crew to shoot later that day.

The ending they did come up with is actually pretty good, though the middle of the movie is a serious slog. The alien object is revealed to be Earth’s primitive Voyager 6 probe, given the ability by an advanced race of alien machines to complete it mission of gathering all data possible and returning it to its creator. Along the way, it amassed so much data it became sentient. But it lacks the emotional side it needs to move to the next level. So V’ger seeks to merge with its creator, which it does with Decker, and moves into the next realms.

Enterprise o'er V'Ger
The USS Enterprise hovers over the surface of V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Having finished principal photography, Star Trek: The Motion Picture moved into its next disastrous phase: creating the visual effects. Again, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had pushed visual effects to a new level and shown their storytelling potential. And in the wake of Luke Skywalker’s rush down the Death Star trench, there was no way effects like those used on the original Star Trek series or on more recent efforts like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Space: 1999 were going to cut it. But George Lucas and his team at ILM, which created those effects and innovated those techniques, were working on The Empire Strikes Back. That meant Star Trek: The Motion Picture had to go elsewhere to find work that lived up to that level — a very tall order.

By all accounts, the original effects team, Robert Abel & Associates, spent somewhere north of a million dollars and had produced almost no usable footage. Adding to the pressure, Paramount pre-sold the movie to exhibitors, who had forked over significant advances for the right to screen the finished movie on Dec. 7, 1979. That money had helped Paramount finance the movie, but it also meant the release date couldn’t budge. It was a mad scramble to finish the movie and several important shots and major sequences got lost in the shuffle.

Wise also was battling the studio over the final cut of the film, with the studio pushing a version that featured more of the expensive VFX it was paying for while Wise was trying to balance the story. The mad race to finish the movie left Wise without a chance to test screen the movie with an audience, which he said for years afterward would have helped improve the balance of VFX spectacle and story.

In a scene cut from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, William Shatner’s Kirk is attacked by unknown particles while exploring V’ger in a space suit.

Standing out as a triumph amid this scramble is the iconic score composed by Jerry Goldsmith. Reportedly, Goldsmith’s original score was found lacking by Roddenberry, Wise and the Paramount brass. They wanted a triumphant theme along the lines of John Williams’ score for — you guessed it — Star Wars. Goldsmith came up with a theme on the spot that satisfied everyone and went on to become an iconic part of Trek’s musical history, returning in subsequent features and as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Finishing the film truly came down to the wire. Final effects sequences were cut by hand into each individual print of the movie on a Paramount soundstage occupied by hundreds of film canisters waiting to be shipped out. Wise himself carried the print shown at the Washington, D.C., premiere with him on his flight out of Los Angeles.

Fan reaction could be summed up as disappointed but grateful for the movie’s existence. The box office results were not in Star Wars territory, but they did reveal an audience existed for Star Trek. And the movie turned a profit despite the studio calculating a then-record production budget of $44 million that — fair or not — included all the development costs of Star Trek: Phase II and likely all the way back to the early 1970s.

That success opened the door for more Star Trek, albeit versions that were much less extravagant.

Next: Is the movie any good? And why?

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