STAR TREK: THE (Weirdest) MOTION PICTURE
I moved in with my girlfriend a month ago. We started introducing each other to our favorite TV shows. I picked Star Trek. Eventually, it was time to move onto the movies. And while my girlfriend writes about Shakespeare for grad school, I’m going to write about Star Trek for the Internet.
When I watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first of six feature films with The Original Series’ cast, I question what a movie is supposed to do. I’m supposed to have fun when I watch a movie, right? I should be having a good time. It feels like most Hollywood movies of today worry about the audience getting bored. The Motion Picture never seems to worry you might be bored. Even its redeemable parts can hardly be called fun. By the end, I think it gets to what Star Trek is supposed to be about — it’s all about the journey, going boldly, discovering vast worlds in the cosmos and in ourselves — but does it count as a success if the journey is boring?
I don’t want to overgeneralize. Not every movie has to be fun. You don’t watch a documentary about child soldiers to have a good time (not to suggest TMP is educational). The big question I don’t have an answer to is how responsible the movie is for how bored you’ll be when you watch it. Can a movie be good and boring?
For the record, I don’t think Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a good movie. But it’s not terrible. It’s not even the worst Star Trek movie. It’s bad, but how bad is it?
First of all, TMP is just weird. It is a weird movie where old men in v-necks and people in hideous tan and blue onesies that show way too much bulge save earth from a weird cloud thing (and then learn what the weird cloud thing really is). It was a big deal when it came out because it was the first new Star Trek people got to see in the ten years since the series was cancelled. Star Trek had a similar return when it came back to theatres in 2009, after the last series was cancelled in ’05. It was a flashy return with lens flares, entire planets imploding, and a fast pace that felt new and exciting. So it’s hard to believe that TMP was the movie they made for the hopefully triumphant return of a beloved franchise.
The most obvious criticism of TMP is that it’s so, so slow. Anything that happens in the movie takes forever to happen (and not a lot happens). Going back to 2009’s Star Trek, there’s a scene where the Enterprise doesn’t start. The rest of the fleet jumps into warp and Enterprise hasn’t gone anywhere. While the bridge crew tries to figure out what’s wrong — Sulu forgot to switch off the parking brake or something — Kirk, who Dr. McCoy smuggles onto the ship — remembers something he heard while he was eavesdropping on Uhura. Kirk runs to the bridge, where he’s not supposed to be because he’s in the middle of a disciplinary hearing, to warn everyone, but in the meantime he’s having an allergic reaction to whatever McCoy gave him, and McCoy’s injecting him with futuristic antihistamines. This scene runs for maybe a couple of minutes, and it compresses all of this information into it.
A similar scene where the Enterprise doesn’t work right happens in TMP. Kirk wants to push the Enterprise into warp before Scotty says it’s ready. “Do it anyway,” says Kirk, so Scotty does it anyway. As soon as they hit warp speed, the Enterprise opens up a wormhole that pulls in some space debris. Now they’re trapped and they’re gonna hit the asteroid they sucked in. Whoops. Then everything gets all slow and trippy — because wormhole. A bridge terminal blows up and hurts Chekov’s hand. Kirk wants to shoot the asteroid with phasers. “No!” says the deposed Commander Decker. “Photon Torpedoes!” Everyone’s words come out slow and garbled, but apparently this does not affect the characters’ ability to hear and preform. They arm the torpedoes just fine, and they blow up the asteroid — somehow they weren’t too close to shoot a torpedo at it — and the wormhole closes. This takes much longer than the scene from ’09. There is less information compressed into it — beyond the “look what we can do” slow-mo effect and that it’s Decker who saves the ship, not Kirk, there is hardly anything we need the scene for at all. But it’s about as close to an action scene as we get in this movie.
Certainly, The Motion Picture is a brave movie. It is, for good or bad, its unique self. Star Wars may have been the launch pad that got TMP made, but it never tries to be Star Wars. Perhaps one of the movie’s braver choices is the way it treats its lead character.
When the movie opens, Kirk is a captain no more. He’s an admiral now, and has a flashy executive title he mentions when he meets Scotty in San Francisco. The space cloud has already destroyed some Klingon ships, and now it’s coming straight for Earth. Kirk meets with some other admirals, and they give him back the Enterprise so he can be the hero that stops the thing that’s coming to kill them.
Kirk boards the Enterprise. It is incredible. It is this movie distilled into a single event. Entertainment Weekly’s Darren Franich describes it perfectly: “Kirk looks at the Enterprise for the first time around minute 16 of The Motion Picture, and doesn’t stop until minute 23.” You’ll never see anything like it in a modern movie. Once he’s finally on the ship, Kirk goes through the awkward business of demoting Captain Decker, who, understandably, is not happy. Decker reminds Kirk that the ship is not the Enterprise Kirk knows. They’ve spent over a year refitting the ship, and Decker is just more suited to this mission than Kirk is.
Then the movie constantly proves Decker right. There’s the scene I talked about earlier, where Kirk’s decision to fire phasers at the asteroid would have used power from the engines and destroyed the ship. Another time, Kirk ignores Decker’s cautious suggestion and their navigator dies because of it. That Decker looks a little bit like a younger William Shatner probably doesn’t make Kirk feel any better either. The Motion Picture shows us the hero of Star Trek with flaws and fears. There’s the genesis of a good idea here, one that’s explored much better in the next movie (which has a genesis planet!). This arc doesn’t reach a satisfying conclusion in The Motion Picture. Kirk’s failures at the start of the movie suggest that he has something to prove, but I’m not sure he ever proves it. The Enterprise stops V’Ger and saves the Earth. But does Kirk? Kirk directs the Enterprise into V’Ger, and I guess from there they’re able to get probed by Ilia’s reanimated body; being in V’Ger lets Spock do his more-sexual-than-usual mind meld, and being probed allows Kirk to bluff V’Ger into letting them into its center and discover Voyager. But it’s Decker’s sacrifice, or — as the movie suggests — his rebirth, that saves Earth.
Star Trek movies have a hard time dealing with having an ensemble cast. It’s hard to fault them too much for it — this isn’t an Avengers movie, where you can just give everyone a cool action scene. The Motion Picture doesn’t have any action scenes anyway. So Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov are in the movie to look familiar and smile at Kirk. This is true for McCoy and Scotty too, but they get a little bit more to do. Then Spock shows up and upstages Scotty. What’s Scotty good at? Fixing engines. What can’t Scotty do in this movie? Fix the engines. Spock has to show up out of nowhere and do it.
And what about Spock? What is Spock’s arc in this movie? In the beginning, he’s absent from Starfleet and trying to purge his emotions on Vulcan. But he fails the test because he’s feeling a powerful signal from V’Ger. It’s not explained why these two things affect one another. Maybe the Vulcans could just tell that Spock’s real destiny was out there and not to be found on Vulcan. Maybe Spock fulfils his story when he holds Kirk’s hand and explains that V’Ger can’t understand “this feeling.” What is this feeling, Spock? Is it love? At the end of the movie, he declines to go back to Vulcan. Does that mean he’s found his place back on the Enterprise, and he just had to spend some time away to figure it out? Is this supposed to mirror Kirk’s journey as well, since both of them had to spend time away from the Enterprise and get back to the Enterprise to figure out they belong on the Enterprise? I don’t know if the movie was supposed to answer those questions, and if it is, it does it without spending much time in world of epiphany, but I like to think the answers to them are there. After all, this is a movie about a monster that causes destruction while looking for its purpose, and what is man if not that?
