Ahhh, we started from the bottom now we're here.
Hello friends! We made it to my very first film review on this blog of mine! If you're reading for the first time, welcome to my ongoing reviews that I'm writing up after rewatching the entirety of the Star Trek franchise. While this is the first film in question, this is actually the fifth installment of that series. (You can check out my original series reviews for the first, second, and third seasons here, while my review of The Animated Series is right here.) You can also check out any live, running commentary on my viewings (and pretty much anything else I'm doing) over on my Bluesky account.
Right away, I can't tell y'all how excited I am to get to this point. While the original series was enjoyable at times, I honestly struggled to get through The Animated Series, in case my review didn't express that enough. By the time that wrapped up, I eagerly launched into the original cast's six theatrical films. And holy movie budget, Batman! Not only is everybody back (including Janice Rand, girl, where you been?!!!1), but they're looking better than ever with that $15 million budget that Paramount gave them. Full disclosure: I did view the “Director's Cut” of the film, which I'm told polished up and added better special effects, but even without any digital altering, you can definitely tell we're dealing with Hollywood now, fam! Each close-up shot of the cast looks phenomenal, the new sets are much bigger and modern, and even the Enterprise got an upgrade, explained in-universe as having undergone a major refit. And she looks gorgeous! Whoever redesigned the ship, to quote my younger counterparts, left no crumbs.
The story here is also remarkable, both on screen and off. The fictional element at play here sees the crew of the Enterprise, responding to a growing threat to Earth. A massive energy cloud is moving through space and has already laid waste to three Klingon ships and a Federation science station without so much as pausing on its course. After Spock's attempts to communicate with the entity via mind meld and the new navigator, Ilia, being killed by the cloud and replaced by a robot with which to communicate with the crew, our band of heroes learns that the threat calls itself V'ger, and it is essentially a living machine who is trying to learn more about the people on board. The crew ultimately discovers that at the center of the entire V'ger complex is actually Voyager 6, a probe that NASA had launched hundreds of years prior, and was believed to have been swallowed by a black hole. The juicy, meaty part of all of this is that V'ger was found on the other side by an alien species of living machines. (Sound familiar???)2 They repaired V'ger, and sent it back on its mission to collect information and then return to its creator. Now it is having trouble communicating, due to V'ger's belief that the “carbon units” aboard the Enterprise and on Earth are an infestation. Ultimately, the film's red shirt3 Decker volunteers to “merge” with V'ger and the Ilia robotic envoy (or whatever?) as its human creator (I guess??), thereby creating a new life form that disappears into space. Like, it was pretty sparkly:
While the story and its resolution left me a little puzzled, it turns out that at points during production, the sources were confused on how to wrap up the plot as well. At one point, Walter Koenig (who plays Chekov) said the crew had started filming without the script even having had an established third act. The issues deciding upon a satisfactory conclusion to the film may have been due to the script being an adaptation of a story outline Gene Roddenberry had developed titled “In Thy Image,” which was to serve as the pilot episode of a proposed follow-up TV series. That series, which was being called Star Trek: Phase II, never did wind up going into production and was cancelled during development in favor of doing this movie instead. Some stories and concepts were eventually realized in later series as well, especially The Next Generation.
Truthfully, I think that the V'ger storyline is pretty fascinating. The idea of something we, as human beings, created and launched returning to us centuries later as something vastly different, otherworldly, and potentially dangerous is kind of a cool and almost scary concept. I also think that the film is, admittedly, a technical marvel of its era, especially given the franchise's origins as an extremely cheesy television series. I have to admit, however, that compared to many of the later films, The Motion Picture moves very slowly and trades in a lot of the action for dialogue and exposition. They probably could have trimmed the runtime quite a bit. However, I do again concede that I watched the Director's Cut, and not the original release, so there may have been quite a bit of footage that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. I also didn't really feel like they gave us much of a chance to connect or relate to the characters of Decker and Ilia, so by the climax of the film in which we see them together one last time, it does feel a little flat. And I have lingering questions, like why was V'ger happy to settle for just any human as its “creator?” Because outside of Ilia's conversion into a robotic dupe, neither she nor Decker had any pre-existing connection to V'ger. Can someone make it make sense??
My very last gripe (I promise!) is the uniforms. While I didn't exactly love the Federation uniforms in the original/animated series, they were replaced here by very drab and almost colorless neutral colored wardrobes. Those whose sensibilities are offended by “millennial gray” have much more to deal with here. But I have to admit... I'd rather deal with these than the upcoming Monster Maroons!4 Yikes!
Next up in the queue is my upcoming review for the second film, The Wrath of Khan! This is where my resident expert Trekkie nephew tells me the original series cast shines the most, so I'm pretty stoked to start assembling my thoughts. I think The Wrath of Khan may also be the most widely-known film of the original crew as well, so I'm excited to see how many of you will yell, “KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!” in the comments of that one. If you're interested in all of that, be sure to subscribe to this blog for free and/or follow me on Bluesky. You can also check my personal website, jiggyflyjoe.com, for all sorts of other nerdiness!
See ya soon, nerds! 🖖
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