Made in His Image

As a child, I was fixated on Star Trek. There are scores of home videos of me, around the age of four, where my parents desperately try to engage me over my trance-like state. One video in particular features me at three years old, sitting in the hospital after my sister is born. I don't give a shit about my new sister as long as Patrick Stewart's glistening head is within my field of vision, and I only acknowledge my father once he threatens to turn off the TV if I don't give him some sort of sign of life.

Eventually Star Trek and I grew apart. I have vague memories of watching Deep Space Nine with my mother when I was five or six, but around that time the outlet for my elementary nerddom became Star Wars.

Also around this time I remember my parents renting Star Trek: First Contact, which scared the CHRIST out of me. I spent the majority of that film's running time running into the next room and hiding my eyes on the staircase. I have particularly traumatic memories of Patrick Stewart snapping the Borg Queen's spine over his knee and hanging it up on his mantle.

But that's about it for my knowledge of Star Trek. I remember very, very little from my time as a kindergarten Trekkie outside of Patrick Stewart's sun-reflecting scalp and I don't think any amount of Star Trekking is going to pull me away from my beloved Star Wars.

But I was recently compelled to do a retrospective of the entire series for two reasons. One was that as I gave more and more thought to J.J. Abrams' recent Star Trek reboot, I realized that it was god damn brilliant and it was the most fun I'd had at the theater since The Dark Knight. I fully regret not giving it a 10/10 and must make amends. The other was a large stack of photographs my grandmother gave to my mother recently contained this:



So with that, I dive into a film with a largely negative reputation. Often referred to as "The Motionless Picture" by the dirty Trekkie scum, the serious, deliberate pace was very well-suited to the story.

As for the story, I'll give you a quick rundown. Kirk is doing what he always does, being an impulsive, selfish asshole and letting everyone else clean up the mess, only this time he's doing it as admiral of Starfleet. He essentially strong-arms Starfleet Command into giving him the Enterprise to handle an apocalyptic astro-threat over the far more qualified Captain Decker. What's this astro-threat, you ask? A giant cloud, about as threatening as a bit of morning fog. Perhaps Starfleet was worried about unsafe traveling conditions, but the more likely scenario was that every now and then they tell Kirk to go blow up a cloud or something, just to see if he will, and just to see how many of his crew he manages to get killed in the process (spoiler warning: 2).

According to Starfleet, the cloud is incredibly dangerous, and as the Enterprise gets closer to it, they realize it's also sentient. It would be a shame for me to go any further, but it's an interesting, if not exactly perfectly logical story.

The film came out ten years after the original series had been canceled and my first impression upon finishing the film was that it was Gene Roddenberry's ultimate vision of the Star Trek universe. Free from the pressure to have explosive climaxes, Roddenberry was free to use the film as a conduit to explore more hard sci-fi territory. This is surprising, because I tend to think of any science fiction film to come out between 1978-1983 to be mere cash-ins on the success of Star Wars. Good for Star Trek: The Motion Picture for holding on to its original vision and providing a stark contrast to the more shallow fare filling the theaters at the time (by God, though, shallow doesn't necessarily mean bad; we got Alien out of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, so I never have any intention of speaking negatively about it).

The real star of this film, though, are the visual effects. I've never liked the look of CGI and have always admired filmmakers like Christopher Nolan who avoid using it when an alternative is possible, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture is just further proof that I'm always fucking right. The model work in this film is second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and while the film catches a lot of flak for lingering on these shots too much, I couldn't get enough of them. The design of the ships were positively epic, and you can practically hear the 1979-oids gasping as some of the more ambitious shots come on the screen. The only thing that didn't look magnificent was the animated bits, which are the pieces that CGI can fill in for these days.

As for the acting, this is a film headlined by William Shatner, which is all you need to know about the acting.

Additionally, it IS a slow-moving film tat doesn't always justify its existence with a story that makes complete sense. At times it reeks of a script that was re-written several times during the shoot.

It's a strong film thematically, and I was engaged throughout. I'm not terribly familiar with Roddenberry's original series, but from what I gather this is exactly the sort of thing he was going for. For a film without a single shootout or spaceship blowing another spaceship to hell, it was surprisingly rousing and exciting in the only way that hard sci-fi can be rousing or exciting.

It's not perfect or great, but it is good, and I enjoyed my time with it more than I thought I might.

I gather that this experience may be less punishing than I had originally thought, and I'm looking forward to The Wrath of Khan.

7/10