-via IMDB.com
I don’t think it is very controversial of me to say that I don’t care for the rebooted versions of the Star Trek universe, now called the Kelvin timeline for reasons I am not interested in going into. I think it may be more controversial for me to admit that I like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first cinematic adventure of the original crew, consisting of William Shatner’s Admiral Kirk, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, Deforest Kelly’s McCoy, Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura, George Takei’s Sulu, Walter Koenig’s Chekov and James Doohan as Scotty. The original series was a television series in the 1960s and included three seasons and an animated season in the 1970s with the same actors returning to provide the voices. There was an aborted plan to bring the show back, on tv, called Star Trek: Phase II but it was abandoned and this film became a reality mostly due to the success of Star Wars in 1977, as many studios suddenly decided to get into science fiction/fantasy when that film broke box office records.
-via IMDB.com
Star Trek: The Motion Picture was directed by Robert Wise, director of The Sound of Music, West Side Story and The Day the Earth Stood Still, and tells the story of Kirk and Company taking the newly retro-fitted Enterprise out to meet a giant space-craft/cloud called V-ger. The movie is beautiful to look at, even if there are flaws in it that weakens it: it is slow, there are no real action scenes; the characters are not the characters we remember from the series; it felt very sparse and clinical, true. But I was struck by the story itself of V’ger returning to its creator and wanting to be reunited with the creator and the crew’s attempts to truly understand the differences between this consciousness and their own and vice versa. There were many unanswered questions, I really want to know what this technological planet is that built V-ger’s shell in order to facilitate its return home to Earth. I would love to know what happened to V-ger after Decker and Ilia joined.
This movie, more than the television series, set up a lot of what came after. The Star Trek theme, used in every film and show that came after except the Kelvin timeline movies, was written for this movie by Jerry Goldsmith. IMDB.com says that the Klingon language was born in this film, as was their look. So too was the Vulcan language. Essentially, without this one, the stuff we love about the rest of the franchise would not exist.
It takes patience, I admit, but this one is worth seeing.
-via IMDB.com