Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the most expensive screensaver in cinema history. Paramount gave Robert Wise a budget that dwarfed the entire television series and Wise spent most of it on shots of the Enterprise from every possible angle while Jerry Goldsmith’s magnificent score played underneath. The film treats the ship as the star and the characters as supporting cast, which is the exact inversion of what made Star Trek worth adapting from television to cinema.
My rating: -10. I hated it. The specific failure is the confusion of container with content — the Enterprise is iconic because of what happens aboard her and who commands her, not because of her nacelles. A film that spends ten minutes on the ship’s exterior and five minutes on the relationship between Kirk and Spock has gotten its priorities exactly backward.
The Fly-Around Problem
The sequence where the refit Enterprise is revealed — Scotty ferrying Kirk to the ship via inspection pod while the camera lovingly documents every detail of the redesign — runs for approximately ten minutes. Nothing happens in those ten minutes except photography. No character development. No story progression. No thematic content. The ship is shown from every angle available to the camera while Goldsmith’s theme swells underneath.
This is not a dramatic sequence. It is a product reveal. Paramount spent an enormous amount of money redesigning the Enterprise for the theatrical release and wanted to show it off, and Wise gave them what they wanted. The result is a film that feels, in its best sequences, like an extended advertisement for itself.
The same problem recurs in the approach to V’Ger — the massive alien cloud entity that is the film’s central threat. The characters spend a significant portion of the film’s runtime flying through V’Ger’s interior while the camera documents its architecture. The architecture is impressive. The time spent documenting it rather than telling the story is inappropriate to a two-hour film that has a narrative to get through.
Star Trek TMP confuses the container with the content. The Enterprise is iconic because of what happens aboard her and who commands her. Spending ten minutes on her exterior is spending ten minutes on the wrong subject. In prose, this applies to world and setting description that exists for its own sake rather than in service of character or story. Description earns its length when it tells the reader something about the people in it or the story bearing down on them. Description that exists because the writer loves the world they built — but that doesn’t serve the reader’s experience of the story — is the prose equivalent of those fly-around shots. Cut it.
The Characters We Came For
The original Star Trek television series worked because of specific relationships: Kirk and Spock, Kirk and McCoy, the specific dynamic of a crew that had been through extraordinary things together and trusted each other with a specificity that took three seasons to build. The Motion Picture has access to all of those relationships and uses almost none of them.
Kirk is given a character conflict — he manipulated his way back to command of the Enterprise and isn’t sure he made the right choice — that is mentioned in early scenes and then dropped. Spock arrives from Vulcan having failed to achieve Kolinahr, carrying unresolved questions about his hybrid nature, and these questions are resolved by the film’s climax in a way that happens too quickly to feel earned. McCoy is brought back against his will and is angry about it for two scenes. Then the film moves on to documenting V’Ger’s architecture.
The Wrath of Khan — released three years later with a fraction of TMP’s budget — understood that the series was about specific people facing mortality and the costs of their choices. It gave Kirk, Spock, and McCoy genuine arcs that engaged with who they had become after the events of the series. TMP gave them uniform redesigns and a mission statement.
What Works
Goldsmith’s score is genuine and shouldn’t be understated as an achievement. The Enterprise theme that became the main theme for The Next Generation television series originated here and is one of the great pieces of franchise music in cinema history. The visual concept of V’Ger — a NASA probe transformed into an alien intelligence by contact with a machine civilization — is interesting science fiction and is handled with more thematic care than most of the film’s other elements.
The resolution, where Decker merges with V’Ger and the evolved Ilia probe to create something new, is the film’s most philosophically interesting moment. A human consciousness merging with alien intelligence to create a new form of being is consistent with Star Trek’s core optimism about consciousness and its potential. It arrives too late and too quickly for the film to fully honor it, but the idea is sound.
The Verdict
Star Trek: The Motion Picture earns its -10 as a film that had extraordinary resources, extraordinary talent, and extraordinary source material, and used all three to produce something that treats its most iconic elements as objects of visual worship rather than as the foundation of human drama. Goldsmith’s score is excellent. The V’Ger concept is sound. Everything else is the most expensive screensaver in cinema history.
FAQ
Is the Director’s Cut better?
Marginally. Robert Wise recut the film for DVD release in 2001 — tightening some sequences, removing some of the more egregious fly-around footage, adding some effects shots that hadn’t been completed for the original theatrical release. The Director’s Cut is a better-paced version of the same film. It doesn’t fix the fundamental problem of a story that prioritizes the ship over the people aboard her.
Why did Wrath of Khan succeed where TMP failed?
Different director, different priorities. Nicholas Meyer came to Wrath of Khan without reverence for the property — he’d barely seen the show before being hired — and approached it as a story about aging, mortality, and the costs of past choices. He gave Kirk, Spock, and McCoy actual dramatic arcs and delivered a film that felt like it cost the characters something. TMP treated the characters as icons and the ship as the star. Meyer treated the characters as people and the ship as their home.
The Cast and What They’re Not Given
DeForest Kelley’s McCoy is brought back to the Enterprise against his will, furious about it, and given approximately three scenes in which to be furious before the film moves on to documenting V’Ger’s architecture. Leonard Nimoy’s Spock arrives from Vulcan having failed to achieve Kolinahr — the Vulcan discipline of complete emotional purging — which should be a rich character premise. The failure is mentioned, its significance gestured at, and then set aside in favor of the mission. William Shatner’s Kirk is given a conflict about whether he made the right choice to manipulate his way back to command of the Enterprise, and this conflict is raised in the first act and then functionally abandoned.
Three strong character setups. None of them developed. The film had the material for a genuine examination of who these people had become after the events of the television series and chose instead to show you the ship from every available angle.
The Wrath of Khan — released three years later — corrected all of this. Nicholas Meyer understood the series as a story about people rather than as a franchise requiring visual commemoration. His Kirk faces genuine mortality. His Spock makes a sacrifice with earned weight. His McCoy is present as a full character rather than a cameo. The contrast between the two films is the clearest demonstration of what TMP got wrong.
Star Trek TMP demonstrates what happens when reverence for a property replaces engagement with its characters. The film treats the Enterprise and her crew as sacred objects to be presented rather than as the foundation of a story. Sacred objects don’t generate drama. Characters with problems, relationships under pressure, choices with real costs — these generate drama. Any adaptation that treats its source material as sacred and its characters as icons rather than people will produce the same result: beautiful and inert.
The V’Ger Concept and Its Squandered Potential
The central idea — a Voyager probe returned as a massive alien intelligence, incomprehensible scale achieved through contact with a machine civilization that took the probe’s mission parameters and executed them at civilizational level — is genuine science fiction. The concept is internally coherent, extrapolates from real technology in ways that feel possible, and generates real philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between tool and creator.
V’Ger’s quest — to find its creator, to join with organic intelligence, to evolve beyond machine consciousness — is the film’s most interesting element and the one given the least time relative to the fly-around sequences. Decker’s merger with the evolved Ilia probe to create something new is the film’s most Star Trek moment: the optimistic belief that consciousness can transcend its origins, that the meeting of human and machine might produce something better than either. It arrives in the final minutes and has approximately four minutes of screen time.
A film that spent its runtime on the characters and the V’Ger concept rather than on photographic tributes to the Enterprise redesign would have been a significant Star Trek film. The screenplay had the material. The production chose wrong.
Goldsmith’s Score
Jerry Goldsmith’s score is the film’s one unambiguous achievement. The Enterprise theme — used as the main title theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation throughout its television run — originated here and is one of the great pieces of franchise music in cinema history. The score communicates grandeur, exploration, and the specific emotional register of Star Trek’s optimistic humanism better than anything else in the film.
The score is also doing more than its share of the film’s experiential work. In the fly-around sequences, Goldsmith’s music is the reason those sequences feel significant rather than merely prolonged. Remove the score and the experience of watching the Enterprise filmed from every angle becomes obviously what it is: an advertisement for a redesign. The score generates meaning that the images alone cannot sustain.