Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Our Review

After ten years of syndication, Paramount brought Star Trek back as the biggest, slowest, most expensive episode of television ever filmed. The Motion Picture is Star Trek with the fun surgically removed: a mysterious cloud is heading for Earth, Admiral Kirk takes back the Enterprise, and the crew spends most of the runtime staring at it on screens. The film wants to be 2001 in a Trek uniform, and Robert Wise directs with ponderous reverence, holding shots so long you can watch the budget accumulate.

And yet. The refit Enterprise reveal, five solid minutes of Kirk and Scotty circling the ship in a shuttle while Jerry Goldsmith’s theme swells, is one of the great starship entrances in cinema. The V’Ger flythrough, dazzling cloud imagery the effects team invented from scratch, remains hypnotic if you meet it on its own terms. The film’s brain is also the franchise’s brain at its best: the climax is resolved not by phasers but by the human capacity to empathize with a lonely machine, a resolution pure Gene Roddenberry. The reunion beats land too, McCoy’s beard, Spock’s half finished kolinarh, the quiet ache of old friends who have all changed.

The pacing is the honest problem. Endless reaction shots, a wormhole sequence that exists only to use the shuttle set, and uniforms that look like medical scrubs. It is a thoughtful, frequently beautiful film that forgot to be an adventure. Six out of ten, respect included.