Rewatched TMP last night

Yeah, why paint yourself into that corner in the first place if only to use more and more magical technology to get out. Something silly like the Enterprise jetisoning its main power source to escape the event horizon of a black hole on impulse power only but then lacking sufficient power to escape the much lower gravity of Earth without warp engines and then engaging them at the last minute to avoid crashing into Earth but without any kind of thrust or backwash. It makes you feel like they took the science out of science fiction.

I much prefer the TMP style. Write the story within the confines of the technology. Make that technology dangerous. That said, even TMP is a bit vague on how the Enterprise was supposed to keep up with V'Ger. Clearly the cloud dropped out of warp but it would have been more sensible if that was due to some piece of ingenuity on the part of Kirk and crew.

 

Sorry, I missed Ensign Perez, spoken to by name (by Dr. McCoy) in a scene with mechanical Ilia. But he could have been anyone.

Having a large crew is a tremendous advantage of a TV series featuring the Enterprise, as TNG showed. But not the movies. The need to get rid of the non-bridge crew was borne out by the success of the TWoK reset - first a small trainee crew, then (in TSfS) none at all.

 

You also forgot Chief DiFalco, Billy van Xandt (bridge alien), and Momo Yoshima (med tech) too :-). With Decker and Ilia, you have 11 characters, so it isn't surprising that they didn't go much wider. I would have liked to see Janice get one more scene, and maybe see an Andorian or Zaranite feature more prominently. I'm a proponent of having second and third tier characters so that the audience cares when they die.

 

I don't think the cloud dropped out of warp until it reached Earth ("Starfleet reports forward velocity has slowed to sub-warp speed. We are three minutes from Earth orbit."). I think everyone just assumes the ship is fast enough to keep pace, that's all. In fact, albeit not portrayed visually in the film, Kirk's reference to a "conic section flight path" means they spiraled in towards the cloud, and ended up creeping up on V'ger from behind (one presumes so as not to race headlong at it and appear hostile).

 

TMP got me into Star Trek. I was six when TOS premiered and remember the Salt Vampire giving me nightmares. After that, my mom (a huge fan) would kick me out of the room anytime she thought an ep looked like it was going to be scary (99% of them by her 1966-69 standards). I do remember being allowed to watch "Journey To Babel" first run and enjoying it a ton. Same with "Tribbles." Other than that, it was off limits.

As a result, I had built up a resentment for the series. However, I did eat up Dr. Who on PBS when they had the good grace to run it on and off and used to watch it with my grandfather after school. I was working part time at a JC Penney in 1979 when I was doing my undergraduate studies. All of the coworkers my age were buzzing about the new Star Trek film and how cool it looked (I was a huge fan of Star Wars when the first film was released in 1977 and had become a bit more open minded). I thought I might as well give this whole Star Trek thing another chance.

I went with my burn out friend nicknamed Zorro who was high when we saw it and thought it was the greatest thing he'd ever seen. So did I, sober! I loved the epic sweep of the film, the effects, the cinematography, the amazing music by Jerry Goldsmith, the uniforms, the plot, the performances, Spock's laughter in sick bay, EVERYTHING. Remember, I'd not seen "The Changeling," which the plot of TMP was somewhat lifted from, it was all new to me. I also enjoyed the HUMOR, which most people seem to think didn't exist.

That hooked me: I was a Trekker from that point on, devouring everything Trek I could get my hands on. Fortunately, TOS series reruns were a weekly thing, so I could catch up and LOVED the series! Also fortunately, there were a bunch of new novels being written continuing where TMP left off. It was a great time to be a Trekker! I've loved each new series (with the exception of the idiotic finale of Voyager, which kind of ruined the series for me).

So, in my long-winded way, TMP will always hold a special place in my heart, as it was my entry into ST fandom, which has gotten my entire family through a lot of hard times. My mom's reaction: "What took you so long?" I'm sure she is happy to have finally met Mr. Nimoy in heaven this year!

 

I remember seeing TMP as a 10 year old at the theater. I always loved the original series reruns. So seeing Star Trek on the big screen for the first time was amazing to me. I remembered reeling over the first few minutes of the film with the Klingon battle cruisers. I did not dig the pajama style uniforms though. ( I much prefer the more militaristic uniforms of the Wrath of Khan onward. )

I remember later when the motion picture came out on VHS I would always run down to the local library because they had it in their media center. Every Saturday, assuming no one else had logged out Media Center time at that time I would go in and watch the movie. I did this for weeks.

to this day Star Trek The Motion Picture remains my most heavily watched Star Trek film, although it's not quite my favorite. my favorite original series film is Star Trek 6 the undiscovered country.

Star Trek the motion picture also is a good means for me to go to sleep. not that it is a boring film because it is far from that, but because it is a serene film.

please pardon my lack of punctuation and capitalization in the last few sentences. I've been using voice to text...quite advantageous when one is pent up in the hospital.

 

TMP is more like a movie of an earlier era, when people went to see ambitious, big-budget, epic movies for scale and spectacle. Wise had done big "road show" pictures in the '60s, when people bought reserved seats and a big overture played before the show, and that heritage shows in TMP. How it fit into a "franchise" was not really a consideration, nor was the still-emerging Hollywood blockbuster formula that we would come to take for granted in the '80s. In the context of its time, I think it holds up pretty well. Does it have problems? Sure, but so did Cleopatra and Dr. Zhivago, and people flocked to see them, too.

 

^ Imagine if TMP was another hour longer and had a ten-minute orchestral intermission in the middle.

As far as the comments on the amount of crewmembers... no doubt, if you want all systems to be running at peak efficiency for a real mission, then you want to have a full crew compliment.

It's a different matter with illegally stealing the ship and jury-rigging it so that "a chimpanzee and two trainees could run her", to make a clandestine run to a quarantined planet with a single objective.

Kor

 

To be fair it wasn't Roddenberry spending like a drunken gambler, it was the studio....the film started as a pilot for a tv series, and then a tv movie, and eventually a feature film once Close Encounters did decent money. Sets were built, and rebuilt, and models made each time. Then they tried basically setting up an effects house, which then didn't finish anything, and because they had presold the movie, including TV rights, for large sums, an would lose large sums in litigation if they didn't get it done in time, they had to keep throwing money at it to get it done in time.

It's like a 6 year project that went down to the line, with it being basically a finished draft at the premier. Not even a final one. So it cost a lot, but not really because of gene.

Star Trek V has almost the same problem, but inverse with the money (the studio kept cutting budget)
If it's one thing those films should have taught the studio, it's to be more flexible with release dates and pay attention to things like strikes. Your audience will understand those delays more than a rush job movie. (I know....how does a 6 year cycle constitute rush job? 500 effects shots in six months. That and more false starts than the Olympics.)

The later films are not done one the cheap because these studio didn't make money on the first either....they just wanted to maximise profit rather than have artisan work like the first. Hire cheaper crew and composers, recycle effects and models, and even rewrite the concepts to draw in a perceived wider demographic. The only TOS film to have an ambition beyond this was STV....which ultimately got battered by two strikes and large budget cuts when shooting began. One can't help but feel Shatner didn't make the right friends at the studio.

The films that my friends and I felt were the best as children, really, in retrospect, weren't. Khan took the world building back by almost a century, and TUC took the character development and social science fiction back by almost the same amount, for the sake of clumsy polemic.

But TMP? Genuine motion picture, genuinely doing something new and progressive.

 

See, it could have been worse!

The reason I thought of Cleopatra was because it supposedly had the most costume changes of one character ever. TMP was not up to that level, of course, but the costumes made for the movie that were never or only barely seen is pretty amazing. And, whatever you might think of their looks, the uniforms were made with the best-quality material and craftsmanship and were quite expensive.

 

One of my favorite catch-phrases is relevant here:

Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan.

Blame is a really easy thing to shift around. If people want to blame Gene for the problems with TMP, they'll find ammunition to do it. And considering his demotion to upstairs, that would be the simplistic way of looking at it. But there's plenty of other blame to go around as well. There were also strategic battles Gene fought and won during the development-hell that helped save the franchise from going down a path that would have probably killed it dead in its tracks (like jettisoning the original cast).

 

Gene's touch with TMP was a nice one. ..but if he'd had his way, and every following movie would've turned out like TMP, the franchise would likely have died after the second film.

 

The only uniforms that I don't like are the, um, pajama ones that the background extras wear on the bridge, and those weird brown bulky things from the V'Ger walk. Kirk's white uniform actually looks like a futuristic naval admiral. They were well-made, and it shows.

The engineering unis look strange at first, but look again and see that they're made for emergency decompression and likely other hazards that the poor repair monkeys have to deal with.

 

Yeah, Kirk's "admiral" uniform was the coolest looking. .. and I felt the same way in that it made him look like a Starfleet admiral.

I loved how they kept that similar, but not exacting style for Adm. Pike in the JJ movies.

 

^^ya that was neat seeing that in the JJ movie.

I like TMP. Always have.

In the last decade I have a tradition of watching it every year in the summer time.

I do remember as a youngster being annoyed with Decker.

So at the end when he's all "I WANT THIS..." I was like, hell ya, go! take it! please go!

 

Yep, and for the most part the production was careful to only have the blue, inboard engine illumination visible when the warp drive was activated*. Therefore, for the entire journey through the cloud, the warp drive is on until Kirk orders the drives disengaged when seized by the tractor beam. Of course, this also means the pass over V'ger at 500m is occuring at Warp 7, which is perhaps why Sulu seemed a bit alarmed at the idea.

* = there is a scene prior to Spocks arrival where they're blue, which I believe is a cost saving reuse of the same optical pass we see later with a warp drive star effect background.

I'm actually Ok with the fit of the TMP uniforms, the idea was they were tight to avoid accidentally snagging a switch - which is why Kirk's admiral uniform featured a pin insignia, but all of the shipboard uniforms had patches. A different design philosphy than TWOK+ when the uniforms became festooned with ornamentation.

 

Ah yes, the "Decker Unit".

I've grown to appreciate the movie over the years, as I feel that it has aged quite well. The Undiscovered Country used to be my second favorite behind TWOK, but I feel that it has aged horribly, and the whole thing just feels a bit disjointed.

 

What is the "universal meaning" of TMP?

Don't send deep space probes to the Borg planet? Or, it's okay to merge with alien AIs as long as it's a heterosexual relationship?

 

The deflector color is also a tipoff. It's blue only at warp, and gold at sublight (and the engine glow is purple, not blue).

There are some boo-boos with this. When the Enterprise is being pulled inside the maw the dish as amber, but then it's blue again in a later shot (here) before being amber again. I don't recall the engines being lit in non-warp prior to Spock's arrival. Or do you mean in the shot just before they try warp drive the second time (if so, I always took that as "powered up and ready for try #2")?

 

Another thing I wish they had held onto in later films and the TNG era. I guess it was more technically difficult to do.