Since When Is The Motion Picture A Good Trek Film?
- Thread starter Similitude
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Well, someone - one Larry Kusik - wrote lyrics to "A Star Beyond Time", aka "Ilia's Theme". Several versions have been released over the years, including one sung by Shaun Cassidy.
I don't know if Goldsmith was cranky about that or not.
Using an iphone doesn't mean you understand how it works.
TOS encountered loads of aliens. Close Encounters Of The Third kind (released a bit before TMP) had us encounter aliens. Robert Wise's Day The Earth Stood Still (1950s) dealt with aliens visiting Earth. Meeting aliens had been shown on TV, in films, discussed in books etc. etc. TMP was hardly ground breaking in that repect.
I doubt that NASA seriously expected aliens to find The Pioneer and Voyager probes. Although they are the fastest moving things made by humanity and are leaving the solar system it will take thousands of years for them to pass near a star. Space is extremely vast and empty and the probes are tiny. A meeting is very unlikely.
Actually, it is much more likely that aliens will spot our radio emissions - e.g. they might detect broadcasts of Hitler, as suggested in Contact (which you mention).
Infact Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise (or at least images of them) are now about 43 light years away from Earth and could be detected by aliens (assuming the signal degredation is not too bad). The problem is, could the aliens work out how to decode the TV signal?
I'm arguing that the premise of TMP is unbelievable, not that it is unrealistic or that "messages" from humans being detected by aliens isn't an interesting idea.
The most unbelievable bit is:
Aliens find the probe (which has no inteligence, no consciousness and no "spirit" to find "kindred") and decide to glue it onto the back of an extremely powerful artificially intelligent space ship and send it back "home" to look for its creator.*
Surely the "creator" of V'Ger is the alien race, not us.
There are a number of implausabilities in the story but this is the worst, as it is the central element on which the story is built.
I'm not so sure about that - TMP was released in 1979. The 1970's started with the end of the Apollo program - 10 moon landing missions were cut back to 7 due to people (i.e. voter) disinterest and dislike of the expense.
Manned space exploration didn't seem to have a bright future, then.
At the moment, things are looking a little more positive - the US might go back to the moon (if Obama's review doesn't stop that), the Chinease have started manned space flight and there is interest in commercial passenger space flight.
There is little hard SF at the cinema (hard SF means as scientificaly acurate as possible). A hard SF film almost certainly could not have Spock in it (Spock has a father with copper based blood and yet is genetically compatible with an iron based blood mother?) and a fragile space probe like Voyager could not go through a black hole and emerge intact.
The SF films we get these days are not hard SF at all.
The audience is used to seeing Aliens appear - e.g. the Star Wars series is overflowing with them. What audiences are used to is SF as a branch of fantasy.
Spock and V'Ger asking "Is this all that there is? Is there nothing more?" was more a spiritual question. V'Ger had found out everything knowable about the universe and discovered that that was not enough for it. Knowledge was not enough.
Trek has never stood up to rigourous scientific analysis - that isn't what it wants to be. TMP can be enjoyed (I have watched it many times), but it isn't the intellectual tour-de-force it wants to be.
* After writing this, it occured to me that maybe the aliens did it as a joke. Perhaps TMP could have ended with a shot showing them watching the bridge of the Enterprise and laughing at Kirk, Spock and McCoy.....
It's subjective opinion, not objective hard facts to prove or disprove. There is an interesting idea there for those who are open to it, but I understand why people either aren't, have issues with or dislike it. You consider it unbelievable, that's fine, more power to you.
Based on Spock's (and other characters') suppositions:
1) "Aliens find the probe" is correct, though the word "alien" has some undesirable connotations.
2) It *is*, or *was, "kindred" to the machine race because it is, or was, a fellow machine and a wanderer through the vast dark of the cosmos.
3) It is not "glued" onto the back of anything, much less a spacecraft. It is enshrined and ensconced at the centre of a vast assemblage or machine temple.
4) It is not clear whether the original configuration was "artificially intelligent" or not, but that might be a reasonable assumption. In any case, Kirk says that V'Ger amassed so much knowledge that it "attained consciousness itself" (notice the subtle play on words). The direct implication is that V'Ger's self-awareness was an emergent property of its journey through space and time.
5) It is not sent "home". The Voyager space probe is amalgamated with technology to enable it to fulfil its mission on a grander scale. Only when it attains consciousness does it choose this course of action for itself.
* * *
All of the preceding points, in ascending order, elaborate on TMP's core themes, geometrically so. Notice that there is a deliberate act with an increasingly significant unintended outcome. For example, in 1), human beings willfully design and build a series of space probes and send them into space for the original purpose of studying the solar system , but one of these probes is eventually recovered by another intelligence in another part of the universe (somewhat anticipated with the Voyager and Pioneer plaques, but they were more of a romantic embellishment -- e.g. it's very likely that we'll be the ones to recover the probes hundreds or thousands of years from now, given that their velocities are pathetically low and they will take on the order of tens of thousands of years to travel just one light year). By the final point, V'Ger's choice to return to Earth (if return is even the right word given that the Voyager probe came directly from Earth but V'Ger did not) is a profoundly significant one for not only V'Ger and Earth, but TMP itself, since it is the consequences of that decision which frame the narrative; quite simply, V'Ger paradoxically makes the movie, and, ipso facto, its own fictional existence.
In my estimation, TMP is deep.
So, I've read the first two pages and the last page. I thought I'd answer the original question from my own point of view.
I'm 38 now, and the first time I saw TMP was when it first aired on TV. After that, our family bought the tape and I did in fact watch it again.
And still found it long and kind of boring.
When I grew up, I rewatched it (again on VHS) and found I liked it more, especially since by then I had seen a lot more Star Trek than when I watched TMP the first couple of times.
Now, TMP is on my list of top ten favorite movies of all time, near 2001, Woodstock, and MASH. I bought the Directors Edition on DVD and have loved it ever since.
Since when is it a good Trek film?
ST was always mainly about 20th century man in space, and its stories focused on characters, not epic space battles or ultimate Good vs Evil stories. In TMP, the audience once again--finally--got to see their favorite characters and starship on the big screen after all those years.
Was it a flawed film? Yes. I will not argue that it was very long, somewhat tedious, and its main plot, Big Cloud That Will Destroy Earth, was a bit much, especially since the movie had no true B Plot, save for the subplot involving Spock and his exploration of purging of his emotions. Plus, the Enterprise has cool new photon torpedos that are only fired once. They never even try out the phasers.
However, TMP was true to Trek by its exploration of the unknown, and its focus on how the characters (Kirk, Decker, Spock, etc) deal with an mysterious, possibly alien, entity. At the same time, we are given an all new Enterprise, new hardware, new uniforms, and even new character dynamics with Decker and Ilia now on board.
The movie is beautifully shot and the pacing has been cleaned up with the Directors Edition. Add to that, the special effects, sans Directors Edition, were amazing. I have to admit, I'm blown away every time I watch TMP when I study the visuals and realize that they were all done either mechanically and/or optically.
And then when you get right down to it, you'll realize that without the success of TMP, there never would have been a Wrath of Khan, or anything else.
I'm 38 now, and the first time I saw TMP was when it first aired on TV. After that, our family bought the tape and I did in fact watch it again.
And still found it long and kind of boring.
When I grew up, I rewatched it (again on VHS) and found I liked it more, especially since by then I had seen a lot more Star Trek than when I watched TMP the first couple of times.
Now, TMP is on my list of top ten favorite movies of all time, near 2001, Woodstock, and MASH. I bought the Directors Edition on DVD and have loved it ever since.
Since when is it a good Trek film?
ST was always mainly about 20th century man in space, and its stories focused on characters, not epic space battles or ultimate Good vs Evil stories. In TMP, the audience once again--finally--got to see their favorite characters and starship on the big screen after all those years.
Was it a flawed film? Yes. I will not argue that it was very long, somewhat tedious, and its main plot, Big Cloud That Will Destroy Earth, was a bit much, especially since the movie had no true B Plot, save for the subplot involving Spock and his exploration of purging of his emotions. Plus, the Enterprise has cool new photon torpedos that are only fired once. They never even try out the phasers.
However, TMP was true to Trek by its exploration of the unknown, and its focus on how the characters (Kirk, Decker, Spock, etc) deal with an mysterious, possibly alien, entity. At the same time, we are given an all new Enterprise, new hardware, new uniforms, and even new character dynamics with Decker and Ilia now on board.
The movie is beautifully shot and the pacing has been cleaned up with the Directors Edition. Add to that, the special effects, sans Directors Edition, were amazing. I have to admit, I'm blown away every time I watch TMP when I study the visuals and realize that they were all done either mechanically and/or optically.
And then when you get right down to it, you'll realize that without the success of TMP, there never would have been a Wrath of Khan, or anything else.
Well stated, Newski. From the second viewing in the cinema to this day, I find the 90 minute (or so it seems) trek through V'Ger to be my main cure for insomnia. I am reminded of Denis Leary's reply to Stallone in Demolition Man... it always makes me think of TMP!
(Paraphrasing) "His idea of the future is a bunch of virgins sitting around in 'pajamas', drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing I'm an Oscar Meyer wiener."Every time I get a visual of TMP.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
That's something I don't think gets addressed often enough in discussion of the film. If it didn't make a choice to come back, it would have just built a fancier transmitter for itself and kept firing data back toward Sol. It still makes for a lot of filling in on the part of the audience, but it does legitimize this thing as an antagonist with a point of view, while at the same time it fits with the 'vger is a child' line, since every time it shakes its rattle at something in its way, somebody gets digitized and patterned.
Perhaps if they'd gone with other drafts that had them discovering it was an old NASA probe earlier in the film, they could have explored a bit of the Frankenstein's monster-and-its-creator aspect. But I guess that is for another film (or remake.)
Oh, come now. Easy to say that in 2009, but remember that TMP came out in 1979, two scant years after Voyager I and II were launched. At the time, they were the pinnacle of technology and human achievement, given their roles. To compare them to a washing machine... is... well...
As a film student and film maker, I have a lot of respect for TMP. It's really trying to do all the right things. It gets our favorites back together, it gives us redesigns and a threat worthy of a major motion picture and it tries hard for adventure. Technically speaking, Mr. Wise composed some beautiful shots and he did so with consistency.
On paper, it's a hell of a movie.
But other than little nuggets here and there ("The Enterprise", Kirk getting McCoy back, the reaction when Spock comes back, the opening sequences with V'Ger taking out the Klingons and the Federation outpost...), the whole things just doesn't quite work.
My guess is that it's trying really hard to be 2001. And there's nothing wrong with that particular brand of science fiction. I enjoy it myself. I respect it. TMP tried to fuse adventure with that style, but unfortunately that style isn't really suited to adventure - at least, not the kind of "adventure" that TOS felt like to me.
TOS was brainy, it was relevant, it required you to interact with the issues it was taking on - but at the end of the day there were gonna be hot girls and Kirk was going to kick somebody's ass. Probably. TMP, to me, is half a Trek in that way. It feels sterile.
Say what you will about the new movie - and I think it weighs maybe a little too far into the western side of the adventure and glosses over the science and the morals - but it at least felt like it was some kind of real fusion of the TOS kind of fightin', rip-roaring adventure and issue-driven sci-fi. It's not perfect, but it's closer to the heart of TOS than TMP is.
I think that's why TWOK is so beloved. It isn't a perfect fusion either, but it feels like its restoring a necessary kind of adventure to the brainy factor of TMP.
All that said, this is coming from someone who, yes, loves Trek09, but generally THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY is my favorite. Movie level stakes, the characters are grappling with moral issues and they've clearly grown and changed, there's emotional depth and a big ol' fight in space and, briefly, on the ground. I can't ask for much more than that.
That's just my opinion, though.
On paper, it's a hell of a movie.
But other than little nuggets here and there ("The Enterprise", Kirk getting McCoy back, the reaction when Spock comes back, the opening sequences with V'Ger taking out the Klingons and the Federation outpost...), the whole things just doesn't quite work.
My guess is that it's trying really hard to be 2001. And there's nothing wrong with that particular brand of science fiction. I enjoy it myself. I respect it. TMP tried to fuse adventure with that style, but unfortunately that style isn't really suited to adventure - at least, not the kind of "adventure" that TOS felt like to me.
TOS was brainy, it was relevant, it required you to interact with the issues it was taking on - but at the end of the day there were gonna be hot girls and Kirk was going to kick somebody's ass. Probably. TMP, to me, is half a Trek in that way. It feels sterile.
Say what you will about the new movie - and I think it weighs maybe a little too far into the western side of the adventure and glosses over the science and the morals - but it at least felt like it was some kind of real fusion of the TOS kind of fightin', rip-roaring adventure and issue-driven sci-fi. It's not perfect, but it's closer to the heart of TOS than TMP is.
I think that's why TWOK is so beloved. It isn't a perfect fusion either, but it feels like its restoring a necessary kind of adventure to the brainy factor of TMP.
All that said, this is coming from someone who, yes, loves Trek09, but generally THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY is my favorite. Movie level stakes, the characters are grappling with moral issues and they've clearly grown and changed, there's emotional depth and a big ol' fight in space and, briefly, on the ground. I can't ask for much more than that.
That's just my opinion, though.
A truly dull movie punctuated with vapid "philosophizing" about...nothing much, really. It was pretty at times, though.
You misunderstand me. I'm not trying to criticise the Voyager missions. The Voyager probes were wonderful pieces of technology and achieved superb results.
However, they weren't any more intelligent than a washing machine. They would be programmed in terms of "at such-and-such a time, turn on an instrument and record the readings - at some time later time, point the main antenna in such-and-such a direction and transmit the recorded data".
They were primitive in comparison to the alien machines that found it.
I think you are correct that humanities penchant for chucking hardware out of the solar system may one day have consequences such as you describe - although, as I said in that post it is more likely that ETs will spot our radio emissions.
TMP is, we are told thought provoking, so let's think about it and consider your points:
I intended no undesirable connotations, possibly some people may find "alien" a nasty term to apply to ETs, however it is in common usage.
Do you consider an amoeba kindred to yourself? Or a fruit-fly? A rat? A chimpanzee?
Voyager 6 was a machine, just as the things I mention are biological life-forms. To slightly modify a question I asked in an earlier post, if an extra-terrestial amoeba landed on Earth, would you find it kindred and enshrine and ensconce it in a vast assemblage of organic material and send that out into space?
I don't recall anyone in the film suggesting that that's what it is, though that is an interesting suggestion. Possibly more in line with Alan Dean Foster's original treatment.
So, why do the ETs do that?
I believe that there were no artificially intelligent space probes in the 20th centuary and I don't think we could make one now.
Kirk does indeed state that "V'Ger amassed so much knowledge that it "attained consciousness itself"".
Do you believe him? Does knowledge cause conciousness? Does that mean that someone who has read and committed to memory an encyclopedia is more concious than someone who hasn't?
OK. Why do the ETs amalgate it with technology?
Perhaps there's some overthinking going on here.
Voyager is found by this planet of living machines. They are machines, they are aliens, they don't think like us. They study Voyager and figure out its programming is to collect data and send that data back home. Being machines, they see an instruction set, and, being super-advanced as they are, say, "let's help this little tyke do its job." They build this monsterous thing (perhaps rudamentary to them) capable of accomplishing the mission in spades, and send V'ger on its way, satisfied with a job well done. For all we know, to them, building V'ger might've been the equivalent to handing a dollar to a homeless person.
Voyager is found by this planet of living machines. They are machines, they are aliens, they don't think like us. They study Voyager and figure out its programming is to collect data and send that data back home. Being machines, they see an instruction set, and, being super-advanced as they are, say, "let's help this little tyke do its job." They build this monsterous thing (perhaps rudamentary to them) capable of accomplishing the mission in spades, and send V'ger on its way, satisfied with a job well done. For all we know, to them, building V'ger might've been the equivalent to handing a dollar to a homeless person.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
There is an idea that the amount of memory and complexity in a computer can get to a critical level, beyond which you attain self-aware status. That is something that has kicked around since Heinlein's MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. The Reeves-Stevens have mentioned it in MEMORY PRIME, so it has even come up in TREKstuff. As to how legit it is ... well, it makes a lot more sense than the usual 'lighting strikes the machine and wakes it up' scenario.
^^ Based on some of the stuff I've read recently it could be very legit. I refer you to Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near.
Kurzweil has been working in the field of developing AI for perhaps forty years. He makes an interesting point that whenever as aspect of AI is successful it's quickly accepted as so commonplace that it isn't even recognized as AI. Yet today we are surrounding with AI in everything from simple calculators to advanced computers and car engine management and widely throughout industry and society as a whole. It's really prevalent in computer gaming where the gaming adapts to a player's increasing skill. It often isn't recognized as such because it's narrow AI tailored for a specific function whereas people generally think of AI mostly in terms of human equivalent intelligence and awareness. But Kurzweil argues that is very likely coming and much sooner than many people think.
Kurzweil has been working in the field of developing AI for perhaps forty years. He makes an interesting point that whenever as aspect of AI is successful it's quickly accepted as so commonplace that it isn't even recognized as AI. Yet today we are surrounding with AI in everything from simple calculators to advanced computers and car engine management and widely throughout industry and society as a whole. It's really prevalent in computer gaming where the gaming adapts to a player's increasing skill. It often isn't recognized as such because it's narrow AI tailored for a specific function whereas people generally think of AI mostly in terms of human equivalent intelligence and awareness. But Kurzweil argues that is very likely coming and much sooner than many people think.
Warped9, do we have anything that can pass the Turing Test?
They must have been extremely advanced. If the 2 (or 82) AU diameter cloud that V'Ger generated is just a toy for them, why hadn't the UFP seen evidence of them before?
Voyager wasn't a living machine. It had no intelligence - why would they feel anything for it?
(We'll ignore the "how did Voyager get through a black hole without being destroyed?" question).
They must have been extremely advanced. If the 2 (or 82) AU diameter cloud that V'Ger generated is just a toy for them, why hadn't the UFP seen evidence of them before?
Voyager wasn't a living machine. It had no intelligence - why would they feel anything for it?
(We'll ignore the "how did Voyager get through a black hole without being destroyed?" question).
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Even by TNG (mid/late 24th century), only 15% of the galaxy has been mapped. It's not unreasonable (within the Star Trek universe) that these advanced machines exist at the far side of our galaxy or even several galaxies away. If I recall correctly, Spock mentions that entire galaxies have been recorded by V'Ger, so a distance galaxy makes sense. There are probably millions of civilizations in the universe that the Federation had/has yet to find.
No doubt many of these civilizations are far more advanced than humanity can even imagine. Q (from TNG) has unlimited powers (a god in essence). Generating a 2AU or 82AU cloud is probably pretty trivial for Q and many other advanced races in the ST universe.
The Voyager probe was not originally a sentient machine, true. A turtle is not sentient either. Does that mean you wouldn't help the poor thing if it were stuck on it's back? Just because something is different from you, doesn't mean you can't show compassion toward it.
Wormholes (at least in the ST universe) have been shown not to be destructive. Again within the confines of the Star Trek universe, it's not unreasonable for the Voyager probe to fall into a wormhole (caused by some subspace irregularity or something) and emerge at the far side of the galaxy or even in another far off galaxy. A civilization of sentient machines then finds the wayward probe. Perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of kindness, perhaps even out of boredom they decided to enhance the simplistic machine. After learning all that there is to know, V'Ger, now a sentient machine, decides to return home to it's creator as it's original programing suggested.
How much of the final V'ger complex did the machines build for Voyager? It's most likely that in the end V'ger exceeded their capabilities just as it far surpassed those of the UFP. To my mind, it's very probable the machines built only the central island on which houses Voyager (a propulsion/power/memory unit) while the rest grew during its travels. Most of that's not "real" anyway, in the sense that it's a Manhattan-sized spacecraft. V'ger's shaped energy fields, not matter.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Just because something is advanced doesn't mean it's going to be poking around our neighborhood.Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That question is exactly what I cautioned against: applying human values and concepts to something alien. They are alien, and machines, and likely don't think as we do and may not feel anything. Spock said they were living machines, not sapient or sentient. For all we know they always follow instructions, no matter how simplistic.
Better still, how did it even get to a black hole at such a low velocity?
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