Why is everyone more robotic than V'Ger in TMP?

True but Kirk saved the Earth.

 

Again, that's the question on the table. Did he really? Spock melded with V'Ger and got key insights. Decker connected with the probe to learn more and made the sacrifice that most directly saved the Earth. Kirk's specific contributions are more nebulous.

 

But Decker would never have gotten that chance if he was the man in charge. He said so himself: "Moving into that Cloud, at this time, is an unwarranted gamble."
Without Kirk's decision, they would have stayed outside the cloud and be as ineffective as all the other vessels that tried to stop it. V'Ger would have gotten (quite fast) to the Earth and killed "every carbon unit infesting its surface". End of story!!

 

He wasn't offering any alternative solution, he just said: "It's an unwarranted gamble" IOW, something he wouldn't have done himself.

 

And then he calmly said "you asked my opinion" and offered no further objection when Kirk went ahead anyway. So we can't assume it was his absolute, immutable position.

Anyway, the question is not about what Decker did or didn't do. It's about what Kirk did. The fact that nobody seems able to answer that question except with handwaves and hypotheticals about Decker just underlines my point that Kirk's own contributions were unclear. If you can't answer a question without changing the subject, then you don't have a solid answer to that question.

Really, would going inside the cloud really have made that much difference? They'd already provoked V'Ger's curiosity with the linguacode message; that was why they were still there instead of reduced to data patterns like the Klingons. So V'Ger might still have sent the probe to take a sample and/or drawn them in with a tractor beam, rendering the whole argument moot.

 

I am not saying that Kirk did the right thing because he was a genius or super gifted. What I am saying is that it was a razor-thin victory. At any time V'Ger could have decided that it had had enough of Kirk's bullshit and vaporized them like they were nothing. So I find it unlikely that the more prudent and even rational Decker would have gone anywhere. Kirk, for example, used bluff, he made V'ger think that he (alone) had the answers to V'Ger's questions but it turned out that bluffing was the only thing at his disposal at the time. They were only seconds away from becoming computer data. A show of weakness, a bout of candor and zap!!! Bullshit won the day.

 

As I've said, looking at the larger context, I think V'Ger would've still sent a probe and tractored the ship in even if Decker had stayed outside the cloud. So I don't think that specific decision necessarily affected the outcome at all, aside from making us sit through 10 or 12 minutes of cloud animation and flyover footage.

I think you're conflating two different scenes. It was Spock's realization of the need to speed up the linguacode contact message that saved them from being digitized by the probe. Kirk's bluff came later, when V'Ger was launching its big weapons into orbit around Earth and Kirk said he'd only divulge the information about the Creator if V'Ger withdrew the weapons -- though V'Ger outmaneuvered him there by demanding the information first.

Still, that does seem to be the moment where Kirk makes the most material contribution. It's his bluff and hard-sell bargaining that convince V'Ger to bring the Enterprise to its central brain complex, which is where they find the final pieces of the puzzle. So this seems like the answer I've been looking for.

 

I don't know. To really do it TOS style, they'd have to have a big group laugh on the bridge at the end, like in "The Galileo Seven" or "The Changeling," even though people died.

 

Interesting! I stand corrected. It seems like a very significant plot point to simply get “lost in the shuffle”. But then again, there was a lot of friction between Roddenberry and Livingston playing “tug-of-war” with script revisions so hardly ideal conditions for maintaining internal continuity and consistency. And there was so much world building that had to be done. For viewers not already familiar with Star Trek, the film had to quickly get across what star fleet and the federation are about (helped greatly by the United Nations inspired federation logo), the characters, the basic technology - transporters, warp drive, communicators, etc., and for viewers familiar with the show, what each of the characters have been up to (at least the ones that in different places than they were in the show). With a story that predominately takes place on the enterprise with no real civilian characters and so much to bring the audience up to speed on, its hard to justify devoting screentime for showing Decker’s personal beliefs about a civilian movement without it being just some exposition awkwardly forced in somewhere.

What I want to know is just how much was the ending in flux during principal photography? Had they already hashed out the broad strokes that Decker would merge with the ilia probe and vejer and were just tying to flesh out some of the dialog? Or were they still trying to concepualize the ending and basically had no idea what was happening after they got to the “voyager 6 probe” set? We’re they trying to figure out if they wanted ilia and or Decker to still be available for a future sequel or series? The pilot would have had vejer simply leave (as the probe in TVH did) - I can see them wanting to get a more fulfilling climax that’s more cinematic and better justifies the danger and loss of life. And without having to build another set.

I really need to get my hands on that book.

 

I still don't get what V'Ger turned into?

 

It's sort of like how the Organians and folks like them evolved beyond physical form to a "higher" level of being. V'Ger had advanced as far as was possible in our physical universe and needed the ability to transcend it and advance to what lay beyond. Your standard sci-fi pseudo-spiritual thing about "ascending" to a godlike level.

 

Something wonderful.

 

2010?

 

yes

 

My big gripe with the Cloud/V'ger encounter has always been:

1. Once Spock determines where the signal is and they reply, no one ever mentions what the signal was or any efforts to decode it
2. After the zippy linguacode message saves their butts there's (shown or implied) no effort made to communicate further
3. Once inside V'ger there's apparently no effort to "peek in the windows" of all those glowing whatevers they are...yes, the scans are reflected back passive sensors and your eyeballs still work fine
4. In short, the crew is passive

The point being that seeing the crew actively trying to deal with the problem in any way they can, even failing miserably at each step, raises the stakes because the situation worsens and their options are dwindling. They can't communicate with the Intruder nor are they learning anything, so their desperate and only chance is the probe.

 

^OMG - You nailed it exactly. I was always bugged about that part of the move -- I had attributed it to it just being so slow and long, your breakdown succinctly puts into words a feeling I couldn't quite articulate. Yeah, why couldn't they just go and look inside that green window that looks like a smiling cat, or check out those weird egg things? (seriously, what were those things? Xenomorph incubators?)


It really is an overtly passive sequence. Decker even calls Spock out on his lack of trying. Which, while consistent with Spock's character arc at that point in the story, really does little to help sell that anyone in the movie is taking the potential threat to Earth very seriously. And if they don't care, why should we as the audience?

Compare this to the Mutara Nebula scene where, in spite of instrumentation failures, you see Kirk and Spock trying to find ways to hone in on the Reliant and anticipate Kahn's moves. Even thought this is also a long sequence, the tension and stakes are always felt.



It is frustrating because I could tell so much effort went into crafting many of the effects for both the cloud and V'ger, with so much care to differentiate the different "regions" of the cloud and the different components of V'ger. Yet nothing or no one in the story have anything to say about them. Even with the lack sensors Spock or other characters could have been commenting or speculating on what they saw. Heck, this is exactly Spock was doing this during his spacewalk, why are they so silent in the cloud? It seems like at the time the bridge scenes were being filmed, no one really knew what these characters would be looking at. I am guessing that by the nature of how it was filmed that it had to be pretty well conceptualized and story boarded before filming, which might have allowed Nimoy's dialog to be tailored to match the visuals better. The cloud and V'ger flyover, I don't know that

By the all is said and done, all we got out of it is.
1) V'ger is pretty damn big
2) V'ger likes to drive around with his own smog cloud.

I think the context of this story is what made these issues more problematic. This was the first new live-action Star Trek in 10 years. It is the first time we would see them on the big screen, with (comparatively) big budget effects and visuals. Our beloved characters were going to encounter this mysterious alien craft that is larger and stranger than any they have encountered before. But they wouldn't go "onboard" this mysterious vessel to explore it inside or even explore any of the curious things they saw on its surface of this immense vessel. No, instead they spend the back half of the film sitting in this thing's rectum. And just when they start to get some answers, woosh, the whole thing is gone. That is a heck of a curveball to throw the audience at the time. Ironically, the film that is arguably the closest to the "explore strange new worlds" mantra of TOS feels like so little exploring was actually done.

 

I recall a lot of movies that did something like this, including Barbarella, 2001, or the Fantastic Journey. It's as if they thought the visual feast would be awesome and inspiring forever more.

I would not say that the journey lacks tension but I completely agree that TWoK was masterful at ramping tension. The tension in the final scenes with Sulu limping away from Reliant was awesome but that did have the advantage of being part of the finale.

They could have stressed the difficulty maintaining pace with the cloud and the difficulties matching speed precisely to merge warp fields. They could have also have added some turbulence inside the cloud, I suppose. Presumably the cloud was made of dust trapped within huge magnetic field within a huge warp field. They'd said it was a 12th power field so maybe the safest way to traverse it was to follow magnetic lines to the centre.

I would have liked to see a couple of shots of crew in other locations looking out of viewing ports, maybe including McCoy and Chapel so it wasn't necessary for McCoy to wander onto the bridge like a yo yo so much.

 

I think the last thing TMP needs is more shots of the cast staring at special effects.

 

Not to be anal but they go into its mouth and tummy, not the back end. That's something that is unclear because their "conic section flight path" is never explained: the ship arcs around the cloud, ends up behind it and overtakes it, so the flyover goes from the ass-end to the maw-end and that's what they get slurped into.