I didn’t really love Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and every time I go back to it I come away feeling the same thing, which is that it’s a bit boring and far too cerebral for its own good. That’s an odd thing to admit about a Star Trek film when Star Trek is one of my favourite shows, but it’s the honest version. Nothing important really happens in it. The crew gets back together, a giant cloud heads for Earth, they fly into the cloud, and then they sit and stare at the inside of it for what feels like most of an evening, and the whole time the film wants so badly to be serious that it forgets to be any fun. And still, and this is the part I can’t shake, I was happy to see it. Kirk, Spock and McCoy up on a big screen, on a proper cinema-sized Enterprise, was really cool, and that feeling has never gone away even while I’m checking how much of it is left.
It’s hard to separate the film from the moment it arrived in. Star Wars had just shown everyone that space could be loud and fast and thrilling, Close Encounters of the Third Kind had made meeting something from out there feel huge and almost spiritual, and here comes Star Trek, a show that spent its whole run on television with wobbly sets, finally given the chance to go big. What it chose to do with that chance was look at things. Long, slow, reverent looks, as though it had watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and decided that was the bar, when what I wanted from my Star Trek was the crew bickering on the bridge and Kirk talking a computer to death. You can feel the effort in every frame. I just don’t think the effort went where it should have.
Kirk wants his ship back
The bones of a good story are there, which is maybe what frustrates me most about it. Kirk’s an admiral now, stuck behind a desk at Starfleet, and when the cloud turns up he more or less muscles his way back into the captain’s chair, taking the Enterprise off Decker, the young captain who spent a year and a half overseeing the refit and knows the new ship far better than Kirk does. That’s a genuinely interesting Kirk, a man who’s a little desperate and a little selfish, and McCoy calls him on it almost straight away. McCoy himself beams aboard with a full beard, grumbling that he’s been drafted back into service against his will, and he’s the one character who seems to remember this is supposed to be Star Trek (his grumpy lines are a breath of fresh air in a film that badly needs some). Then Spock turns up mid-mission, having walked out of a Vulcan ritual meant to purge the last of his emotions, colder and stranger than I’d ever seen him. Three old friends who’ve drifted apart and have to find their way back to each other, that’s a great setup.
And then the film spends a stretch just looking at the ship. Kirk and Scotty take a shuttle over to the Enterprise in drydock and circle it, slowly, from every angle, and it goes on for minutes with nobody saying much of anything. I get why some fans treasure that scene, the refitted Enterprise really is a beautiful ship and seeing it that size after years of watching on a small TV was something else. But it’s the whole film in miniature for me. A lovely thing to look at, held for far too long, while the people in it stand there with their mouths slightly open.
Inside the cloud
The mission itself is where it really loses me. The Enterprise catches up with V’Ger, a vast machine hidden inside the cloud that’s already wiped out three Klingon ships and a Starfleet station, and instead of a fight or a battle of wits we get a long, dreamy trip through its insides, lights and shapes drifting past while the crew stare at the viewscreen. V’Ger snatches the navigator Ilia and sends back a probe that looks exactly like her, and Decker, who had a history with her, has to try to reach whatever’s left of the woman inside the machine. Spock sneaks out in a spacesuit and mind-melds with the thing, which is honestly a cool moment, and then the big answer arrives. V’Ger is an old Earth probe, Voyager 6, that grew into something enormous out there and has come home looking for its creator. It’s an idea straight out of the original series, a lost machine hunting for meaning, the kind of problem Kirk dealt with in The Ultimate Computer, except the show got through it in under an hour.
Which is my real problem with the whole thing. It feels like it wants to be too serious. Every scene is played so solemn and so careful, with everyone in pale grey pyjama uniforms standing very still, that there’s no room for the warmth that made me love these characters in the first place. The film has big ideas about logic and emotion and what a machine might want (not far off the questions Ex Machina asked decades later, only much slower), and I’m all for Star Trek having big ideas, the show always did. But the show also had jokes, and fist fights, and Kirk and Spock arguing over whether to trust their gut. Here the ideas are all there is.
Spock finally feels something
For all that, there’s one thread I do like, and it’s Spock’s. He starts the film trying to be pure Vulcan, having gone off to get rid of his feelings for good, and it’s only when he touches V’Ger’s mind and finds this huge, cold, perfectly logical thing asking whether this is all it is that he realises logic on its own is empty. Afterwards, lying in sickbay, he takes Kirk’s hand and tells him that a simple feeling like that is beyond V’Ger’s understanding, and he actually weeps for the machine. It’s the one moment in the movie that got to me, because it’s the old Spock again, finally, the half-human one who never quite fit anywhere. Leonard Nimoy plays it so quietly, and it’s a reminder of why losing him hit as hard as it did.
The ending, Decker choosing to merge with V’Ger and the Ilia probe and becoming some new kind of life in a burst of white light, is meant to be the huge moment. It doesn’t do much for me. I never cared enough about Decker and Ilia to feel they’d made some great sacrifice or leap, and the film barely stops to let Kirk react before it’s over and the Enterprise is heading off to whatever comes next. What I did care about was the last few minutes on the bridge, Kirk back in the chair, Spock staying on instead of going home to Vulcan, McCoy muttering in the background, all three of them a little looser and happier than when it started. It’s the same pull that got me watching Star Trek: Picard so many years later, just wanting to see an old favourite back where he belongs, and I’ll sit through a lot of slow drifting through a cloud for that.