I’ve been re-watching Star Trek: The Original Series – I’ve almost finished the first season – and thinking, how clunky! Shatner the ham, how plain everything is, how obvious and intrusive the moralizing, and how primitive the special effects! But in its day … Can’t say I was ever a fan, but I’ve watched most of the Trek franchise (except for the animated series).
Fortunately Tyler Cowen posted a link to a new review of the first Star Trek movie: Tim Greiving, ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ Is the Best ‘Star Trek’ Film for Non-Trekkies, The Ringer, April 5, 2022. I watched it when it came out in 1997. My dominant memory is that it was slow, though I sense an undercurrent of something else. I’m thinking Greiving’s review-essay is about that something else. Anyhow, I’ve watched it and, yes, it’s slow, but there is something there.
The concept, a stately ontological fable, with touches of grace:
Star Wars may have inspired the suits to make a Star Trek movie, but screenwriter Harold Livingston—working from a story conceived by Roddenberry and sci-fi author Alan Dean Foster (who ghostwrote the novelization of Star Wars)—ignored the mysticism and kid-friendly adventure of George Lucas’s universe and instead plunged into mankind’s quest for meaning. For all the flak the film has taken for being too heady, it actually employs an admirably lean, focused concept for a sci-fi blockbuster: a mysterious object in space, the clash and competition between an old-school captain and a whiz kid, forbidden love between old flames, and a contemplation on the dynamic tension between emotion and logic, between carbon units (humans) and machines.
It's not a space opera, nor is it jammed end-to-end with battles – though, for what it’s worth, Gene Roddenberry pitched the original series as “Wagon Train to the stars” – Wagon Train was a major TV Western of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a romance and, it turns out in a final twist that I’d completely forgotten, a cosmic one at that. If you want to know what motivated those NASA kids to fly to the moon, this movie has a sense of that.
At least I think it does, though I’ve not been there myself, so what do I know? I’d imagine that actually spending an extended period of time in space could get to be something of a slog, punctuated, perhaps, by moments of terror. But I’d imagine that someone of an appropriate sensibility, who’d cultivated their imagination – for that’s what it would take, no? cultivation, would be able to sense the majesty and wonder of it all. I’d like to think so, otherwise, why go there at all? Anyhow, I felt a bit of that when I visited Kennedy Space Flight Center in, I believe it was, 1997. Sacred ground.
But I digress. Back to Greiving’s essay. The movie’s style:
Director Robert Wise was more of an Old Hollywood craftsman than an auteur with his own remarkable style, but he brought some serious pedigree: He edited Citizen Kane before directing a sci-fi staple, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and two mid-century musical classics, West Side Story and The Sound of Music. In fact, he treated this film like a roadshow musical spectacular—complete with an overture and several lengthy set pieces where Jerry Goldsmith’s music takes the wheel, only instead of song and dance routines, they’re choreographed numbers for animated energy fields and ship models. One of the chief complaints people have about this movie is epitomized by the roughly five-minute, wordless sequence where Scotty (James Doohan) slowly flies Kirk around the parked Enterprise. […]
In this way, The Motion Picture is much more a cousin to 2001 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind—with their shared effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, who died in February, at ship’s helm—than the whiz-bang dogfights in Star Wars. The visuals in The Motion Picture, which include everything from vintage matte paintings to animated light streaks for a wormhole scene to elaborate models, are absolutely of their time—no matter how much Wise was able to gussy them up with 2000-era CGI in his director’s cut. But it’s part of the movie’s vintage 1979 charm that it sits smack between Close Encounters and Blade Runner in a heyday of tactile, handmade illusions before computers ruled the earth. And it’s the mood of these hypnotic, psychedelic space sequences that’s timeless—mostly thanks to the symphonic majesty of Goldsmith’s cosmic French impressionism, in one of the greatest film scores (and main themes) ever composed.
So not everyone wants a mood-altering mind trip through the heavens—fine. But Stanley Kubrick defined a very specific and very powerful template with his 1968 space movie that many others wanted to follow and revise in their own image, from Spielberg to Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve’s epic Dune may have more jaw-droppingly realistic visuals, but it’s every bit as much a glacially patient and somber slow movement for spaceships and (electronic) orchestra.
That said, The Motion Picture is as much a character story as it is spectacle; it’s fundamentally about the necessity of “foolish human emotions,” to quote Bones. Wise managed to get far more naturalistic, grounded performances from Shatner, the Hamlet of hams, and his cohort of TV actors than they ever gave on the small screen or in later movies. This feels like a 1970s movie, and not just because it introduces Bones in a chest-hair-and-bling-bearing tracksuit and a shaggy Bee Gees beard.
There’s much more at the link.
Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown theme
Greiving praises Jerry Goldsmith’s music, justly so. He’s scored many films, but I associate him with the main theme from Chinatown (1974), perhaps because I’m a trumpet player. It was performed by Uan Rasey, a legend of the Hollywood studios.
Man in Space, imagination needed
I’ve done a number of posts on the theme, man in space, which I’ve gathered under that link. Many of them are about movies or TV programs, for that’s how most of us experience outer space, isn’t it? We’ve never been there, have we? You might contrast this movie with the way The Crown depicted Prince Philip’s disappointment over the conversation he had with the Apollo 11 astronauts (Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins). Their banal banter didn’t touch his soul. Who knows what they actually felt? They didn’t know how to express (it), and Philip didn’t know how to elicit (it).
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