In the forty years since its December 1979 release, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is still something of an enigma in the Star Trek canon. From 1979 to 2016, thirteen Star Trek movies were produced. Most were successful, some were not. Several (1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact) are unanimously regarded as great movies among fans (if not by critics), while others (1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis, and 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness) an abomination of the name Star Trek.
In the four decades since it warped its way into movie theaters, the merits of Star Trek: The Motion Picture are still highly debated among fans. Some see it as an underrated space epic masterpiece along the lines of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while many others look upon the movie as an epic bore. Despite earning over $82,000,000 ($300,000,000 adjusted for inflation) at the domestic box office, myth has it that the movie was a box office failure with The Wrath of Khan saving the franchise from oblivion. The truth is, with the exception of director J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot movie Star Trek, the first feature was seen by more people than any other Star Trek movie.
The fact that Star Trek: The Motion Picture happened at all is something of a miracle. Despite being groundbreaking in many ways, the original Star Trek television series struggled in the ratings and was nearly cancelled after its second season. It finally was cancelled following a disappointing third season. From midway through the first season to midway through the second season with underwriter/producer Gene L. Coon, the series produced a number of episodes like “The City on the Edge of Forever”, “The Devil in the Dark” and “Amok Time” that not only remain among the greatest Star Trek episodes but are simply television at its best. Even the mangled third season produced a couple of gems like “All Our Yesterdays”. Network television has never been about quality though, but numbers. How many viewers does a series bring in? Star Trek had a dedicated but small viewership.
When Star Trek was cancelled by NBC in 1969, the series was put into syndication where many people believed it would soon be forgotten. The exact opposite happened, and the series grew in popularity. Over the course of the seventies, science fiction series such as Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica came, ran for a season or two and were gone, while Star Trek continued to draw in new viewers. Beginning with award-winning science fiction writer James Blish’s novelization of the original 79 episodes, Star Trek grew into a hugely popular series of fiction books. The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield (published in 1968 while the series was still on the air) and The World of Star Trek by David Gerrold (the young writer of the popular “The Trouble of Tribbles” episode) were two of the earliest books on the production of a television series. Star Trek even returned to television in the mid-seventies with an Emmy winning but short-lived animated series. There were also, of course, Star Trek conventions where fans would gather to celebrate their favorite television series.
When Paramount Pictures first considered bringing live-action Star Trek back, it was as a low budget television movie. Despite the popularity of the series in syndication, the studio did not believe that the series had enough of an audience to make a theatrical movie profitable. Science fiction was simply not considered that lucrative a genre during much of the seventies. It wasn’t until the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars (a.k.a. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) in May 1977 and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind later the same year, that it hit home with movie studios how popular science fiction could be with a mainstream audience. Star Wars had surpassed Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) to become the highest-grossing movie of all time with Close Encounters not far behind.
In 1978, Paramount executive Michael Eisner decided to bring Star Trek to the big screen. The only problem was that Star Trek was already in development to return to television as Star Trek: Phase II. Paramount was going to start up its own network, with the new Star Trek series serving as its anchor. Gene Roddenberry would once again be serving as executive producer with veteran screenwriter and author Harold Livingston overseeing script development, and Robert Goodwin (later a producer on the first five seasons of The X-Files) overseeing production. The entire original cast with the exception of Leonard Nimoy would return as the crew of a refitted U.S.S Enterprise headed out to explore the final frontier on a new five-year mission. With Spock not on board, two new characters were added to fill his vacancy: Lt. Xon, a full-blooded Vulcan would be manning the science station while the young commander Will Decker would be the new executive officer. Chekov, now head of security, would have his former position as navigator filled by the exotic Lt. Ilia, a Delta, a species in which the females have no hair. It would also be established that Decker and Ilia were once lovers when the commander was stationed on her home planet. This relationship would also be the inspiration for a similar one between Commander William Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation a decade later.
Paramount’s dream of their own network fell through, and Star Trek: Phase II became the $15,000,000 big-budget Star Trek: The Motion Picture. “In Thy Image”, the two-hour premiere episode of Phase II, written by Harold Livingston (from a story by Alan Dean Foster), would be rewritten as the movie’s screenplay (two other scripts, “The Child” and “Devil’s Due”, would later be rewritten as episodes of Star Trek:The Next Generation). Leonard Nimoy would return as Spock, with Stephen Collins cast as Decker, and Persis Khambatta as Ilia. Robert Wise, who had won the Academy Award for West Side Story and The Sound of Music, was hired to direct the movie. Wise was no stranger to science fiction, having helmed the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Problems plagued the movie from day one. One of the many obstacles facing the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was that filming began before Harold Livingston had even finished rewriting the screenplay. During much of the principal photography, the story had no ending. Paramount also hired an untested special effects company, Robert Abel and Associates, who worked for half a year and spent over $5,000,000 producing less than a minute of usable special effects. Filming began on August 7, 1978, and two days later the movie was a full day behind schedule. In his journal on the making of the movie, Chekov’s Enterprise, Walter Koenig wrote that by the end of August he learned that his services would be required for eight weeks longer than originally intended. Filming came to a conclusion on January 26, 1979, after 126 days. Adding in the money spent on the aborted Phase II television series, the budget of Star Trek: The Motion Picture ballooned to a then record-breaking $46,000,000.
With the clock ticking, Robert Wise brought in Douglas Trumbull, who had done the special effects on his 1970 movie The Andromeda Strain after cutting his teeth on Kubrick’s 2001 and later creating the beautiful effects for Spielberg’s Close Encounters. Trumbull was soon joined by John Dykstra, who had helped produce the groundbreaking special effects in Star Wars. Trumbull, Dykstra, and their teams were given nine months to create twice the number of special effects used in either Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To say that the two men rose to the occasion would be something of an understatement, as the effects in Star Trek: The Motion Picture remain some of the most mesmerizing ever brought to the screen.
The one aspect of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which all fans agree is nothing less than spectacular, is the unforgettable musical score by the late Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s title music was so popular, it was later featured as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount had proposed Jerry Goldsmith to Robert Wise very early on, and as the director had worked with the composer on his 1965 movie The Sand Pebbles, he was only too happy to take the studio’s suggestion. Jerry Goldsmith composed some of the greatest movies scores of the 20th century, including A Patch of Blue (1965), Planet of the Apes (1969), The Omen (1976), Alien (1979), Poltergeist (1982), The Secret of NIMH (1982), Gremlins (1984), Total Recall (1990) and Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Even Goldsmith’s music for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is wonderful, even if the movie itself is not. Star Trek: The Motion Picture may feature Goldsmith’s greatest score, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Goldsmith’s brilliant soundtrack record was released on vinyl and later CD.
Despite not being the writer of the movie’s screenplay, Star Trek’s creator and the movie’s producer, Gene Roddenberry, wrote the novelization of the movie, the first Star Trek novel to be published by Pocket Books. The novel included some backstory not featured in the movie, such as Will Decker being the son of Commodore Matt Decker, the commander of the U.S.S. Constellation played by William Windom in the classic episode “The Doomsday Machine”. It’s a superb novelization that spent six months on The New York Times bestseller list. Roddenberry’s assistant, Susan Sacket, wrote the insightful The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There was also Walter Koenig’s enjoyable, before mentioned, Chekov’s Enterprise. Perhaps the most informative book on the making of the movie, Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Preston Neal Jones, would not be published until 2014 after decades of legal dispute. For fans of the movie, there are many great books out there for your enjoyment. October 2019 will see a special 40th anniversary of Gene Roddenberry’s novelization.
As unforgettable as Goldsmith’s score is, and as breathtaking the effects by Trumbull and Dykstra are, what makes Star Trek: The Motion Picture special is the story. Which surprisingly is one of the most debated aspects of the movie. Some fans believe that the movie is more a showcase for the special effects than a character drama, something the television series always was. This is not an unwarranted criticism, especially as Paramount demanded that several key character and story moments be excised from the movie to shorten its length, instead of removing a few minutes of special effects. Thankfully, these scenes were put back in the movie for its VHS release in late 1980.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture ranks along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope, and Ridley Scott’s Alien (also released in 1979) as one of the greatest science fiction movies of the 1970s. The four movies are very different, but if The Motion Picture has a kindred spirit among the three, it would be Close Encounters. George Lucas designed Star Wars to be a space western (Lucas had said on several occasions that his classic movie is not even science fiction), whereas Alien is a homage to the pulp science fiction stories of the 1950s. Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are movies about the wonderment of the unknown. This is also something the first Star Trek movie beautifully captured from the television series.
Also, as with the television series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture uses science fiction to tell a very human story – man’s search for God. The Enterprise is ordered to leave dry dock early to engage a mysterious cloud that has destroyed three Klingon battle cruisers and a Federation space station. At the center of the cloud, the crew discovers a massive space ship which, in a dangerous mind-meld, Spock learns is a living machine called V’Ger, in search of its creator that it believes is on Earth. At the center of the vessel, Ilia (who was killed by a V’Ger probe sent to download information from the Enterprise computer and was replaced by a lookalike machine) leads Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Decker to the center of V’Ger where Kirk discovers the massive entity is actually Voyager 6, a late 20th Century NASA probe that disappeared into a black hole and was believed lost. The probe was discovered by a race of living machines that built an entire vessel around the probe so that it could fulfill its mission – to learn all that can be learned and return the information to its creator. On its 300-year journey back towards Earth, V’Ger gathered so much information that it achieved consciousness. Having gained such massive amounts of knowledge, V’Ger now believes its existence is without meaning. In joining with the creator, V’Ger hopes to find answers to the question of its purpose in life. In a beautiful scene (criminally, one that was cut from the theatrical release) towards the end of the movie, a teary-eyed Spock tells Kirk, McCoy, and Decker that everyone at one point in their life questions the reason for their existence. It’s unfathomable why this scene was initially cut, as it’s extremely important to the movie’s narrative and captures the beauty of the movie not with special effects but with one simple question: “Why am I here and what was I meant to be?”
Star Trek: The Motion Picture opened on December 7, 1979, to a mixed response from both critics and moviegoers. The movie grossed over $11,000,000 in its first weekend, surpassing the record set by Superman a year earlier. By the end of its first week of release, the movie had earned nearly $20,000,000. Because of its massive budget, according to Preston Neil Jones in Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the movie did not break even until April of 1980 (a movie has to make two to three times its production cost to earn a profit), eventually grossing $82,258,463 in the United States and $139 million worldwide. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the fourth highest-grossing movie in America for 1979, out-grossing all other science fiction themed movies ($2,000,000 more than Alien, $12,000,000 more than Moonraker, $40,000,000 more than Disney’s The Black Hole).
In late 1980, Paramount Pictures announced a second (much less expensive) Star Trek movie. Needing a scapegoat for the first movie’s runaway budget, Gene Roddenberry was made a consultant and stripped of all creative power, with producer/writer Harve Bennett and writer/director Nicholas Meyer put in creative control of what would become fan-favorite Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That is another story, however.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture remains one of the best of the thirteen Star Trek movies. Unlike the three reboot movies (2009’s Star Trek, 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness, 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond), which truly are little more than a showcase for special effects and senseless action (though under director Justin Lin, Beyond was a sizable improvement over the first two reboots) and are Star Trek in name alone, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a movie with a very human story at the center of it. Its characterization may not be as strong as The Wrath of Khan’s or Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (another movie that often fails to get the respect it deserves), but it is definitely a Star Trek movie and a great one at that. As the U.S.S. Enterprise warps off to new adventures in the unknown, the movie leaves us with the words, “The Human Adventure is Just Beginning” across the bottom of the screen before the end credits roll, and indeed it is.