Star Trek: The Motion Picture

This is the first in a series of Star Trek Movie Marathon review posts. I’m playing along with Shannon the Movie Moxie. Here’s the link to the Countdown post in case any of you want to play along too. I’m paying particular attention to doing my reflections spoiler free, like Shannon does. Like my TV episode reviews, I’m going to focus on what I find fun and inspiring about Star Trek.

My Adventure Finding the Movie

First of all, a huge shoutout to L, my wonderful and supportive husband, who took me out looking for the movie on several occasions. The first stop at the used video store resulted in no success. Then we went to go to our usual rental place, which has closed! We found their second location and drove over there the next day, only to find that they only had the newer Trek films. Then a stop at Best Buy resulted in successfully locating it. But, they didn’t have the fifth movie, which is the only other one missing from our collection. But, I’ve got until March to track it down (and will possibly order it from Amazon). Don’t worry about L, he’s a Trek fan too. And, I bought him Chinese food and popcorn as a thank you treat.

My Reflection the Movie (Spoiler Free)

One of the things that I think has helped Trek span the ages is that it always reflects the society that helped create it. If you’re a fan of 70’s era films, particularly sci-fi, this one will probably not disappoint as it has a lot of those elements in it.

Partly because of the era and partly because it was a return to Star Trek after quite a break, there are a lot of scenes showing off the new shiny ship. In terms of ship technology, the movies do appear to really bridge the gap between the original Trek and the Next Generation.

The movie is different from the later movies, in that, it’s quite light on the action side. Definitely more philosophical than action packed. Not to say that they didn’t have their fair share of 70’s grade special effects, because they definitely threw those in.

It goes into the basic questions of existence. What is it all really about? Why am I here?

I enjoyed the bit of Vulcan mysticism they showed, but I’m a sucker for cultural explorations and sociology. I would have enjoyed even further exploration into this kind of thing.

I’m not a huge fan of movies from the 1970’s (much to the disappointment of my husband, the 70’s dystopia fan). However, I did enjoy this one more than I thought I would. I have seen it before, but I remember it being more boring than I thought it was this time. Plus, the DVD I got has some commentary features that I might actually take a look at. Generally speaking I’m not one to watch a movie with the commentary on, but I might make an exception to watch it with Michael Okuda’s text commentary. You read that right – TEXT commentary. I’m intrigued to say the least. We’ll see what happens though. I’ve got a lot of movies to watch and not a lot of time to watch them in.

Race Intro: The Deltans (actually, they may be introduced in the Original Series because everyone seemed to know all about them and their Oath of Celibacy and why that’s important)

Fun stuff from the film:

• Isaac Asimov was a special science consultant. There is definitely a connection between the author and some aspects of the film!