Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...least $2 million) but also damages the rest of the show--the half-hour wasted on James T. Kirk's procession to the Enterprise, and the net loss of 20 minutes to uninteresting preparations for departure, might have been used profitably elsewhere to put more content into the film...
What makes the lack of action even worse is the amount of time devoted to special effects sans action, dialogue or intelligent meaning. The lengthiest of these scenes is almost ten minutes long; such sequences dominate the film. Inserted between the effects are bits and pieces of trite dialogue, sparsely populated by thoughtfulness and chock full of allusions to the television series and are thus only understandable to Trek fans...
...produced both the series and The Motion Picture, promised that the optical effects in the movie would not overwhelm the idealism that made Star Trek popular as a television show. Roddenberry apparently reneged on his promise. The special effects are not particularly wondrous, although publicity materials for the film claim that special effects wizards Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and John Dykstra (Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica) created the effects with the most sophisticated equipment ever devised for such work...
Since there is no action in the film, dialogue is the only thing left to compete with the special effects, and the dialogue is uninformative, full of jargon, and plainly pseudo-intellectual--almost as much as unfriendly critics would have us believe the television series was. The non-effect scenes didn't have what it takes to counterbalance lengthy visual scenes with little intrinsic interest and much bore potential...
...enemy they are combating. We end up learning more about the enemy than the human beings. We can assume that Roddenberry meant us to view the alien as a projection of ourselves. It was a good idea, a common theme in Star Trek, but one overwhelmed by the film's flaws...