Word: spaces
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are three groups of people who will definitely want to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Star Trek fans (of which I am one), Star Wars fans, and those moviegoers who consider themselves genre connoisseurs, because they made it to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. All three groups will be sorely disappointed--most of all the millions of Trek fans who desperately hoped the film would be the apotheosis of the qualities that made the late '60s television series stand out during its three-year run on NBC and ten years in syndication. The film simply fails...
...beginning to justify the movie's existence and to offer a chance to show off expensive special effects. The first part of The Motion Picture describes the reunion of the major cast members on the pretext that they are required on board the refitted U.S.S. (United Space Ship) Enterprise to battle a never-before-encountered "thing." ("Why is any object we don't understand always called a 'thing'?" asks Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley) in typical Star Trek: The Television Show fashion). The "thing" is headed for Earth, gobbling up everything it encounters...
...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...
Special effects seem to be what movie studios think science fiction is all about these days. No doubt, Star Wars impressed a good many people because it depicted outer space with realism and "flash." But since the "creators" of The Motion Picture wanted to get away from the rough 'em up cowboys and laser beams action of Star Wars, they decided to put their special effects money into non-military opticals of the Enterprise's travel through an alien "cloud." It is quite possible that Dykstra and Trumbull decided that since anyone can create the illusion of space travel--they...
...even if the western-in-outer-space images are not there, neither is the thoughtful intelligence which you would expect to substitute for an overkill of laser fire and death stars. Star Trek: The Motion Picture deals with deep issues in a surface manner--probably the result of compromise with film executives who were afraid of too much cerebral content in a G-rated film being released at Christmas time. (An original story by Roddenberry and science fiction Guru Harland Ellison was rejected by Paramount because it dealt with the identity...