Word: treks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Those with Trek credentials will recognize that the plot is primarily a mish-mash of three of the original television episodes--"The Changeling," "The Immunity Syndrome," and "The Doomsday Machine"--each of which had something interesting to say, and said it in less than one hour...
...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...
...second part of The Motion Picture describes the Enterprise crew's interception and final solution to the problem. The first half seems aimlessly tacked on. The writer and producer thought it necessary to explain the ten year gap between the last episode of the Star Trek television series and The Motion Picture. The resulting footage is not only unwieldy and expensive (a five-minute sequence involving the Starfleet's San Francisco headquarters must have cost at least $2 million) but also damages the rest of the show--the half-hour wasted on James T. Kirk's procession to the Enterprise...
...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...
Gene Roddenberry, who 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...