Star Trek I.

It was like any other Friday night, and I had been drinking. I had to stop however, because I was at a flat which wasn’t actually mine, most of the occupants had gone to bed, and the increasingly dropping temperature in the living room made a cold beer less than inherently desirable at 1:30 am. It was just Cam and I to start us off on this magical experience, so we sacrilegiously inserted my Yoda USB into the TV, and prepared ourselves for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The film itself, from both a combination of Internet reading and having seen it before, is notoriously slow-paced. I already knew it going in a second time, so for this viewing I made myself focus on the smaller details on the screen: extras who might not have known what they had to be doing in the scene and so on. Once I got bored of that very quickly, I proceeded to say Spock’s name repeatedly a la William Shatner. Eventually, Cam caught the ailment too.

Well, the basic premise of the film is the discovery of a sentient probe named V’Ger who is trying to not only reach but also contact Earth. The catch is that its immeasurable power levels entire star ships, and it tends to do the latter than have a proper conversation. This malevolent entity at one point takes control of the bald-headed helmsman/navigational officer/plot device named Ilia, and uses her as a vessel to basically mock the ship’s crew. Maybe? All I remember was that she was bald. Maybe that didn’t happen after all. With the reveal that V’Ger was in fact a lost Voyager probe seeking the truth about its existence, I was already fidgeting on the couch by this point, restless. This was an ongoing issue, as breathing heavily into my shirt for warmth did little to escape the conveyer belt tour of the Enterprise model we were forced to endure at the 20 minute mark, let alone at the 120 minute one.
  

A striking detail about the film is that James T. Kirk is more a designated hero, or one in name only. He forces himself on board the Enterprise, in the process demoting the current captain who repeatedly states that the ship has been radically redesigned and needs someone who knows how to work it, so basically himself. Kirk further goes on cause the deaths of two crew members in the middle of beaming over to the ship, and in turn forcibly drafts his old medical officer Bones from shore leave (or Boogie Wonderland going by his costume). The icing on the proverbial space cake comes at a rare moment of tension in this major motion picture, where an ill-fated attempt at warp speed causes a speedball of special effects consisting of a vague “wormhole” and a very stationary asteroid. I was literally on the edge of my seat during this, and I can safely say that no other scene in the 132 minute running time comes even close.

However, the movie is still just as slow moving and dull as I remember it being, because so much of it is people looking at things. I cannot tell if this was a deliberate move on the part of the filmmakers seeing as it is a visual medium, but I did find to a degree layer upon layer of some unintentional intrigue. Once I got bored of watching the Enterprise crew watching the ship’s view screen, I turned my attention to the condensation on a nearby window. I am using this to fault the director/producer/big management for breaking the intended verisimilitude and the effect it could have had upon me. You could have had me, film. I gave you another chance at entering my life and you proceeded to revert back to your old ways, exactly as they were before. In summary, it’s about as hard to get into as an internship in Silicon Valley.

NB: Because of parallels in these films, I am also recording the instances where Chekov places himself or others in a dangerous position. I am doing this because I sincerely hope a defamation league will rise up and call out his various injustices in the franchise, and also because I don’t like the character. The first one is rather innocuous, but if some writer in the courts would like to record it for future reference, quote me as saying:

“Chekov burns his hand like a little bitch when V’Ger is scanning the bridge of the Enterprise.”