Lower Decks

A good reason to name a column something like “How I Got These Scars,” besides a certain inspiration from ‘The Dark Knight,’ is that I’ve got a considerable amount of experience enjoying things that, while being highly visible, don’t get a lot of respect from the general public. With the release of the new Star Trek movie closer every day, it’s time to write about one of the big ones, ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture.’

Let’s get the reputation out of the way: to most Star Trek fans, it might as well be called “The Motionless Picture.” It’s an old joke, but it’s as appropriate as they come. While ‘The Wrath of Khan’ is easy to love as the second film and the one that let fans hang out with old friends, ‘The Motion Picture’ is exactly the opposite, so remote that it doesn’t even let the characters enjoy themselves. Through the years, as the franchise has twisted and turned along with its fans, I’ve come to admire the film more and more, but I’ve never been able to properly express why. If the first Star Trek movie is one of those experiences you either love or hate, it’s been far easier to choose the latter and leave it simply as that, and all the more so since the film series evolved and various TV expansions allowed fans to look elsewhere, rather than tackle the increasingly abstract and distant appeal of what has become the missing link in franchise lore.

‘The Motion Picture’ is in so many voids that it’s difficult to find a starting point. For one, no other film or episode since has sought to duplicate the storytelling style Robert Wise, Gene Roddenberry, and their associates established. Though I’ve never seen it, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ seems to be the only comparable filmed space experience to date (although ‘The Fountain’ has a similar tone, and M. Night Shyamalan the same deliberate pacing, at least in ‘The Sixth Sense’ and ‘Unbreakable’). What it managed to accomplish was the exact opposite of what Joss Whedon would later do with ‘Firefly’ to the most extreme effect possible, and that was to deemphasize the cowboy, “Wagon Train to the Stars” quality of the original series, and instead embrace the cold nature of scientific and human exploration that were the other elements Roddenberry had envisioned.

The story wasn’t exactly unfamiliar to Star Trek audiences. At its heart ‘The Motion Picture’ is a virtual duplicate of the episode “The Changeling” from the show’s second season. Later audiences would even identify V’Ger and the machine world it encountered with the Borg. Yet the crucial difference lay in the story’s identification that the probe run amok simply wanted to meet its maker, to answer the same basic question we all have, as Spock explains, to discover its purpose, to try and understand if there’s more to life than it’s known.

If the story is easy enough to understand (relatively speaking), then the execution is the obvious point of contention. As I’ve already detailed, the choices therein resulted in a sterile, meandering tale that left it up to the audience to find a way into the psychology and philosophy on display. But the audience was made up primarily of existing fans, who could hardly have expected something like this from a reunion with James Kirk and his crew. Even the ship had been altered, and the costumes, so that all the bright, cheery colors previously inviting them were gone.

As I see it now, from the perspective of the creators behind the film, it must have seemed necessary to have some sort of plausible explanation as to why the characters reunited, and given that ten years had passed since the last episode of the television series, change was a necessity (interestingly, at least in the test footage for the proposed second TV show that the film replaced, the visuals would have remained much intact, and the crew apparently much as they were, minus Spock). It would have thus been impossible to simply bring them back together as if nothing had happened in the years between, so changes such as Spock attempting to purge the last of his emotions, Kirk being promoted out of the captain’s seat, and the ship itself, if still around at all, enjoying at least some upgrades, would have been unavoidable and the story would have to address these facts along with whatever had brought them back together.

If you remove the cowboy elements from the Star Trek template, you invariably reach the understanding that Starfleet is more a navy than an army, another fact that at least one episode, “Balance of Terror” had memorably exploited in the past. In fact, ‘The Motion Picture’ is very much more “Balance of Terror,” ultimately, than “Changeling,” the same story but without the audience seeing the perspective of the antagonist. So much of the story is based around the unknown nature of the threat Kirk and the planet Earth faces that it feeds into the alienation that the characters themselves are feeling, whether Spock in attempting to discover the destination of his own journey, Kirk as he tries to settle back into an active position, or the displaced Decker, who loses a ship and his lover Ilia during the course of the mission. The ship in its journey might as well been seen to be traveling the open seas as the imaginative layers of the probe’s projections.

The years have actually made it easier to understand the story better, but not for anything Star Trek did, but rather the ‘Matrix’ trilogy, which took the popular man vs. machine story and explored it just about as deeply as possible. Not surprisingly, by the third film, it had found just about as many people willing to care as fans of ‘The Motion Picture.’ But just as Neo ultimately realized that he would have to give himself over to the machines as a sort of peace offering, a bridge that would never exist otherwise, Decker realizes the only way out of the crisis V’Ger poses is to merge with it, creator and offspring reunited, made into one. Flipped around, ‘The Motion Picture’ is the story of man making a machine that outgrows its purpose, discovering a machine world that it sees as the only one truly worthy of existing, the only logical world, and the only way to convince it otherwise is to explain the value of emotional connection, which it has already known but couldn’t understand. Neo was the human inside a simulated world humans inhabited to remain passive enough for machines to feed off of, who proved it wasn’t enough. Decker was the human who proved it wasn’t enough for V’Ger simply to expect a creator in its own image. ‘The Motion Picture’ is the story, then, of the very opposite reflection as the reaction it garnered: the need to embrace the human adventure, the disparate perspectives that provide meaning to our lives. It is a very Star Trek story.

It was also the chance for Roddenberry to tell exactly the kind of Star Trek story he’d always hoped to, and maybe it was this suggestion that came as a sort of slap in the face to those who’d liked the original TV series for all the elements the movie turned its back on, the color that made the adventures fun. ‘The Motion Picture’ was exactly the kind of straight storytelling that no one seems to enjoy all that much. Even with the wisecracking and irreverent McCoy or vaguely silly little Chekov intact, the movie suggested there was a different approach Star Trek always could have been. And the fans let Gene know that’s just not what they wanted. They wanted to have some straightforward fun, too.

With a story and an approach that took traditional Star Trek elements into a bold new direction, ‘The Motion Picture’ now stands on its own as an example of storytelling that doesn’t work for fans. That doesn’t mean, however, that its reputation as a failure is earned. It just means that the film is a distinct vintage, a cultivated taste to be savored by those who continue to honor it, both for the fact that it helped keep the franchise alive, and as a unique experience in a well-traveled ship, regardless of its familiarity.