Rating: **

Screenplay by Harold Livingston
Story by Alan Dean Foster
Produced by Gene Roddenberry
Directed by Robert Wise

As a Trekker of thirty-five years’ standing, I have to admit in all candor that it may not be possible to objectively review this film a quarter-century after its original release, or to do so unaffected by the feelings and expectations that swirled around it back then.

The simplest summation of ST:TMP is that it is mind-crushingly dull. Eye-glazingly boring. Synapse-deadeningly uneventful. There’s just not much that actually happens in this film. And contrary to what other reviewers have said over the years, it is neither “cerebral” nor overflowing in thoughtful dialogue. Vast stretches of the two and a quarter hours of screen time is taken up with the characters, almost literally, staring out the viewport at the (for the time) ground-breaking special effects, right along with the theater audiences. One wonders how a project that was a decade in the making could possibly have landed with such an empty thud.

And yet that is not how we Trek geeks looked at it at the time. It’s almost impossible to remember now, on the other side of four additional television series and nine subsequent feature films, how starved we were for new adventures from the “final frontier.” Such was the fans’ hunger that we would have packed cineplexes to watch outtakes of Priceline.com ads and been sated. And when I say packed, I do mean packed. When ST:TMP premiered in little, out of the way Wenatchee, Washington, there were so many of us crammed into the lobby of Columbia Cinema that I actually pulled up my feet and the crowd carried me into theater. It was strikingly reminiscent of “The Mark of Gideon”, as a matter of fact. <s>

Once we all were shoehorned into our seats, the lights dimmed, and the snorefest began.

Is that a bit harsh? Well, maybe…imprecise. The story concept is actually a tremendous one, out of the best tradition of quality science fiction: one starship on a mission to intercept an unknown something that has evinced apparent hostile intent, but may simply be alien beyond human understanding. Really, the sort of First Contact that would be most likely in deep space, given the extreme unlikelihood of two space-faring cultures being remotely close to each other technologically or culturally. No possibility of space battles and laser fights here – just one’s wits and the ability to improvise, which happen to be Jim Kirk’s specialties.

There are also a few worthy subplots: Kirk having accepted promotion to the Admiralty and his subsequent unhappiness at being deskbound instead of “out there” commanding a starship; his exploitation of this crisis to finagle his way back to captaincy of the Enterprise; how Kirk’s scheming impacts his designated successor, Will Decker (son of Commodore Matthew Decker, lost in the TOS classic “The Doomsday Machine”) who is demoted to First Officer and isn’t shy about expressing his resentment of it and Kirk himself; and Spock’s almost-but-not-quite attainment of kholinar, the Vulcan purging of emotion, and being denied at the last moment by the arrival of this alien probe and Kirk’s psychic scream (or whatever) for Spock’s assistance in dealing with it.

The story begins with a trio of Klingon K’Tinga-class battlecruisers on an attack course toward what looks like a nebula. The difference being that this nebula is moving at high warp, and these ships were the only ones the Empire could deploy to intercept in time. Thinking some ship is within this vast, solar-system-sized cloud, the Klingons open fire, to no effect. There is, however, a response, as out of the cloud, after some lightning-like crackles from within, comes returned fire that seems to implode the K’Tinga heavies in a matter of seconds.

This one-sided encounter is observed from a Starfleet border station called Epsilon-9, which does three things: (1) determines that this cloud is on a direct course for (naturally) Earth; (2) dispatches a warning to Starfleet; and (3) tries to communicate with it and is imploded in turn.

This second attack is viewed in real-time by the crew of the Enterprise, hastily reassembled as “the only ship that can intercept the intruder in time.” Which, upon reflection, isn’t all that plausible a plot device for either the Klingons or Starfleet; I mean, in “Best of Both Worlds” the Borg were hurtling toward Sector 001 at better than warp 9.9, and the Fleet managed to muster a forty-ship armada at Wolf 359; hard to believe they couldn’t do better than one ship only a century earlier.

Regardless, there isn’t a dry pair of uniform pants in the ship’s Rec area after Epsilon-9 is destroyed, but the hardy crew sticks together and dedicates itself to what now looks like a suicide mission. While for their admiral-cum-captain, it’s all about him.

Kirk is remarkably blind to this exercise in naked ambition. I suppose that illustrates how ego is the perfect insulation from introspection. Here is his golden opportunity to get his ship back, which is what he’s really after, but he convinces himself that it isn’t about that, but that he, with his unparalleled deep space experience, is the only…well, logical choice to lead this mission. And because this really is a crisis, nobody, including his superior, Admiral Nogura (whom we never see – which is a pity, since beholding Kirk making this argument to the Starfleet Commander, instead of his victory being presented as a fait accompli, could have been a powerful polemical scene), can really argue the point. Hence the “golden” part. But if he succeeds, and Starfleet is hugely indebted to him, and he can have anything he wants, including maybe the Enterprise permanently…well, he makes sure not to think that far ahead.

There’s only one little problem: the Enterprise has been almost completely overhauled and rebuilt, and Kirk isn’t nearly up to speed on the technical upgrades. And Mr. Decker is.

This is an interesting dynamic that, aside from one very good confrontation scene early on, tends to get short shrift. It is not at all difficult to identify with Decker’s plight: submarined out of his first command by his own mentor, knowing that he knows this ship, and can command her, better than he, and believing that Kirk is consciously and deliberately trying to screw him out of it for his own aggrandizement. Whereas Kirk is cocooned in his rationalization that his vastly superior experience is the difference-maker and is discomfited by being in the unfamiliar position of being the grizzled veteran being pushed by the hot-shot up & comer so like whom he used to be. He doesn’t see himself as trying to hold Decker down, and this self-image becomes such a tunnel vision that he never realizes, until McCoy confronts him with it, how fiercely he’s competing with the younger man.

This is embarrassingly highlighted when, in his impatience to intercept the Cloud, Kirk orders the jump to warp before Scotty has the matter-antimatter intermix formula worked out. This imbalance sucks the ship into a wormhole, along with an asteroid which is on a collision course. Kirk orders Chekov to phaser the asteroid, which Decker, knowing that the phaser arrays are routed through the warp drive and thus inoperative, belays in favor of a barrage of photon torpedoes. (It should also be noted that the sensory-distorting effects of the wormhole made this scene appropriately surreal, if also more than a little hard to follow.) Thus, Decker saved the ship from Kirk’s impulsive incompetence in front of the entire bridge crew. And it pisses Kirk off, all the more so when, in a follow-up woodshed session in Kirk’s quarters, Decker smugly rubs his mentor’s nose in it for good measure. Consequently, when McCoy, as alluded to above, points out the gapingly obvious, Kirk is thunderstruck. But it’s far too late to do anything about it, unless the doctor was willing to declare Kirk unfit for command. Which would have been an interesting plot twist, actually, if the plot hadn’t been bent upon making the cast, and us stare, endlessly slackjawed, at the (for that time unprecedented) $40 million in amorphous special effects.

Luckily for our heroes, Spock chose that moment to show up, move one of the warp nacelles to the other side of the Engineering hull, and get them on their way. But, quite evidently bitter about failing kholinar, he regarded his old/new crewmates with an unleavened coldness bordering on hostility, as though it were somehow their fault that he was still stuck with his unwanted human side. More on that in a moment.

The remaining subplot, of which I’ve purposely made no mention, is the Decker-Ilia relationship. Ilia (played by a genuinely bald Persis Khambatta) is Decker’s old girlfriend, who is now the Enterprise’s navigator. She’s also a Deltan, a species of intense sexuality that Decker evidently couldn’t handle (which may mean he couldn’t even be in the same room with her without blowing his load like a water cannon). Their reunion thus adds an almost obligatory sexual tension factor that, also obligatorily, the story never even tries to resolve, despite putting Ms. Khambatta in an abbreviated bathrobe so short that she dared not raise her arms without answering the question of whether she was bald someplace else as well. If this sounds an awful lot like Will Riker and Deanna Troi, you have a powerful grasp of the obvious.

And that, ladies and gents, about sums it up. The first third or so of the film sets the table, and the remaining two-thirds never delivers the meal. Once Kirk deposes Decker as captain, and the Enterprise sets sail through the solar system at impulse (lots of extended special effects sequences here as well), and then has its wormhole mishap, and Spock arrives, they rendezvous with the Cloud, trigger another attack, somehow survive when the “new shields hold” and Spock deduces that their friendship hails are not being understood because they’re too damned slow. Then they proceed into the Cloud, and the bulk of the remainder of the film might just as well be an acid trip.

After probing the bridge with a plasma thingie, the Cloud implodes Ilia and sends her back as a sort of interface with the “carbon-based units infesting Enterprise.” Only, somewhere beneath its programming is the remnants of the real Ilia, which is supposed to be a painfully poignant pickle for Decker but comes off as a series of unrequited cheap off-screen thrills. Man, this guy is as unlucky at love as Jonathan Archer.

Eventually Kirk & Co. learn that the Cloud is actually a fantastically advanced probe which is returning to Earth to merge with its creator. Or, rather, Spock learns it through a mindmeld with the thing, undertaken out of his desperation to find some new meaning to his life (or his own brand of cheap thrills – take your pick). But that discovery pales beside what Spock learns about himself. Since every Trek film HAS to have a moral, here it is that the Cloud (which calls itself “V’ger) is everything that Spock has ever aspired to become – total knowledge, perfect logic, and no emotion. And yet V’ger is barren, sterile, and still in search of…a meaning to its existence.

And what is that meaning? Holding hands with Jim Kirk, apparently. If Brannan Braga had been writing Trek back then, Spock probably would have kissed Kirk as well.

While all of this navel-gazing is going on, the Cloud is arriving at Earth, and when its creator doesn’t respond to its hails, it deploys gargantuan versions of its plasma weaponry around the planet, presumeably to implode it. Taking his usual wild gamble, Kirk tells V’ger that he knows how to contact the creator, but will only do so if V’ger withdraws its plasma imploders. V’ger, in a delightful bit of circumlocution, counters that it will withdraw the plasma imploders only if Kirk will make contact with the creator. “It learns fast,” McCoy cynically observes.

Kirk, ad libbing at will, adds the stipulation that he can only make contact with the creator if he can speak to V’ger “in person.” The Enterprise is moved to a place where Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Decker discover, of all things, an old NASA space probe called Voyager-6. Talk about “I shot an arrow into the air”; this probe apparently fell into a black hole, or got sucked into a transwarp conduit, or drifted into a Borg transportation hub, and ended up on the other side of the galaxy on a planet dominated by vast machine intelligence that rebuilt it in order to enable it to fulfill its primary mission: gather all data and report back to its maker. Imagine its disappointment at what it finds upon arriving home.

In later years, Gene Roddenberry backfilled this story by suggesting that Voyager-6 was assimilated by the Borg, and that the “machine planet” was actually the Borg homeworld. William Shatner’s novel The Return is based on that idea, and had it been conceived of here it would have added a third star to ST:TMP’s rating all by itself.

As it was, we ended up with a gauzy, gaseous climax-and-light-show that eliminated Decker and Ilia (“I want this; as much as you wanted to screw me, I want to screw Ilia!”), “evolved” V’ger into “something else,” and left Kirk exactly where he wanted to be: in unchallenged command of the Enterprise and able to take all the credit for saving Earth. Maybe incipient guilt is why he gave her back and returned to his dirtside desk. You’ll notice he didn’t make that same mistake at the end of Star Trek IV.

In the final analysis, ST:TMP is a story that means well, but is just too small for the big screen.

The next installment didn’t have that problem….