STARRING: WILLIAM SHATNER, LEONARD NIMOY,
DEFORREST KELLY
1980
RATED: G
RUNNING TIME; 2 HRS.+
After a long recess
the stars of Star Trek made a comeback from the television screen to the
silver one, in their answer to the phenomenal success of Star Wars a few years
before. The series itself was charming and fun, if made in the 1960s, and the
characters of Spock, Kirk and McCoy became legendary and forever burned into
the memory of Hollywood, for what they were worth.
Unfortunately the motion picture
proved to be a different story.
Basically there is a long
period of time between the end of the series and the movie where we are caught
up with a history that Captain Kirk (Shatner) of the Federation starship
Enterprise left his post long ago to become an Admiral at Star Fleet. But it's
been chewing him up for years and he yearns to be back on his baby. Then a
gigantic cloud of energy is heading for (where else?) earth and is destroying
ships and entire space-stations in its wake.
It's an emergency, and, what do you know!,
Kirk selfishly decides that this is the perfect time to reclaim his former
ship. He pulls some strings, uses his undeserving Admiral status to boot
people from authority and takes his ship back to go face the cloud, having no
idea what he's doing. Along the way they meet back up with Doctor McCoy (Deforest
Kelly), who had no intention of being drafted back into the military, and
Commander Spock, everyone's favorite pointy-eared emotionless grump. He's
going through some dumb ritual to cleanse himself of his "Human"
emotions, being half Vulcan half human.
There's a bald alien babe named Ilia played
by the diseased Persis Khambatta, who while a cute character gets annoying by
constantly reminding the humans of how they are "sexually inferior",
and the idiot crew members prove her right by falling head over phasers for
her. Idiocy.
They go out and find the cloud, which
is monstrously huge and they then go into the center, where they find a vessel
so big we never even see it all. They say it could house tens of thousands,
but I think it looked bigger than that. Basically its supposed to be Star
Trek's answer to the Death Star, but it's really not that impressive.
The ship turns out to be sentient, and
calls itself "Vyger". It even kidnaps the bald babe and makes her
its ambassador. This is highly stupid the way they do it, because she's an
imbecile and talks through a hoarse speaker in her throat like a smoker. It
turns out that an American probe was sucked into a black hole in the 1970s,
came out again and landed on a planet of living machines where they took it,
created the massive ship for it and sent it back home to give the information
it had amassed back to the "Creator", namely, us. The probe was
called Voyager, but with wear and tear in space some of the letters burned off
and it became Vyger, which raises a question...why would the stupid ship read
its own name?
In the end it turns out that Vyger is
not interested in returning the information after all. It wants to physically
bond to a human and become living in a whole new way, so the bald babe and
another crew member bond together and disappear in a flash of light, which
raises questions very disturbing to my mind. Did that crew member just mate
with a machine? (shudder)
The film tried to be ambitious, but
it was the absolute most BORING film I have ever seen. There were sequences
that were stretched on and on for so long you wondered if they knew how much
film they were burning. The acting is purely terrible, even from the normally
great Leonard Nimoy (we go in naturally expecting Shatner to be bad). The
special effects while cool are hampered by the weak, weak story and terrible
execution of it. The music is the best thing about the movie in my mind,
composed by the great Jerry Goldsmith.
With a start like this it's amazing
that the Star Trek Movie franchise survived, but I can say thankfully that
there were many better efforts later. This films stands as Star Trek 1 because
you really only ever feel like seeing it once. If you need time to kill, this
film murders it.
