Lord J,
Having grown up a softcore Trekkie, it was a breath of fresh air to see your respect for the Motion Picture soundtrack. Looking at the campy-adventure theme of the TOS to suddenly see it with such raw emotion and intelligence in TMP, it's amazing that only 10 years passed between the two. When I first saw TMP many of the themes were over my head - it truly is a fabulous piece of film making, even though it was inspired by an equally great 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To this day I don't think Star Trek has been able to capture the same quality and emotional storytelling. Many find the storytelling boring and dull, but I find it fantastic!
Agreed!
Star Trek II has tighter literary smarts than most people (even its fans) realize, and of course it's Star Trek's pinnacle rendition of space opera. The score by James Horner for many years competed with this score as my favorite Star Trek score and is still one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. But I gotta rank this one higher.
If you went to music school, like I didn't, then you'll see it much more skillfully than I was able to, but
The Motion Picture score is a technical masterpiece. There are really only four fundamental themes in the whole work: Starfleet, Ilia, Vejur, and Spock. That's it. (The Klingons have a theme, but it's self-contained and doesn't appear elsewhere. Even so, it went on to become the archetypical Klingon theme and would be explored well in
Star Trek V.) Four basic sounds around which a soundtrack is built that spans longer than some of the other Star Trek films. But the variety is just incredible. Nothing is repeated verbatim. Everything relates back to one or more of the four source themes--just as the movements of Beethoven's symphonies famously could each be "summarized" in one or two bars of music, containing everything you would need to build out the rest. (Incidentally, check out the original series soundtrack for "The Doomsday Machine." It's the only other example in all of Star Trek where the technical skill level is that high, and of course Kaplan didn't have a full-scale orchestra or a mind-bending script to work with.)
The main theme for this film ended up becoming the patron theme of all of Star Trek, once it was used for
The Next Generation and several of Goldsmith's scores for other Trek films. Yet, despite appearing in so many other places, this motion picture has more variation on that theme than everything else put together. If you're one who likes the same musical idea presented in different ways, you'll just ooze delight with getting to hear the great theme of Star Trek put together in so many beautiful forms. My favorite of them all is the version that appears at the end of "Total Logic," when we are first introduced to Admiral Kirk and, for the first time ever, Starfleet Command.
Moving off from just the soundtrack, people don't realize just how much of Star Trek was created in this film. It's a wellspring of canon. Music, for sure. But there's also grand stuff like the Starfleet Command headquarters in San Francisco all the way down to little details like the shape of the corridors aboard the Enterprise. The strong distinction between warp drive and sublight drive was created in this film. The placement of the photon torpedo bays, the red color on the impulse engines, the backlit deflector dish, the idea of deep space stations and communications arrays, the convention that phasers are powered by the warp drive, and the less-consistently-utilized convention of avoiding warp travel inside a star system...all of these things are just some of the conventions created in this movie.
Other conventions that never took root are equally compelling, either visually or artistically: It's the first time in Star Trek that you could see another part of the Enterprise from looking out an Enterprise window, which most windows on the ship should be able to do because of their placement. It's the first time we see the main energizer. We also see, essentially, the entire rear half of the stardrive section from inside the ship. Large interior spaces that never appear again, like the recreation deck and the aforementioned stardrive section. We see more of the warp core's vertical trajectory than anywhere else in Star Trek. I was always captivated by the use of matte paintings to convey vast spaces
inside a starship; this is the only film to do it, except in
Star Trek II where they reuse the main engineering matte that depicts the length of the main energizer and the power conduits out to the warp engines. Because of this effort to convey extreme depth and scope,
The Motion Picture is by far the only Star Trek film that feels truly "big." (That same "big" quality is why the Star Wars films are so visually captivating to me.) Only
Star Trek II dared try, and only in one sequence: the camera pan from the Enterprise up to the Reliant in orbit of Regula. In contrast, all of
The Motion Picture is filled with this sense of vastness. Even the script goes out of its way to talk about the physical dimensions and power scale of Vejur.
"Twelve power?!" That's an in-joke of mine that invariably people never understand.
There are more exterior shots of the Enterprise in this film than in all the other TOS-era films combined, both in time and number. Hell, there's the drydock sequence, which all by itself has more shots of the Enterprise than in the entirety of
Star Trek V. The composition of the Enterprise shots is collectively extraordinary; nowhere else in Star Trek is the ship so well-documented visually. We get extreme distance shots, sometimes so far off that only the bare shape of the starship is discernible. Other shots are such extreme close-ups that you'd never tell it was the Enterprise without context. It's also the first time in Star Trek that humans appear on screen with the starship exterior, creating a sense of scale that doesn't appear again until
Star Trek: Generations. We see every side of the new Enterprise in this film, and in many different operating conditions. (Contrast that with
Star Trek: First Contact, where I never got a good idea of what the new Enterprise looked like.) As a result of the treasure trove of Enterprise exterior shots in this film, there are some visual mysteries introduced in this film that never get an answer: How long does it take for the warp core to "heat up," resulting in the deflector dish going from brown to blue? What are the conditions under which the warp nacelles are lit up? (Subsequent films assumed "only at warp speed," but that isn't true in this film.)
The music and visual effects are the most technically proficient aspects of the film. To be honest with you, I have yet to see better special effects in any movie than I saw in
The Motion Picture. That's right.
Any movie! That includes films which have executed much more complex visuals and computer graphics. The only part of the film that doesn't still look good today (if it ever did) is how Spock's body shakes as he floats back into Kirk's arms after melding with Vejur, and how the Klingon flotilla maintains exact formation throughout its evasive maneuvers (which looks artificial).
The paint job on the Enterprise is something we never saw in Star Trek before or since. It was so beautiful that the technology didn't exist at the time to film it properly:
While construction on the model was still in progress, Zuzana Swansea designed the surfacing detail for the saucer section, most notably what was to become the "Aztec pattern" (a hallmark for later classes of Federation star ships), however she lacked the painting skills to apply these details herself. In order to accomplish this, Dow contracted free-lance airbrush artist Paul Olsen early on to apply the paint job. Working on the model, starting with the dish, for the better part of eight months, the most striking part of his work was the application of a high-gloss pearlescent lacquer coating which gave the Enterprise a chameleon-like appearance in the movie, changing its color appearance depending on the kind and direction of lighting. The "Aztec pattern", for example, was only visible if the light hit the model at an oblique angle ("I used four pearl colors that were transparent: a blue, a gold, a red, and a green... they all flip-flopped to their complements when the viewing angle changed. Beautiful. By varying the amount of color, and the mixture of several colors on top of each other, I obtained myriad colors and depth of color.", Olsen later remembered. [43]) Though considered magnificent, the paint job caused some trouble for Douglas Trumball in shooting the model. As Olsen remembers on his website, "Dear old Doug drew me aside with one of his big grins and said, "Paul, it's terrific, but we may have problems shooting it because I think we'll get light kicks off the edges of the model." The model was so bright and so colorful that light flare against the black background she would be shot against would make it impossible to isolate the edges of the model from the background so a star field or planet fall or other effect could be photographically dropped (matted) in cleanly. They would have to shoot the model with low light, which would cool the reflections and all the model detail as well. There are still some shots where the opalescence can be seen, but the real thing looked so much better than can be seen in the movie."[44] Olsen was assisted by Magicam's Ron Gress, who worked on the secondary hull.
Source.[/url]
The Enterprise in future Trek films was simply gray.
The Motion Picture stands in contrast to the original series in that it's so much darker, luminously speaking. The TOS Enterprise was well-lit all the time, usually from all angles. In this film, the strongest lights on the Enterprise were often the Enterprise's own running lights. Indeed, there's a subtle but classic mistake at the end of the film: As the Enterprise clears Vejur, we see the daylight side of the Earth below it, but the only light on the starship saucer is from the Enterprise itself. Motion pictures always had more discretion to use high contrast lighting than television, because of the superior level of detail available, and TMP used its license to the fullest extent. A lot of the film has murky lighting, because the ship is inside Vejur. This stands in contrast to the brightly lit Enterprise interior. There's also the scene of sunrise as the Enterprise leaves drydock, another artistic contrast that would reappear many years later in the opening titles to
Star Trek: Voyager. (Incidentally, don't think that TMP didn't influence the naming of that ship. Star Trek had become notoriously self-referential by that point.)
I could go on and on about how much I love the visual details of the film, and the technical details, but, like I said with the music, there's more to this film's excellence than just the sights and the sounds. These are the strongest components of the film from an objective viewpoint, but even the film's maligned plot and direction deserve a rousing defense, I think.
There's a slur for TMP: "Where Nomad has gone before." This is because TMP's plot is based on the backstory of the probe Nomad from "The Changeling" in TOS. That strikes me as an intellectually dishonest criticism, because some of our greatest stories are ripoffs (i.e., retellings) of earlier stories. Indeed,
most of our stories are ripoffs. These days it's even en vogue to "reboot" movie franchises, including Star Trek itself. There are many metrics on which to judge a story; "derivative" status is not one of the more significant ones.
A much bigger slur directed at TMP is that it's boring. That faction has dominated the Star Trek fandom for a long time, and they got their way. Look at what DS9 degenerated into: a soap opera with huge space battles and cheap drama. The new Star Trek film isn't even science fiction; it's action. Can I point out that I found the new film almost as boring as many of its fans found TMP? The good thing about Star Trek is that there's room for both of us; the franchise has had some huge paradigm shifts over its lifespan, and I'll always be able to return to something like TMP or the early seasons of TNG, while fervently ignoring that things like
Star Trek: Nemesis and
Star Trek: Enterprise ever existed in series canon.
The Motion Picture is a thinking person's work. So is
The Wrath of Khan, but TMP's intellectualism is more cerebral; TWoK's is more literary. It's the philosophical ideas in TMP that are biggest of all. Even Vejur isn't as big as the idea of human exploration into the unknown. TMP had no villain, no space battle (Klingons notwithstanding), no cheap dramatic teasers. It's a film with a singular purpose: To highlight what humanity is capable of doing. Humanity was partially responsible for Vejur in the first place, and humanity was able to confront Vejur on its own merits. There was no powerful alien who came to the rescue. There was no deus ex machina (which is ironic in a film that bears witness to the creation of a literal deus ex machina). The Enterprise prevailed because humanity had a Starfleet, because Spock was good at warp science and computer science, because the ship's library had a cache of old NASA records, and because Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were able to comprehend the machine's inner struggle for a subjective experience. That's it.
This film is about what humanity is capable of doing. The relaxed uniforms and absence of cultural tensions present among the mixed crew of the Enterprise--mixed sex, mixed ethnicity, mixed species--were a strong suggestion, never stated outright, that the prejudices of today will only be with us for as long as we want them to be around. They aren't inherent to our speciary condition; they're just an example of what else we are capable of doing. If you ask people why they love Star Trek, you'll get a generational divide. The fans of the older Trek like its optimism and utopian ideals. The fans of the newer Trek like its battles. Those two objects of affection are irreconcilable. The Federation of TMP hadn't lost its fighting spirit. The red alert effect in the ship was much more powerful than that of TOS. The crew watched the deaths of their fellows when Epsilon IX was erased. And Kirk was prepared to blow up his beloved ship to save the world. Clearly this was an Enterprise capable of war. But war isn't what won the day, and that's a lesson so subtle that most people seem never to comprehend it. Like Picard said of the Romulans, if it ever came to a fight the Enterprise would defend itself, but, if it did come to that, they shall already have failed in their mission.
That truth transcends Star Trek. You need a strong military so that you will never have to use it. You need that military to be defanged of opportunists and machismo so that its servicemembers won't get the wrong idea about their own significance. But militaries are only there to preserve order, not to create a better future. The way to "win" is to awaken people's potential through a just and equitable society. Any liberalism or conservatism that strays from the overriding imperative of human betterment is invalid. Smart people with good tools and social backing will invent a superior solution every time. If Kirk had done his job better in the first place, Khan would never have threatened the Federation with Genesis. It wouldn't have come down to who had the stronger ship and superior tactical knowledge. Don't you think our civilization will be better off if superior ideas determined the outcome of conflicts, rather than superior weapons? The Enterprise's shields saved it from Vejur's attack, and its photon torpedoes saved it from the wormhole, but it was critical thinking that ultimately saved the world.
If you have ever gotten a sense of wonder from stargazing, or peoplewatching, or touring museums...this is the film for you. It's a story that actually takes you out to the stars, to learn about human nature, and to discover what is possible by learning about what has already come to pass.
Yeah, so, this is the right thread for my raving. The music in this film is brilliant, and it's only a part of the film's wider genius. I'll grant any day that it's a strain on people with short attention spans, low levels of curiosity, or underdeveloped brains. I'll grant that the production schedule prevented the film from being more tightly directed. (But that in itself is not a bad thing: Legend has it that the drydock sequence exists only because they didn't have time to edit it down.) And of course there could have been a stronger literary dimension. Yet...no Star Trek film besides this one captures the essence of that sentiment which the movie itself says at the end: The human adventure is just beginning.
You can look at our present existence in several ways. Some people call it a culmination of history, a cultural evolution into overcomplexity and debauchery that will ultimately result in a catastrophic contraction of our civilization or the outright extinction of it. Some people call it a passing age, a historical anomaly of airplanes and computer chips. I prefer to see it as a transitional point in our evolution. I don't think that the future will actually look like Star Trek, but I do think that up to this point we have been dominated by nature's power and by our own passions, and from here on out, barring a cataclysm, we will be dominated by our own sense of destiny. All the intractable evils of today--faith-based thinking, capitalistic excess, fat-bashing, military posturing, cynical politics, sexism--are profoundly ephemeral. I think we will learn that soon by personally witnessing the dawning of universal opportunity. Not you and I, probably, but we can help be among the last generations of people engaged to create that dawn.
