Things Star Trek:The Motion Picture Got Right

Like what? I think the movie is solid throughout.

All the long fan service shots of the ship and of vger.

The tour around the Enterprise was great!

So are tits, but that doesn't mean that you devote a significant amount of the movie to them as opposed to the actual plot.

Maybe you don't.

Heathen.

Gene Roddenberry was a tremendous horndog and pervert, if he could have shown the Deltan orgies instead of implying them, he would have.

What I would've liked to see as far as Kirk and Decker was Kirk being forced into the Enterprise assignment as a "mission specialist" or "senior advisor" some such. Then something happens to Decker and Kirk is reluctantly thrust into command of the ship again. At the end, he realized how much he misses being the captain.

When the Ferengi were being planned for Star Trek: The Next Generation Gene Roddenberry was supposedly proposing that they be given enormous cod pieces in their costumes indicating they had meter long penises.

Roddenberry reportedly was excitedly explaining in graphic detail all the positions the Ferengi would be capable of to one of the other producers who shot him down by pointing out "Gene, this is a FAMILY show".

Apparently, Roddenberry's enthusiasm for ST:TNG cooled considerably. He had been led to believe that "first run syndication" meant "do anything".

Sounds plausible, given that Troi was originally meant to have 4 breasts (or was it 6?)

The Klingon attack music may just be the best few minutes of music in any Trek, ever.

The font.

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Why not? There is more to movies than plot.

Enterprise deserved her re-introduction to the fans too, she's just as much of a character as the trinity.

So what if it's under 5 minutes? It's still longer than it should be, which is what makes it a fan service scene. It's also not the only one.

There's this thing called story pacing that shouldn't be disrupted by long segments of nothing. This is especially true in movies, because they don't have as much time to tell their story or to develop their characters.

The introduction was too long, and the ship had plenty of time in the spotlight. While I don't mind fan service, dragging it on too long is something a movie or TV show can do wrong, and since the question was what TMP got wrong, well there you go.

It isn't nothing. Many of the best films have "slower" parts. Did the space waltz in 2001 disrupt the story pacing?

The fucking Enterprise was going to be spotlighted the whole movie as it slowly cruised through v'ger. On top of that boring ass shit, we had to watch 5 minutes of Kirk flying around the thing in a tin can. It's too long. Everything about that film was too long.

No, but they could have halved the Dawn of Man and been no worse off for it.

And that was reportedly the intention of the director (Robert Wise wasn't it?).

He deliberately wanted the "2001 feel".

But lets be honest.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released AFTER Star Wars. It was made into a movie because of Star Wars.

People went into the movie with Star Wars still on their minds.

When they didn't get at least one kick ass dogfight many were bound to be disappointed.

And I'll be honest, I think Stephen Collins "Captain Decker" was written poorly. Collins is just fine as an actor, but I think the movie deliberately tried to make Decker look week so the audience would be cheering Kirk on.

The movie would've had a lot more drama and tension if Decker was clearly written as a formidable captain in his own right. Someone who had the confidence of both the old and the newer crew members.

In the decision to weaken Decker, ironically The Motion Picture did the exact same thing as was done in "The Doomsday Machine" with Decker's father.

In "The Doomsday Machine" Decker was supposed to be played by Robert Ryan and not be a shell shocked captain but one seething with rage at the Doomsday Machine. In the original script, Decker wasn't found sitting slumped over a viewscreen unconscious but standing, glaring at a viewscreen in a rage.

But it was thought that a powerful, angry obsessed character would overshadow Kirk and the producers did not want that.

I think in TMP, a conscious decision was made that Decker not be any kind of character that fans would like or respect.

He had to be grossly inferior to Kirk.

That also dramatically weakened Decker's sacrifice at the end. He was basically completely redshirt expendable and everyone knew it. So his sacrifice mean little or nothing.

I think they were trying to follow the current Navy uniforms.
You have the dress blues and whites, and the work khaki - the drab uniform.

There is no such thing as too much gratuitous Enterprise footage.

Things Star Trek:The Motion Picture Got Right

everything

Yes, it was. Nothing happened other than Kirk checking out the ship. His character was not further developed and nothing happened to move the story forward.

It isn't slow pacing that makes it bad, it's wasting too much time with fan service that doesn't actually do anything for the movie.

Not nearly as much as all the landscape shots and the "dawn of man" bits from the beginning. But the movie, as a movie, probably could have done without such long extended shots. Some people love that kind of stuff, but then that's why it's called fan service.

So...um....the argument is that by adding bits to a film that the fans LIKE and WANT you...make a worse film...?

so the best movies are those which provide not "fan service" but "critic service" - right?

I presume you know what "pandering" means, right? Adding shots like that are pretty much the same in concept as adding a lot of nudity and sex in a movie. People might like seeing it, but it can still make the movie bad, particularly if the plot and characters are underdeveloped because of it.

"Can" make the movie bad? Yes. but not in every case. if the plot and characterization in TMP was weak (and I think the latter is only mildly so and that regarding Decker and Ilia only) then it was NOT because of the 4:44

in fact, a movie of that length could easily have been 4 minutes longer if that 4 minutes would have actually remedied the faults you cite.

i'd be very happy if they'd shaved 4 minutes (probably more like 10) out of the long tedious V'ger flyovers and not have lost 1/100th of the emotion I'd have lost without the bit I linked.

When I was seeing this film in the theaters as a 16 year old teenager in 1979 I was literally on the verge of tears of JOY during that scene. If i had to edit the thing down cutting the least essential bits first, I'd have it down to under half an hour before I even thought about cutting that scene.

I don't know how old you are, or whether you were of the generation that watched TOS in re-runs after school when there was no illusion that there would ever be any more Trek ever made, but speaking for that group -

"I WANT my fan service, I NEED my fan service!"

And you and Siskel and Ebert and whatever other sophisticated "I'm the film expert here" critic who doesn't like it can ...well....this ain't the Red Room.

Speaking as a Trek fan, I love the long, lingering ride around the Enterprise. The ship is one of the main characters, and needs a proper introduction.

But, if I distance myself and evaluate it as objectively as I can, then I'd say yes...about 30 seconds to a minute of the 4.75 minute tour should come out. Even the beautiful Jerry Goldsmith theme has to "rev back up" several times to keep it going and it's just too much.

See, if you don't like 2001, you've just abandoned all notions of credibility...

Audiences got the opening Klingon attack. That was exactly one kick-ass dogfight, which of course destroys your entire argument into tiny little pieces and grinds it into the dirt without mercy. Mwwuuuaaahahahahaha!!!!

TMP was made because of Star Wars, true. But it was made to be a more intelligent, thought-provoking scifi film like 2001 and I have no issue with that. The premise was closer to Trek than any of the other movies that came after it. The problem with TMP at the time is that the audiences were watching an unfinished film. Paramount, in their greed, rushed the film into theaters when it wasn't even finished. The original cut of the film was, in essence, still a rough cut with many SFX sequences missing, while others were just tacked on with no trimming for pacing. Hell, the film was still wet when it was rushed into theaters.

The re-released Director's Cut was a vast improvement in terms of pacing. They could have done a better job with the new SFX, but overall the movie felt more complete. Was it perfect? Hell no. Robert Wise may be a classic Hollywood Director, but his direction in the film felt almost amatuer and extremely stiff. The film also needed just a tad more humor, and Perses Kambata couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag. Still, the movie was epic, and like classic Trek focused more on the human condition rather than "kewl space battles".

I, for one, miss the intelligent scifi that Hollywood produced back in the 60's and 70's. I'll take 2001, TMP, Logans Run, The Andromeda Strain, and Silent Running anyday over shitfests like Transformers or the Star Wars Prequels.