Speaking of childhood traumas, those damn ear worm things haunted me as a kid…
How many days until Khan? I should not shortcut the time in the spotlight of ST:TMP but I’m ready to watch me some Khan. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Soon?
I had mixed feelings about this when I first saw it in the theater at 14. I was ecstatic to see new Star Trek for the first time since TAS. I loved the Enterprise flyby. Every moment of it was pure joy to a kid who started building models of the Enterprise when he was 8 years old. Even then I thought the V’ger fly-in was far, far too long, and having a personal investment in wanting more Trek it bothered me that that was going to bore mainstream audiences. :)
I was also disappointed that the main conflict in the script was a rehash of the TOS episode The Changeling, with the “Roykirk” confusion changed to “Voyager” confusion. I’d hoped to see something original. In retrospect, given some of the other movie ideas that preceded it, it could have been much worse.
Still, it was an epic film, the first live-action Trek we’d gotten in 10 after years of teasing things like the *Star Trek: Phase II" TV series, and overall I enjoyed it. But I liked Wrath of Khan sooo much more.
I was such a hardcore Trekkie as a kid that I bought the Foster/Roddenberry novelization of this before the movie actually hit theaters. (I think it came out about a week before.) Read the whole thing beforehand, which helped fill in some of the gaps y’all mention. (As well as some other cool stuff, like confirming that Decker is the son of Commodore Decker from The Doomsday Machine.)
Nope, GregB. Star Trek never overplayed the womanizer thing until the Abrams movies. It didn’t even become a “thing” people really called out until the 80’s or 90s when TV parodies started mocking it, because it wasn’t an uncommon trait for a single leading man in shows of the era. According to a Star Trek fan with plenty of time on his hands, he slept with 3-4 women over 72 episodes, with another 3-4 “possibly” dalliances.
As to the actual reason (per the novelization, cowritten by Foster and Roddenberry), Ilea is a Deltan. She’s also Decker’s ex. Deltans are a hot and sexy 70’s sexual liberation culture, and they emit very, very strong pheromones. Thus, the “oath of celibacy” comment. Unfortunately they cut much of the scene out that established Decker and Ilea’s past together, which lessens the impact of their eventual merging at the end of the film.
She ended up okay., but apparently decided to get away from transporters :) She was a communications officer at Starfleet Command in San Francisco in ST IV: The Voyage Home" and was Sulu’s Communications Officer on the Excelsior in The Undiscovered Country.
Again, from the novelization, Chekov is the Weapons/Security Officer. Used to be that was the helmsman’s duty, but on the refit they made it its own station. You’d think they’d make the weapons officer station less explosive, but nope.
The designers thought the primary colors (which were designed to show off newfangled color TVs of the day, as TOS was originally shown when some shows were still B&W) were too cartoony and wanted to tone them down. Originally everyone’ uniforms were going to be the two-tone like Kirk’s, but Robert Wise wanted them to be monochromatic.
The jumpsuits were apparently horribly uncomfortable, you needed help from Wardrobe to remove them to go to the bathroom (the cast insisted on a redesign for later films), and I still remember the jokes at the time about Decker’s “Captain’s Log.”
Also, that thick thing on the belt area that looks like a communicator or hand-phaser? It was a life support monitor. Star Trek must take place in a universe where the Apple Watch was never invented.
I watched this with my 10 year old on Saturday. I didn’t want to spoil the big reveal at the end so he kept saying that he “couldn’t wait to see the alien at the middle of the ship” at the end. He was somewhat bemused by idea of Vger’s origins and why it couldn’t (wouldn’t) understand who the Creator was.
The deep tones of the music within Vger “creeped (him) out.”
I personally liked that they never tried to visually show the scale of the alien ship from the outside, which I think a more ham-handed director may have insisted upon.
This movie always seemed to me to be the last effort to try to tell the types of SF stories that Twilight Zone and the ST original series presented. I’m not well versed enough in the topic to know if this correlates with the end of the New Wave of sci-fi or whatever, or if it was just that Star Wars bulldozed everything.
Wow. Learn something new every day.
Preach. I’m thinking I might actually skip that part when I show it to the kids. The transporter thing is horrible, but the thing burrowing in and out of ears? That was a one way ticket to Nightmaretown for me.
Definitely soon. I’ve been loving the discussion so far. I was thinking each movie should get either 5 days or 7 days for discussion. If it’s 5 days, we can get done with all 6 in a month. But maybe that will short change some movies so that don’t get any weekend time period for discussion at all, namely Star Trek 3. But on the other hand, it’s Star Trek 3, so maybe that’s okay?
Yeah, I’m not sure what to think of that section. As a young person, when I first saw the movie, it was even longer since I saw the super long version. And it was way, way too long, it kills the momentum of the movie. But in the intervening years, I’ve grown to really appreciate movies that take their time actually let us sit there and absorb and ponder. Kubrik is especially good at this.
As to Star Trek’s V’Ger section? I’m not so sure. The music definitely defines that section and makes it enjoyable. I could see perhaps being overcome with curiosity and wonder during that section if I was maybe older but also viewing that section for the first time.
It’s still incongruous with the rest of the movie though. The pace of the movie is slow in general, but nevertheless there’s a lot of dialog and a lot of drama, and then suddenly there’s this looooooooong sequence that essentially takes up half the movie. I’m all for trying to provoke wonder and curiosity but does it really deserve to be half of the screen time, essentially? I’m not sure.
There’s this Ebert quote I always think of when discussing movies I love (or hate, but I don’t really bother discussing those much): a good movie is never long enough, and a bad movie is never short enough. I loved everything this movie was showing me, all the wonder and spectacle of whatever the hell Vger was. It never registered as momentum-killing to me. But of course if it’s not your thing, I can see how it would be interminable.
I see you shivering with antici
I find it very hard to see TMP as anything other than Star Trek: Hey Guys Did You See 2001?
pation!
A few things stuck out for me on rewatching this.
9.5-year-old Tin Wisdom was not exactly fully dialed in on everything that happened in this movie when he saw it in the theaters. I found most of it to be pretty boring, actually. I had seen Star Wars in the theater the summer before, but I was a big enough Trek fan (via my mother, who watched it whenever it was on) that I knew not to expect lots of zipping fighters – Trek was all about capital ships.
Back then, I thought that the scene with the Klingon D7s was amazing – the music, the action, the ships. And I still do. The effects haven’t aged too well, but the music is still the foundation for practically every Klingon score made since. My mother had the soundtrack on vinyl, and I played and replayed the Klingon theme hundreds of times.
Actually, this scene is a great case-study for how amazingly influential this movie was on all the later Trek shows and movies. This was our first glimpse into the “new” Klingons, and of course TNG, DS9 and Voyager all kept the exact same costuming and general prosthetic designs. Likewise the general Klingon “hexagonal” equipment and displays – that followed into the Trek computer games of the 90s and 2000s too.
But beyond that, look at the photon torpedoes in this scene. Pretty much every version of that weapon to this day keep that same general aesthetic: Orange with the little “rays” flashing out to the sides.
This was mentioned a little later I think - Kirk asks/notes that she is a Deltan, a race whose people basically ooze sex appeal (via pheromones or telepathy or something), and sexual contact with a human carries the very real danger of driving the human insane. As such they have to obey strict codes of conduct if they want to serve in Starfleet.
Remember that ST:TMP was based off a pilot script for “Star Trek Phase II”, the reboot/relaunch of the series. It was only turned into a movie when Star Wars showed Paramount that sci-fi could make big money on the big screen. And Ilia was originally conceived of as a new crew member and regular character for that series; all that Deltan stuff was going to be fleshed out in the series… she was kind of the anti-Vulcan, from a race that fully embraced emotions and sensuality.
And that was another thing that 9.5-year-old Tin Wisdom lacked the… wisdom… to appreciate. The sexual themes in this movie. Christ, there’s a clitoris around every corner, at the end of every tunnel, and just behind every “orifice”. The entire resolution of the plot involves figuring out how to properly find and interface with the little pink sensor nestled into the hollow of Ilia’s throat.
Which of course ended up as Troi in TNG, with Decker turning into Riker.
Yeah, exactly. I’m not the biggest Riker fan, but I think the TNG writers did some decent stuff with him, especially in later seasons.
Troi though… ugh. If they had kept the character as a Deltan (or something similar) they could have had a good time pointing out how repressed humans (i.e., Americans) were with their silly sexual hang-ups. Instead, we got a couple seasons of Troi “sensing anger” in the people that were shooting at them, and maybe two episodes where they let Marina Sirtis take center stage with her character.
That wouldn’t really work on a show whose creators and executives had those same hang-ups. Go look at some of the production commentary on any episode of TNG or DS9 that got anywhere near the topic of sex.
This is not to say they shouldn’t have done better by the character, of course. As I’ve said before, Sirtis is so much better than the material she’s given in TNG. It’s a crime, really.
One of the things I certainly learned during our re-watch of Star Trek The Original Series is that the show was clearly anti-hippy and seemed to be very conservative overall. How much the show was against free love and the sexual revolution, I’m not sure. Kirk seemed very open-minded in terms of being attracted to green women and falling in love with women who were androids, for instance.
We are also talking about a show formed during Reagan-era America, too. Even if Roddenberry had been game, there’s no way in hell Paramount or many of the TV stations they sold TNG to in syndication would have allowed it.
Now that I think about it, it’s kind of surprising that neither Picard nor STD have brought back Deltans, considering how obsessed both shows are with a) callbacks to previous shows, and b) being edgy.