There have been references to them in other shows, apparently. ST: Enterprise mentioned (but did not show) the Deltans. TNG had a picture of one in a holodeck episode. But these were all just “Easter Egg” type things.
Is it an entirely different species of aliens? Or is it humans who have settled on some place called Delta colony or something? That’s what I was wondering when I was watching the movie. But not for long, obviously. They didn’t put much emphasis on her Deltan identity. She might as well have been human with a shaved head.
They’re supposed to be aliens. You can tell, because they have no hair, which is totally different from humans, which DO have hair. Especially Shatner.
It’s a Turbo 2000.
I thought the novelization said that she shaved her head because if she had hair, that definitely would have driven the male crew horny-bonkers. And then they’d never get any work done!
The twenty-third century was definitely from a different time.
I did finish watching ST:TMP but forgot until just now to put my complete notes back in the thread. Having gone back through the whole thing, I’m just kind of amazed that this movie ever got made. It really is its own thing, definitely taking a lot of notes from Kubrick’s 2001. The whole time Spock was making his journey to the center of Vger I was thinking of Keir Dullea’s similarly trippy and colorful journey at the end of that movie. While I guess Star Wars is credited for giving Paramount the kick in the pants to finally get a movie off the ground, ST:TMP really doesn’t seem to take much inspiration from that movie. There are now pew-pew fights, not a lot in the way of whiz-bang effects, and no freaky looking aliens. I think the Ilia, representing the Deltans, is the only new alien species introduced. And she’s basically just a bald human.
But there are a bunch of details I never really picked up on before. Shatner makes some interesting choices with line readings, lots of little details that amused me. When Ilia-bot is returned to the Enterprise, Decker and crew try to convince her to consent to a body scan in med bay. She says basically that she wants to monitor normal carbon based activities. Shatner’s reply is to kind of look blankly into the distance and say, ‘The, uh … examination is normal activity for carbon units.’ It’s not a big thing, but kind of a funny way to say the line, as if Kirk is distracted at that moment. Or maybe Shatner was thinking about lunch. Who knows?
One other thing I couldn’t help wondering about while watching the movie - does anybody know why Vger is so big? Near the beginning they note that the cloud that surrounds Vger is something like 20 astronomic units across, and we are constantly shown the mass of Vger itself, and all the weird stuff it contains - all those representations of its journey, its origin planet, etc. It’s not explained in the movie as best I recall, maybe in the novelization or elsewhere, but why? Those images seem to be represented in nearly 1:1 to their original size but why? And where did Vger get all the materials to take on all that mass? I guess partly the reason is ‘it looks cool’ and seeing a room full of blade servers with a sticky note saying ‘Vgers memories here’ wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic. I just have to wonder if there’s an actual in-universe reason.
Also, I wish McCoy had kept his beard and Spock kept his long hair. It was the 70s, why not?
86 AU, iirc. It would have engulfed the solar system. ADF likes to write about big, cosmic threats. It’s the Tar-Aiym Krang (at least, as I remember the plot of that novel of which there is scant information online, it seems)
Oh yeah, the Alan Dean Foster Flinx book. I read that many moons ago. Barely recall it at all.
Google somehow knows I’ve been rewatching and discussing this movie. It’s pushed this Red Letter Media Star Trek: The Motion Picture re:View at me. I haven’t seen it yet, but I love these guys’ re:View of the top Star Trek: TNG episodes so I’ll definitely be watching this later today. Well done Google’s algorithm and spying on me.
In that video, ?MIke brings up the probe scene as being his favorite in the movie. I don’t think we discussed the probe scene in this thread yet. That was a really good scene. There were a few key scenes where there was a menace to the alien. One was the establishing Klingon scenes, where we learn that the threat is really dangerous. Then the Federation outpost scene that plays out in front of the whole crew. And then that probe scene, where the threat feels most immediate. And I have to say, it is kind of nice when you don’t know how on earth they filmed a scene. I really had no idea how they filmed this scene on the bridge with a pillar of light, but it looked really good, and it looked very very convincing, and that’s in 2021.
So back when the Star Trek movie came out in 2009, my son wanted to see it. So, being the good dad that I am, I told him that first we needed to watch all 79 episodes of TOS. And we did.
And then, once we were done, I told him he needed to watch the first four Star Trek movies. So we watched Star Trek: TMP through Voyage Home. After that, I asked him to rank the four movies, and he put The Motion Picture at the top of the list. He said it matched the tone of the series the most closely, and it was really hard to disagree with him.
Really? Like a lot of others have said, I think TMP tried way too hard to be ST: 2001. I’d say IV is probably the closest in tone to the ToS.
The humor in The Voyage Home has started grating on me over the years. Plus, Miss “All the Tea in China” is not a great actress.
I found the time to watch it this weekend–geez, I’m already a movie behind!
I just can’t bring the enthusiasm to it that many of you are. I saw it in theatre when it came out, and it was wonderful to see the franchise restored after being off the air for so long, but I really consider this movie a huge disappointment after waiting that long. Basically nothing happens that they have any agency over at all. It is a 2.5 hour long borefest. Lots of CG–and yeah, the first ride around the new ship is great–but the wormhole graphics are terrible, the new Warp graphics are terrible, the unitards they wear are for uni-tards. The hour-long ride through V’Ger that looks like 8-bit game console fractal nonsense now is WAY over the top.
Everyone is really stiff. The sets are not great and often don’t look finished. I found Decker to be a wet noodle. Why you wait over a decade and then just rehash the script from an TOS episode. Why in the hell you hire one of the worst SF authors out there to do the script anyway? Lots of clumsy dialog. Shatner at his most wooden (though admittedly that might be intentional).
And dying in a transporter malfunction has got to be the most embarrassing way to die in all of Starfleet.
TMP is a 1979 film. Beyond some bridge screens, there probably wasn’t any CG in it at all.
sorry, I should have said special effects.
AW YISS
What’s in the Director’s Edition? Hopefully a longer flyby of the Enterprise. I’m not joking.
Here’s a bunch of the changes that were involved in the Director’s Edition -