Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

An original movie poster in 1979; the cast of ST:TMP (L-R) 1st row- , Persis Khambatta (Lt. Ilia), George Takei (Lt. Cmdr. Hikaru Sulu). 2nd row- Stephen Collins (Capt. Willard Decker), Majel Barrett (Dr. Christine Chapel), Leonard Nimoy (Cmdr. Spock), James Doohan (Cmdr. Montgomery Scott), William Shatner (Adm. James T. Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. Leonard McCoy), Grace Lee Whitney (CPO Janice Rand), Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Cmdr. Nyota Uhura), Walter Koenig (Lt. Pavel Chekov); the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 in Spacedock; the Enterprise bridge; V'Ger's probe scanning the bridge, its crew and computers; nameplate on V'Ger.
Summary

After the animated series, the producers became more serious in their work, and set a new goal - to create a Star Trek movie. Production began in the late 1970's, however, the movie was not released in time to rival a newcomer, later known as "Star Wars", which hit theaters earlier in 1979. Although the movie, entitled Star Trek: The Motion Picture, generated the most revenue out of all of the next nine Trek movies that would follow after it, many fans were not happy with the flick. To some, the storyline was boring, involving an attempt to save Earth from NASA's own Voyager probe, which had been discovered and reprogrammed by a highly advanced mechanized culture at some point after the probe's departure from the Solar System. Its original programming - to record all information that it could in its journey was augmented by the advanced race, who sent it out once again to record everything in the known galaxy. Over time, the probe amassed such a great knowledge that it transformed into a massive life form. When its journey was complete, Voyager reverted to a section of its original programming and headed back to Earth to return its accumulated baggage.

By this time, it was the mid-23rd century, 2271 to be exact. It had been four centuries since Voyager left from Earth. Nobody knew what became of it, nor they care. One of the Federation's listening posts on the Klingon Neutral Zone, Epsilon Nine, detected a monstrous entity approaching Federation space with a direct heading for Earth. The station continued to monitor the entity as it attacked three Klingon cruisers that had intercepted and attacked it , even recording the enormous electrical output from 'the cloud' as it vaporized the ships with no difficulty. Just before the station was destroyed by the cloud, it alerted Earth of the impending danger it faced. Who else but the Enterprise under the experienced command of Admiral James T. Kirk, could save Earth? Duh! After pulling the refitted Enterprise from Spacedock, Kirk and crew sped off for the cloud. The current captain of the ship, Will Decker, was not at all pleased to have the famous admiral take back his ship. Spock, home on Vulcan on a spiritual cleansing, the Kolinahr, returned to the Enterprise halfway to Voyager onboard a Vulcan courier ship, reinstating his Starfleet commission once onboard.

The Enterprise approached the cloud, as Voyager sent an electrical beam to the ship as a scanning method. Feeding off information from the ship's computers, it also abducted Ilia, a new Deltan navigation officer, whose clone returned to the ship to gather information about its inhabitants, who were to be converted from carbon-based beings to 'storage units' of pure energy. The Ilia clone interacted with the crew, notably with Kirk and Will Decker, Ilia's fiancee, serving as a conduit to Voyager itself. Spock took a thruster suit into the interior to the cloud to mind-meld with its core, a process that resulted in the massive transfer of information that blasts Spock back to the Enterprise and gives him mild neural trauma. Meanwhile, the probe now known as V'Ger, by the Ilia clone, arrived at Earth and began signaling for its Creator. Since the transmission was in the form of archaic radio waves, the signal was not received or acknowledged. The Ilia clone, speaking for V'Ger, demanded to know why the Creator was not answering.

V'Ger came to the conclusion that the 'carbon-based beings' had infested the planet, and started firing electrical surges at Earth. Kirk stalled for time and told the Ilia clone directly that he knew why the Creators had not answered, and that he would say it only to V'Ger itself. V'Ger tractored to the center of the cloud, where V'Ger itself sat. A breathable nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere was created, and a walkable field of 'living stones' created for the away team and the Ilia clone to travel from the ship. Upon arriving at the sunken pit where V'Ger sat, Kirk learned that it was an old human-constructed space probe. Rubbing off a burnt-residue on a nameplate, Kirk spelled out Voyager VI, and remembered it as a exploratory space probe sent out from Earth in the mid-twentieth century. At once, he instructed the crew on the Enterprise to send out a response to the probe on a radio frequency, which in turn initated the data transfer process. V'Ger wished to merge more fully with its Creator. The Ilia clone combined with Decker on his consent to create a being of pure energy which left as the probe and its surrounding cloud began to disintegrate around the Enterprise. The Enterprise sped off, well out of harm's way.

I have to say that the special effects were better than in the television series, and despite the fact that the Enterprise underwent a massive overhaul and restructuring, the uniforms worn by the crew were hidious, resembling oversized white pajamas. The producers took this major mistake into account by the time that the next Trek film was filmed.









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