45 Years Later, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” Remains One of the Franchise’s Highlights

There’s an old joke among Star Trek fans about how only the even-numbered films in the franchise are good. And while it’s hard to argue against the quality of The Wrath of Khan (1982) or The Voyage Home (1986), this attitude does a huge disservice to the film that started it all: Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Despite fans warming up to it over the years, the overall reactions to this 1979 sci-fi epic remain mixed. Of course, no one can debate another person into enjoying something that just wasn’t their cup of Raktajino, but there ARE elements in Star Trek: The Motion Picture that make a convincing argument for how, in order to be no. 1, you have to be odd-numbered. On its 45th anniversary, here are all the things the first Star Trek movie got right and then some.

The Scale of the Antagonist

Star Trek: The Motion Picture deals with the mysterious space entity V’Ger that can destroy some of the most advanced ships and space stations in a matter of seconds. As the possibly-sentient cloud of energy heads towards Earth, Admiral Kirk assumes command of a refurbished Enterprise to contact the entity because of his years of experience dealing with unknown threats. But no one has dealt with anything like V’Ger before.

Described as being 82-astronomical-units in diameter, more than twice the distance from the Sun to Pluto, the V’Ger cloud boggles the human mind with its size that defies language. “Leviathan” has the right nuance of overwhelming eldritch terror to it, but the scale is all wrong. “Astronomical” has the opposite problem. We’ve simply never seen anything as impossible as V’Ger in Star Trek, and that’s before the Enterprise ventures inside the cloud.

There, we discover that V’Ger is a living machine the size of the Solar System, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture thankfully gives us a lot of time to take it all in because there is so much “it” for the taking. Millions of miles of cables that stretch like techno-veins. Grates the size of planets that seem to mimic biological tissue. Oblong, eye-like shapes that would dwarf some moons. Electric discharges that bring to mind neurons firing in a brain the size of Jupiter. More metal than you can find in the entire Solar System shaped into what looks like the bones of God.

All of this exists not just for the sake of spectacle but to get to the very core of Star Trek. The show and the movies take place during a utopian era where we can present the best of humanity while constantly coming into contact with new planets, species, and cultures that remind us that humanity is just one tiny part of the known universe. Normally, this is used to inspire hope, which is present in the movie, but here it’s also accompanied by a sense of humility in the face of the realization of just how small our species really is in the grand order of things.

The Joyous Geeking Out

A common complaint about the first Star Trek movie is its runtime, which some fans feel has too many prolonged of the new Enterprise. The original series certainly never did anything like that. But that was more of a budget issue. Star Trek captured the hearts of generations with its gripping storytelling, not its special effects, lest we forget the time the show put a plastic horn on a dog and called it an alien (TOS: “The Enemy Within.) Things were different with the movie, which had the money to construct detailed models that anyone would want to proudly show off.

There is real love to how the new Enterprise is presented on screen for the first time. First, we see glimpses of it from the side between the pylons of a space dock; little teases slowly building to a full frontal view when the Star Trek theme swells up and it’s like we’re witnessing the return of an old friend. The Enterprise is supposed to be the best ship in Starfleet and the pinnacle of human engineering. It’d be weird not to geek out over it like the cinematography does. There is also something inspiring about knowing that human hands built this Enterprise and other ships/stations in the movie. In an era of regurgitated AI “art,” Star Trek: The Motion Picture remains a powerful tribute to human creativity through its practical effects.

The Best Romance in Star Trek History and a Celebration of Humanity

Star Trek can do romance well, like using the love between a husband and wife to construct a powerful backstory for Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine. But nowhere has romance been as important to the plot as in the first Star Trek movie where V’Ger turns out to be a Voyager probe that landed on a planet of sentient machines that fixed it all up and sent it back to its “Creator,” which is where the romance part comes in.

In order to communicate with the crew of the Enterprise, V’Ger creates a humanoid probe based on the brain patterns of Starfleet officer Ilia (Persis Khambatta). She and the original captain of the Enterprise whom Kirk replaced—the very capable Will Decker (Stephen Collins)—have an entire thing going on throughout the movie. Their history is summed up in a few sentences but the little smiles they give each other, his screams when Ilia is “killed” and brought back in machine form, or him reaching out to the probe’s human side all point to a powerful connection between the characters. In the end, Decker sacrifices himself to merge with V’Ger, allowing it to become one with its Creator and spare Earth. The scene can be celebrated as a supreme act of bravery and a desire to be with the one you love by any means necessary but there was much more to it.

V'Ger’s NEED to merge with its Creator started out as an over-interpretation of the probe’s programming directive to collect data and send it back to Earth. After it developed consciousness and collected all possible kinds of physical data, it needed more. It needed to know if there was more to existence. It needed to believe in other dimensions or higher levels of consciousness, which cannot be proven logically. But they can be imagined. For all its mechanical perfection, V’Ger and the living machines are “barren” because they cannot imagine. In order to be more, they need the power of illogical human imagination, which is what Decker gives them.

Star Trek has long celebrated technology as a path to humanity being our highest selves but always emphasized that we shouldn’t lose what makes us special in the process: our ability to turn our greatest weaknesses into our greatest strengths. And that’s the movie in a nutshell: a challenging, beautiful ode to the core tenets of Star Trek for the last 45 years.