There were reports of a “multi-million dollar” film in the summer of 1976, now scripted by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant (the team behind Don’t Look Now), to start shooting in the spring of ’77. Paramount was paying attention, and that year the studio announced it would make a Trek film, with creator Gene Roddenberry writing the script.īut the journey to the big screen was hardly warp speed. In 1975, roughly 15,000 Trekkies converged on Chicago to sit at the feet of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the gang in the largest con yet. In a 1978 Boxoffice article that had no idea what was about to happen to Hollywood, it was touted as “probably one of the few pictures, if not the only one, made by overwhelming public demands by its fans.” The original Star Trek TV series went off the air in 1969, but as the show lived on in syndication its fandom only grew-a fire fueled by conventions. Of course, it was only because of the fans that the movie existed in the first place. (The 4K cut will also play in theaters in late May and come out on Blu-ray in September.) Whether a beautified print and a (now-dated) upgrade to its special effects will win any new converts is debatable, but if you’ve never seen it and you’re not a Star Trek fan, this is the movie for you. The film that detractors call “the motionless picture” gets a new hearing on Tuesday, Star Trek’s “First Contact Day,” as the 2001 director’s cut debuts on Paramount+ in a 4K restoration. The film is trying to ape 2001: A Space Odyssey, and so it thinks that what the audience wants is a slow, meditative motion picture, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it loses Trek’s greatest strength.” That’s where it shook out in a 2020 ranking by Collider, which argued that the “biggest problem with The Motion Picture is that it lost Star Trek’s sense of identity. There’s a dumb adage about the odd-numbered films ( I, III, V) being bad and the even-numbered ones being good, and most Trekkies rank this first feature, from 1979, at the bottom of the old Captain Kirk films, alongside 1989’s The Final Frontier (also about a search for the Creator). This is the opposite experience of most Trek fans, who seem to love TMP the least. And for me, every film that followed was a disappointment. You rent the first one from the nearest Blockbuster, pop the DVD in … and you get a patient, proper science-fiction film, a lengthy tone poem of visual and musical wonder with a compelling story about a search for the Creator. Imagine never having seen a frame of Trek in your life, then deciding in college that you want to watch all the movies with your friend- maybe to make fun of them, but then who knows, maybe you’ll emerge a baptized Trekkie.
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