Star Trek Movie Most Worth Skipping Isn’t The Worst

What do I mean when I say it’s the least important movie “from a completist point of view?” Well, when it comes to stories that unfold before and after Star Trek: The Motion Picture, all the film’s biggest developments change things that—if you never watched TMP to begin with—you would never know need changing.

For example, both Spock and Bones return to Starfleet duty which, yes, are important developments. But since the officers were serving aboard the Enterprise at the end of both Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, you wouldn’t even know they left the ship if you never started watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

By the end of film Captain Decker (Stephen Collins) and Ilia (Persis Khambatta) are gone, but if you never hit “Play” you’d never know they existed in the first place.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is often jokingly called the “motionless” picture and, yeah, there’s a good reason for that. Purely in terms of pacing, it feels like director Robert Wise took a lot of inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and no, that’s not a compliment.

Of course, there is the infamous sequence in which Scotty flies Kirk around the docked Enterprise—a sequence that lasts a few minutes but feels long enough that Shatner would’ve gone through three or four different hairpieces to film it.

But that’s hardly the end. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is largely an exercise in spending lots of money on VFX and then making it your top priority to let the audience know you spent lots of money on VFX.

As soon as Enterprise and her crew gets underway on their mission to stop V’Ger, the film becomes filled with sequences that only have two kinds of shots—shots of impressive VFX, and shots of the heroes looking at the monitor to be shocked at the impressive VFX.

I like to think of the difference between watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the other Trek movies like the difference between listening to an album by a great rock band and listening to an instrumental album by a solo rock guitarist like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai.

The former will hopefully give you endless hours of entertainment, while the latter at best will make you think, “I could not do this, it’s impressive.” And you will be impressed, but you’ll never so much as tap your foot while you listen.

In recent years, more fans have been giving Star Trek: The Motion Picture a second chance. Some of them have concluded that, in truth, TMP is the only “real” Star Trek movie. It is, the argument goes, the only Trek movie that stays true to Gene Roddenberry’s vision, and that actually feels like an episode of The Original Series.

There’s some merit there, but I have two responses.

First, when it comes to films based on properties that were originally television series, there’s nothing more disappointing than a movie that just feels like the creators took an episode, made it longer, and spent more money. A perfect example is 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection, which feels like nothing but a slightly longer episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Second, while conceptually Star Trek: The Motion Picture may be more like an episode of The Original Series, it doesn’t feel like one. It’s slow, boring, and insults your intelligence the same way Zack Snyder’s constant slo-mo does—-letting you know with each long, snooze-worthy shot, “you’re too dumb to realize this is important on your own.”

There are worse movies in the franchise than Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier which taught the world that, when it came to directing, William Shatner was a good actor. There’s Star Trek: Generations which got revenge on Shatner by killing off his character in the dumbest way the franchise could manage.

There’s Star Trek: Nemesis which has too many faults to pick only one, and there’s Star Trek Into Darkness, which let the world know exactly what it would look like if Michael Bay made a Trek film.

But no film in the franchise is more utterly skippable than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, unless you need a sleep aid.