In the modern media landscape of seemingly endless revivals inspired by nostalgia, it’s easy to overlook just how remarkable it was that Star Trek, a show that only achieved cult status in syndication, could have been revived via a big-screen continuation a full decade after it ceased production. Even stranger, Paramount not only greenlit the project but, after overruns, ended up devoting a then-record $44 million to making the film and preparing a never-materialized reboot series. For point of reference, the original Star Wars, which ran so over time and budget that it gained a reputation as a money pit prior to its lucrative box office release, came in at a mere quarter of the cost of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The result is a film flagrantly in love with its own opulence. Though helmed by classic Hollywood hired gun Robert Wise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture truly belongs to the various effects crew members whose work is lovingly spotlighted to the point of parody. For one, a scene that reintroduces the USS Enterprise to audiences consists of almost six minutes’ worth of long, slow shots that amble along the hull of a miniature. A significant percentage of the film consists of the actors gazing at screens where model spaceships, rotoscoped animation of energy waves, and other visual effects that were added in post-production. You might even say that the actors spend Star Trek: The Motion Picture more or less watching Star Trek.
The film remains fascinating for its strange marriage of reunion special and philosophical inquiry around an artificial intelligence’s search for its creators. The latter pays off in one of the most thoughtful stories to involve the original series cast, opening religious discussions that suggest that just as humans look to the unknown for answers of their own existence, our ability to program increasingly advanced synthetic life makes us gods of our own.
Such lofty philosophical ideas were always central to Star Trek, but in many ways the foregrounding of intellectual curiosity and analysis over whimsical adventure makes Star Trek: The Motion Picture less a logical continuation of the original TV series than the first stirrings of the more cerebral direction that Star Trek: The Next Generation would take the franchise in. Despite its generally mixed reception, this is the Stark Trek film that feels truest to Gene Roddenberry’s aspirations with the franchise, and Wise’s later-assembled director’s edition sharpens the film’s narrative and thematic points to make it a nearly great film.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture made enough money to justify a sequel, albeit one subject to much more script and budgetary scrutiny. The result, 1982’s leaner and meaner Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, is by leaps and bounds the most well-loved Star Trek film of any era. Reviving popular show villain Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán, reprising his role in the 1967 season one episode “Space Seed”), the film at once feels more concretely tethered to the series’s continuity and more representative of its action-adventure tone. Khan’s past dealings with the USS Enterprise gives him a better motive than most other Trek villains, and Montalbán’s performance strikes the perfect balance between operatic histrionics and a subtler, more chilling acumen. Though set in space, The Wrath of Khan has the feel of a naval thriller, namely for the way that each captain acts with consummate tactical skill throughout.
But it’s also a showcase for the actors, who seem much more comfortable and affectionate around each other than they were in the first film. Of particular note are Leonard Nimoy, who amps up Spock’s trademark nobility and calm in an act of self-sacrifice, and William Shatner, always the inveterate ham but who here dials down Captain Kirk’s histrionics to deliver a series of tender, moving tributes to his shipmates. Released in what’s often considered a high-water year for geek cinema, Wrath of Khan is one of the best pop movies of its time.
The critical acclaim and box office success of the film guaranteed the franchise’s survival, and Nimoy stepped behind the director’s chair for The Search for Spock, which picks up immediately after The Wrath of Khan with Kirk and his crew hitting upon a means of possibly resurrecting their fallen comrade. Narratively, the film forms the middle part of a trilogy, but stylistically and tonally it plays like an attempt to balance the blockbuster-driven urgency of the second film with the cerebral wonderment of the first. Alas, Nimoy doesn’t pull off that balancing act, with the film oscillating between a fun plot involving a renegade Klingon (Christopher Lloyd) and thuddingly obvious biblical images of Spock’s resurrection. Still, it’s a mercy that the actors get to do more than simply spew technobabble, and Shatner may put in an even better performance here than he did in the prior film. But it’s DeForest Kelley who steals the show as Dr. McCoy, who’s given ample space to grieve for his verbal sparring partner.
Nimoy doubles down on the strengths of the third film’s quiet hangout scenes with the loopy, character-driven comedy of 1986’s The Voyage Home. Of all the Star Trek films, this one feels the most like a big-budget television episode. The ludicrous premise finds the 23rd-century crew being sent back to the mid-1980s present, and the film sneaks a nakedly earnest environmentalist message into the depiction of the USS Enterprise’s “save the whales” mission.
The film leans into this ridiculousness with a comedic tone that’s at odds with the preceding installments. This could have been a miscalculation, but the cast all deliver hilarious performances, be it the huffy disgust in Shatner’s voice when Kirk mutters, “They’re still using money,” to himself, or the withering pity with which James Doohan’s engineer Scotty regards a computer that you still have to type commands into instead of simply saying what you want. A recurring subplot of Walter Koenig’s Russia-born Chekov affably ambling around a Reagan-era naval base inquiring about “nuclear wessels” is a riot. And with the emphasis taken off of special effects, the film puts more effort into its aesthetic presentation. Donald Peterman’s Oscar-nominated cinematography is a consistent delight, filming the bridge of the Klingon warship that the crew commandeers with an eerie beauty that highlights its rusty, dried-blood colors of dark red and brown, while the San Francisco exteriors dazzle with sunny, azure skies.
The entertaining high of The Voyage Home was unfortunately short-lived, as a series of behind-the-scenes nightmares, including aggressive budget cuts and not one but two union strikes, derailed an already rocky proposal for the fifth film, The Final Frontier. Helmed by an out-of-his-depth Shatner, the film astonishingly marks the third time that the original Star Trek series tackles religion, a bizarre decision for a franchise founded on idealistic secularism. The plot is too threadbare to support its themes, and major characters are rendered in self-contradictory terms, from a full-blooded but bafflingly emotional Vulcan revealed arbitrarily to be Spock’s half-brother, to a disgraced and bloated Klingon warrior who somehow easily diffuses tensions between Starfleet and his fellow Klingons who denounced him. The Final Frontier is a conceptual and structural mess, and it’s dragged down further by just how visibly the actors, already in their 40s during the shooting of the first film, have aged over a decade.
Seeking to right the franchise ship, Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer took the reins of the sixth film. Adopting a darker tone than the earlier installments, The Undiscovered Country depicts a collapsing Klingon Empire suddenly suing for peace with the Federation, an obvious allegorical stand-in for glasnost-era Soviet Union even before Kirk and McCoy end up in an alien gulag. Compared to the listless and contradictory plotting of the prior film, The Undiscovered Country is a taut political thriller, slowly turning into a conspiracy drama as forces on both sides of the war sabotage diplomatic efforts to maintain military readiness. This smartly puts the utopianism of Star Trek under a microscope, revealing the realpolitik beneath its surface. In much the same way the first film felt like a conceptual pitch for The Next Generation, this darker and more morally gray view of the franchise anticipates the series Deep Space Nine.
The sixth film nonetheless ends with an optimistic send-off for the original series crew, or at least it would have had the first Next Generation-led film, Generations, not ill-advisedly brought back Shatner for a more awkward passing of the torch. That step backward notwithstanding, the first six Star Trek films represent a shockingly consistent level of quality contrary to fans’ “the odd films are bad, the even films are great” axiom. Compared to the increasingly misguided revisionism of modern Star Trek properties, these movies grapple with serious conflicts and moral conundrums but retain the indefatigable belief in human scientific and philosophical advancement that powered Roddenberry’s creative vision.
Image/Sound
All six films (including the theatrical and director’s cuts of the first, second, and sixth films) look stellar on 4K and with Dolby Vision grading boosting their rich and diverse color schemes. Each movie looks significantly different from its peers, but all boast consistent levels of contrast and object detail as well as filmic grain distribution. Shots of the USS Enterprise moving through space show off deep black levels with no crushing artifacts. Each film comes with the original soundtracks as well as the 7.1 surround mixes used for their 2016 Blu-ray releases, which might potentially frustrate some fans hoping for new Atmos tracks. But these mixes are still superb, ably managing sound effects, music, and dialogue in all channels with no distorting overlap. The only outlier in the audio department is the director’s cut of the first film, which received additional remastering prior to this release and was given an Atmos mix. This soundtrack is indeed the best of the lot, calling particular attention to this cut’s addition of ambient noise aboard the Enterprise to reflect the constant hum of its massive engines.
Extras
Paramount has repeatedly reissued these movies on video, and over the years the distributor has slowly accumulated a formidable amount of extras, all of which are presented here on top of, impossibly, some brand new documentaries and other bonuses. Each film comes with multiple commentary tracks from cast and crew, as well as ones with later Star Trek-related figures like Ronald D. Moore and the rebooted franchise overseers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. These tracks can be chummy, informative, nostalgic, and often all three at once. All of the films also have extensive making-of featurettes that cover every aspect of production, but each disc also comes with additional documentaries on the minutiae of Star Trek. There are videos on the creation of the Klingon language, the lucrative realm of merchandise and prop collection among fans, even the surprisingly rich shared history between William Shatner and fellow Canadian Christopher Plummer. Most of these documentaries are brief, but the sheer glut of them adds up to enough bonus material to keep a hardcore fan surfing for days.
Overall
After countless reissues, remasters, and repackagings, Paramount has issued definitive editions of the first six Star Trek films, presenting them with gorgeous A/V transfers and enough extras to satisfy even the most obsessed fan.
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