Star trek online review2/20/2023 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. 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. Star Trek: The Motion Picture made enough money to justify a sequel, albeit one subject to much more script and budgetary scrutiny. 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. 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. 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. The film remains fascinating for its strange marriage of reunion special and philosophical inquiry around an artificial intelligence’s search for its creators. You might even say that the actors spend Star Trek: The Motion Picture more or less watching Star Trek. 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. 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. 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. The result is a film flagrantly in love with its own opulence. 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. 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. 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.
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