It is all too easy to take Star Trek for granted. Since the premiere of Gene Roddenberry’s original, groundbreaking TV show in 1966, there have been nine spin-off series, 13 feature films, and an incalculable deluge of Trek-related cultural artifacts, from the billions of dollars of official merchandising, to the incredible amount of artistic and literary production by the legions of dedicated fans who gather at dozens of conventions every year. Thus, it is easy to forget that, when Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released in 1979, it was something of a gamble. After all, despite its loyal following, the original television series had been perceived for many years as something of a failure, having lasted only three seasons (1966–69), a total of 79 episodes, many of which suffered from exceptionally meager budgets, especially during the second and third seasons.

During the mid-1970s, Roddenberry and others were developing a new series with the same cast of characters called Star Trek: Phase II. After the phenomenal success of George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977, Paramount switched gears and decided to turn Star Trek into a motion picture. Oddly enough, although Star Trek: The Motion Picture is often thought of as being made to cash in on the Star Wars juggernaut, the two movies could not be any different. While Lucas’s space opera is fast-paced, action-oriented, and mythological in its notions of pure good and evil, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is slow and cerebral, more enraptured by stately sci-fi imagery than it is by heroes and villains and chase sequences and shoot-outs.

If anything, what the first Star Trek movie most resembles both visually and thematically is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film most directly responsible for initiating the modern era of serious cinematic science fiction. This similarity makes it stand out from the more action-oriented Trek movies that would follow, even if it does not share Kubrick’s rigorous intellectualism and visually exacting methods. While there are moments that are deeply engrossing without being conventionally exciting, too much of Star Trek is, for lack of a better word, tedious.

The story involves an enormous, extremely powerful alien cloud that is slowly moving toward Earth. We get a sense of just how dangerous this cloud is when it vaporizes three Klingon ships and a Federation space station in the film’s stunning opening sequence. To deal with this mysterious, dangerous phenomenon, Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is called back to duty even though it has been years since he commanded the Starship Enterprise. Kirk quickly reassembles his faithful crew, including the Vulcan science officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the always irascible Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley), and the engineer Scotty (James Doohan). Each major character is given a loving reintroduction, which must have thrilled fans to no end in 1979 who had not seen these characters on-screen for a decade. The move to the big screen—in ’Scope widescreen, no less—must have been that much more thrilling, as the Star Trek universe was finally being portrayed in the larger-than-life manner it had always deserved, but had been consistently denied by the limits of television in the 1960s.

Kirk’s assumption of command of the Enterprise is a hard shot to the ego of the previous commander, a rising young star named William Decker (Stephen Collins), who is more familiar with the newly retrofitted starship. Yet, it is Kirk’s experience exploring the cosmos that is most needed on this mission, and he and Decker eventually find a working relationship, although it is not without its tensions.

The slow-moving narrative (the screenplay was penned by novelist and television writer Harold Livingston from a story by prolific sci-fi novelist Alan Dean Foster) charts the Enterprise’s journey to intercept the mysterious cloud before it reaches Earth. There are some exciting moments along the way, such as when the Enterprise is caught in a worm hole. But, for the most part, the journey is a build-up, a way of increasing the space cloud’s mysterious aura. Once they reach the cloud, the movie verges on the surreal in a way that none of the other Star Trekmovies ever did (least of all the immediate follow-up, 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a violent and melodramatic revenge tale).

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is certainly an inventive and thoughtful science fiction movie, even if it is not entirely in keeping with either the television show that preceded it or the movies that would follow it. In this way, though, it remains unique and memorable. Legendary director Robert Wise was pressed for time in making the movie, but he lent it a distinct air of intelligence and purpose. Wise, who had won Oscars for the musicals West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), but was also know for directing horror (1963’s The Haunting) and science fiction (1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still), was an inspired choice to helm such an ambitious project. His professionalism and extensive experience proved to be crucial when the movie’s production came down to the wire.

Wise was able to maintain the importance of the characters and the story, even when the special effects were constantly threatening to engulf them. At the same time, though, he used the effects to new advantages, especially in his almost fetishistic attention to the Enterprise, which truly allowed the ship to become its own character. Wise’s camera and the improved model effects for the first time gave the Enterprise true mass and scale, which is the same thing he did for Star Trek itself, giving the innovative and progressive, but technically limited, TV show a jolt of the kind of magnitude that only the big screen can give.

However, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as it played in theaters starting in December 1979, was an incomplete film because Wise and his production team had to rush the final stages of postproduction in order to meet Paramount’s imposed release deadline, which meant that many of the effects shots, sound effects, and, in some cases, entire scenes had to be either left in the film in a truncated form or had to be removed altogether. In 2001, Wise was given the then-rare opportunity to revisit the film and complete what had been incomplete. The resulting film, dubbed The Director’s Edition, was not an entirely new movie, but it was one that was vastly improved. The theatrical release version had been pushed to the very last minute—the print was literally still wet when Wise premiered it in Washington, DC, and it was never given any previews. In returning to the film, Wise was able to trim some of the dialogue and update the special effects in several key scenes. Those improvements have now been enhanced even further with a subsequent 4K restoration in which more than 100 shots were either given new or improved visual effects and the soundtrack was given a complete overhaul, resulting in a film that is even more visually impressive than either of the two previous versions while still maintaining the general look and feel effects work in the late 1970s. It may not be the same as what fans remember seeing in theaters more than 40 years ago, but it is definitely a better movie, the one that Wise and the rest of his team had always intended to make.

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