Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Or The Slow Motion Picture as it's detractors like to think of it. However i think this is an excellent film.
Rather than an action packed space opera the movie series turned into, The Motion Picture is mainly a character study. Bringing back to life a group of characters not seen on our screens for ten years. As much a reinvention of the Star Trek universe as anything since,
The Haunting and
Sound of Music director Robert Wise gradually filters the
Star Trek universe back into our consciousnes
From a cracking opening involving the destruction of three Klingon Birds of Prey attack ships... this is as action orientated as the film gets...it's first five minutes, Wise almost takes us backwards as we are introduced to characters one by one. First Spock, then Captain, now Admiral Kirk and so forth. It's when we are shown the classic space ship the USS Enterprise for the first time that the film becomes slow motion sci-fi porn. Wise's camera in the form of a shuttle craft slowly makes it's way about the Enterprise in it's space dock. It's a genuinely thrilling sequence and we are in as much awe as Kirk is in the shuttle.
The story itself, written by science fiction legend Alan Dean Foster is one that would be reused time and again in subsequent
Star Trek series as well as many other science fiction shows, that of a deadly cloud approaching Earth on an orbit of total destruction. The fact that Foster wrote the story and Isaac ****ing Asimov - the king of science fiction - was it's technical advisor suggests the film isn't the kind of storytelling nonsense we get nowadays and the ideas used are all scientifically credible.
Quality slow burning science fiction. Makes me think i should give
2001 another go.