starlady | "Out there. Thataway."/"Jim, I should have known." (Reply)

So, pursuant to the return of Star Trek to my life, I decided to re-watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). The movie is, on one level, not great, but it also is in many ways very, very characteristic. And amusing. Be warned, some of my thoughts are probably very obvious.

A lot of people (myself included) have remarked on the fact that Star Trek: 2009 feels like a Star Wars movie--nonstop action, playing stuff for laughs, etc. Now that I'm not eight years old, I can see clearly that this mutual relationship (or influence) has been going on for 30 years. The moment the Klingon warbirds appear on the screen in this movie (sidenote: all the Klingons look dazed by their prosthetics), I thought, "Hey, they learned how to do that from watching Star Wars!" So yes, the special effects in Trek are much better, and it jumped to the big screen, and we have George Lucas to thank.
Star Trek loves to talk about God and the meaning of life. It comes up again, crucially, in Star Trek V, as well as (somewhat) in Generations, and that's just the movies. I think to an extent the explicit talk about God and the Creator were an artifact of Gene Roddenberry's sensibilities (esp. compared with Earth: Final Conflict), but it's very much a continuing Trek preoccupation.
OMG so freaking 70s! I think the best example (besides those lovely taupe uniforms, but hey, at least the women are wearing pants!) is when McCoy beams aboard with a three-inch beard, a white bellbottom jumpsuit, and a gold belt buckle and a gold medallion-necklace the size of saucers showing through his chest hair. HilARious.
It's still so masculine. For all that Chapel has added an M.D. to her name, and Janice Rand has worked her way up to a transporter tech (I nurse fond fantasies in which, like O'Brien, she moves up the ranks and retires as chief engineer of some vessel or other), how many of the scenes in this movie are just bunches of men staring at Ilea/the woman/the alien? Thinking about this movie as it would have been had Decker been a woman and Ilea been a man leads one down unhappy trails--after all, it was the 70s, and as Star Trek: 2009 proved, some things (like male superiority) haven't changed in 30 years. Of course Ilea is neither the beginning nor the end of a long line of (alien) women in Trek who are Other(-ized)--for some reason the Horta springs to mind first, but I could go on. Again, in this paradigm women are vulnerable/open to (alien) penetration/takeover--so of course, no, they can't sit in the captain's chair.
I feel like in some ways this movie anticipated rather handily both Data and the Borg (who are both creations of the 1980s and its cyber-izing culture).
I definitely noticed in Star Trek 2009 that the Enterprise (and Starfleet, for that matter) were much, much more alien than they had been in previous iterations. Now, at times those aliens were played for laughs (that short alien who hangs around with Scotty is the spiritual successor to Wicket the Ewok, clearly), which is depressing but again, a venerable tradition in sf lifted straight out of Star Wars. By contrast, this movie had much more human diversity on the Enterprise--black people in almost every scene, etc; I even noticed a Native American crewmember with feathers braided in her hair in one of the crowd scenes. Of course that was the only time she was on screen, but she was there, in the 23rd century, a proud member of her people, of humanity, and of Starfleet and the UFP.
I can understand why David Weber is on record ranting about the complete lack of serious military protocol in Starfleet. Decker the XO countermands his captain's orders, Kirk jumps from COO of Starfleet itself to the captain's chair of one single starship, Spock goes from years being "inactive" straight back to the science officer's station. And why does McCoy spend all his time hanging around on the bridge/attending Kirk's private meetings? Doesn't he have surgical instruments to polish or something? Starfleet: No rules, just right! And this is clearly something that Trek 2009 took and ran with. (Yes I'm looking at you, mobilizing cadets and throwing them onto bridges and into captain's chairs! WTF.)
It's funny how Starfleet is clearly the best game in town and yet the best people over and over are trying to be quit of it. I mean, I can't even think of how many characters have thought about or have actually left Starfleet and then find themselves back in--just in this movie, there's Spock and McCoy (and Spock's return scene is made of win, incidentally, made of win), but off the top of my head, I think of Worf, Tom Paris, Picard, etc. I think even Sisko may have retired at one point--yeah, when he built that solar sailer with Jake.
First (but by no means last) iteration of the "people who will not move their asses from their chairs" theme. Kirk won't move on, and this inaugurates a long Star Trek tradition of people sticking around way past when they should (paging Will Riker).
The computer has a male voice. I like Majel Barrett much better.
Spock chuckled. I heard it. And then he and Kirk held hands. Oh man, the slash is just there on a plate. Okay, actually, I just remembered perhaps the one thing that made the novelization of this movie worth the read: its denying, in a footnote, that Spock and Kirk have ever had a sexual relationship in the form of "a statement issued by Admiral Kirk" of which I remember only something about the difficulties of a sexual relationship in which one of the parties "can only have intercourse every seven years." Luckily, later iterations of Trek have established that Vulcans can have sex outside of pon farr, so Kirk's denial on that front is moot. Oh Star Trek, stay self-aware and slashy.