Monday, October 21, 2019

Review: 'The First Star Trek Movie: Bringing the Franchise to the Big Screen, 1969-1980'


Star Trek had barely been cancelled when its obsessive fans began obsessing about where the Enterprise might head next. Even as Gene Roddenberry dangled the possibility of a new live-action series, and forced fans to settle for a cartoon, there was talk of a feature film for years. Events began to snowball by the mid-seventies, and Trekkers (never call them Trekkies!) got their big screen treat when Star Trek—The Motion Picture zoomed into cinemas in 1979. Well, maybe “zoomed” is not the right verb. Perhaps “floated in slow-mo” is more appropriate for Robert Wise’s notoriously inert epic. Disappointment followed.

One Trekker (or does she prefer “Trekkie”?) who was not let down by all that “V’ger” business was Sherilyn Connelly. In fact, she is downright defiant about her love of Star Trek—The Motion Picture in her new book The First Star Trek Movie: Bringing the Franchise to the Big Screen, 1969-1980. Even though I’m among the many who find little to love in Star Trek’s first cinematic outing, I can certainly get behind Connelly’s stance considering my own vocal love of such fan-irritating items as The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. I can also get behind her attitude since she expresses it with so much wit and willingness to acknowledge the flaws of a film she realizes is flawed but loves anyway.

So you don’t really have to share Connelly’s zeal for a ponderous exercise in saying “V’ger” over and over to dig The First Star Trek Movie. The road to the film’s eventual release is convoluted enough to make for interesting reading under any circumstances. There are bizarre discarded plots about the Kennedy assassination and Kirk swashbuckling with giant space spiders, gobs of debunkable Roddenberry bluster, and a disturbingly prescient side-story in which Leonard Nimoy gets shit from prototypes of the disgruntled losers who now make social media so delightful. However, it is always the author who is the true star of this show. Connelly’s writing is so lively and littered with humor (for example, she turns flogging her previous book about My Little Pony to an audience of self-serious Trekkies/Trekkers into a running gag) that it makes The First Star Trek Movie much more fun than the first Star Trek movie.

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