Trek

Update: OK. Correction in comments, followed by another comment by me, followed by another correction. At this point I'm giving up on ever saying anything about Star Trek that I don't know to be an absolute truth. Like, apparently, Spock is at least partially some other species than human. I will point out, however, that the belt buckles in the movie still look ridiculous.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I Netflixed Star Trek: The Motion Picture the other night and found it average.

Strange how your memory can change things. The movie, in my mind, was great. I saw it in theaters, when it first came out about 50 years ago. Mainly, I had no idea what was going on. Something about a bald lady with a flashlight in her throat. But I thought the pictures were purty.

Since then I had seen bits of it here and there but never watched the whole thing through, and it’s pretty good in bits and pieces.
An art museum in Abilene ran an exhibition by the artist who came up with the special effects, and it was impressive enough to make me begin to think that the movie had been unfairly dismissed (Trekkies usually argue between I and V as the worst, I think).

And then I watch it again, and:

• The special effects people were way too proud of their product. We have about five sequences of shuttles flying by the Enterprise. These sequences usually end with fascinating, minute-long scenes of shuttles backing up into the Enterprise docking bay. Parking in space! This stuff doesn’t stay current, and good directors understand that.
• Stupid side story: So you have this big energy cloud thing that’s larger than the sun, that’s destroying anything that looks at it, that’s on a direct course for earth. You, the new captain of the Enterprise, take off to meet it after giving up your chair to Starfleet legend Kirk, and you spend the majority of the trip there whining. “Woe, Kirk took my job.” “Woe, will my love with the weird bald chick ever be rekindled?” “Woe, will I ever appear in another film besides Brewster’s Millions?”

• A plot that turns on a “no freakin’ way” idea. The big surprise at the end is that V’ger is a Voyager space probe sent out by earth to explore space. We’re told that this probe gathered so much knowledge that it somehow translated into consciousness, then, happy day, it runs into a planet populated by conscious machines, which build it a ship to return to earth. OK, the series has always had to wreak havoc with the laws of physics to move the plot along, but now it’s screwing with the laws of computer programming. A probe, which is really a kind of telescope joined to a radio transmitter, becomes “I prefer CSI to Law and Order” conscious?