This week is the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I never saw it in theaters, but I do remember playing the HECK out of that movie on an RCA Videodisc when the family bought it a couple of years later. I think I watched it more than another videodisc that my dad bought – Star Wars.
I revisited the film last year – the Blu-ray, not the DVD-only “Directors Cut” Robert Wise supervised before he passed away. On that rewatch, I saw a subtext that was so obvious I missed it before. A subtext that may be just me “reading into” events in the film.
I thought the following movie, the Wrath of Khan, was about aging, about death. Not The Motion Picture.
I was wrong. It’s about all that, and more.
The movie’s “theme” is about life, death, change, and rebirth.
Spock’s story arc is key. He left “home”, seeking answers, he changed… Then he came back. Because someone – something else – is having almost the same journey.
V’Ger. Voyager 6 left home, changed, then came back. Searching for meaning, and answers. Just like Spock.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture has multiple blatant imagery about transitions, and change. As well as, ironically, motion. Kirk can’t beam on board, so he has to take a shuttle pod to board the Enterprise. He sees his vessel – his ship – from the outside. Like a man looking at something he loved, or reflecting on something – Like new beginnings.
Kirk’s moment of rebirth. He, too, acts somewhat childish, until getting back his mojo.
You have less subtle visual allusions to birth, none more obvious than in the conclusion of the film.
In the finale, you have a birth – Decker, combines with V’Ger, that creates a new next level of life. The logical Male, combined with emotion – Female. And ironically, it is Decker providing the latter. And when V’Ger dissolves away, and the Enterprise slowly appears out of the remnants… Well, that is a beautiful exclamation mark on the birth we witnessed.
Add up the repeated references to V’Ger as a “child” who must “Evolve.” As we all must, and you get what I think is the contextual underpinning of the whole… Umm, ‘Enterprise’.
We are temporary. What we are. What we pass on. We change, we evolve, and then we end. That is evolution, that is the human adventure.
That is Star Trek.
Is it the intent of the filmmakers? I think not. But the theme is there, even if unplanned. And I think it is ironic that I recognize such meaning as I enter another decade on this earth.
The human adventure is just beginning.