Star Trek getting to film was a bit of a troubled story. The series itself initially ended after dwindled success in 1969, but sprung back with a vengeance in syndication in the 70s and attained a massive popularity. This prompted Paramount to think about making a film, which went on and off throughout the 70s and it went through a series of possible story ideas and plots (there was also talk of a new TV series or TV movies as an alternative, but that's another topic). I know that by at least as early as 1976 at least, and likely earlier in the 70s, they were working on a film but the studio was being very picky on the story.
The thing that may have finally pushed things forward was the release of Star Wars in 1977, forcing Paramount to rush to finally start the film. What we got was Star Trek: The Motion Picture which was released in the year of 1979, also known derivatively as "Star Trek: The Motionless Picture" because of of it's slow pace and a plot considered dull, and "Where Nomad Has Gone Before" because of similarities to the episode of the TV show where the Nomad probe was featured. The first film was, as those titles show, not viewed as all that great. It was a major box office success, but was not viewed as that great. The pace was extremely slow, very little happened, and an ungodly amount of time was focused on extended beauty shots of all the special effects and the models and the Enterprise, and needless diversions into special effects territory as if to say "we finally have the money for all these effects, so we're going to force you to look at them". A proper competitor to Star Wars it was not, and they went back to task with Star Trek 2 which was much better and launched a trilogy.
The challenge here is to make it so that Star Trek's film adaptation is better? By no means does this topic stay limited to the 1979 film or cleaning up that film to make it better. Given the time talk of a film started, you could have one go at any point in the 1970s and with a number of potential plots, and I personally think that's a better place for the discussion than to try to tweak the 1979 product.
On this subject, we could also discuss where an alternate film series would go from that initial entry.
The thing that may have finally pushed things forward was the release of Star Wars in 1977, forcing Paramount to rush to finally start the film. What we got was Star Trek: The Motion Picture which was released in the year of 1979, also known derivatively as "Star Trek: The Motionless Picture" because of of it's slow pace and a plot considered dull, and "Where Nomad Has Gone Before" because of similarities to the episode of the TV show where the Nomad probe was featured. The first film was, as those titles show, not viewed as all that great. It was a major box office success, but was not viewed as that great. The pace was extremely slow, very little happened, and an ungodly amount of time was focused on extended beauty shots of all the special effects and the models and the Enterprise, and needless diversions into special effects territory as if to say "we finally have the money for all these effects, so we're going to force you to look at them". A proper competitor to Star Wars it was not, and they went back to task with Star Trek 2 which was much better and launched a trilogy.
The challenge here is to make it so that Star Trek's film adaptation is better? By no means does this topic stay limited to the 1979 film or cleaning up that film to make it better. Given the time talk of a film started, you could have one go at any point in the 1970s and with a number of potential plots, and I personally think that's a better place for the discussion than to try to tweak the 1979 product.
On this subject, we could also discuss where an alternate film series would go from that initial entry.
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