Kirk and Decker share a moment.
Click the image to see the action.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture took everything that was great about the TV series and got rid of it: having the original crew behave as if they were meeting each other for the first time; adding extra characters we couldn’t care less about and making them the focus; grinding things down to an excruciatingly slow pace. Even with all of that, it’s still an interesting movie. It might have been better had it not been a Star Trek movie, to be quite honest. Some interesting film-making here, unmet expectations be damned. What can you do? I’ll still give it two and a half V’gers out of five.
This is our first request here at Movie Douche and we couldn’t be more pleased. Matt Ward of California, thank you for your suggestion. I won’t be doing a Star Trek Week – we just slogged through Star Wars Week and I don’t want to look like a complete geek/dork – but I do plan to roll out the original-cast movies in the near future. Why not?
Keep those requests coming!
Movie Douche 
That’s a general consensus about this movie : it’s got an intriguing & intricate otherworldly plot; good design and decent characters; and Robert Wise is a very skilled director – but it didn’t need to be a Star Trek movie, especially the first original ‘Trek’ property in 8 years!
Of course, there’s the ‘even-odd’ curse of Trek movies : odd-numbered ones are kinda crappy, even-numbered ones kick ass. The curse was broken by JJ Abrams & “Star Trek #11 : The Re-invention Prequel Time Travel Rebirth”
I don’t know, but it seems possible that the story existed in some form and was adapted to Star Trek once the idea of a movie was hatched. The Klingons were cannon fodder; they could have been anyone, really. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Bones did not save the day; they weren’t much more than bystanders throughout.
I wonder…