Overall, Star Trek: The Motion Picture simply does not have the fun, action, or humour that Star Wars has in spades! It is just too esoteric for any kid growing up in the late 70s/early 80s to understand and enjoy!
I mean, the movie throws you in the deep end right from the start with the cloud attacking the Klingons, and not a word of English for the first 5-10 mins until the intro of Kirk! And the movie was just too padded out with:
- lengthy shots of the Enterprise moving inside the cloud.
- way, way, way too many closeups of the crew just staring out the viewer with all sorts of weird expressions on their faces!
- dialogue and body language that was simply not delivered in a natural manner!
The way people reacted to deaths, attacks, Spock etc was just too mechanical for me. Like when Spock first boarded the Enterprise, the reaction of the crew was just bizarre!
And the whole Voyager thing and the mechanism achieving its own consciousness etc - if I had seen this as a kid I wouldn't have known what the f*ck was going on!! As an adult, I'm still struggling with it intellectually!! :)
But there were some good points. I like the musical score, although it's certainly not as memorable as the Star Wars score. In fact, there were quite a few times I thought the music would be equally at home in a wild western movie!! I also loved that in the future, women still wear mini-skirts ;)
Overall, I left this movie feeling more intrigued than anything. So I'm itching to get into the second movie to see where it goes from there. Hopefully it's not such a meandering story but a little more focused. So overall for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I give it 6.5/10 :)