Star Trek: The Motion Picture

You know when a commercial broadcaster, say channel nine, gets their hands on a new piece of technology, say skycam from a few years back or more recently the spidercam, and tries to use it in every situation it can possibly think of?
Or say a new app comes out, and millions of loyal Apple or Android fans go out of their way to purchase said app and, even if it is of poor quality? But even after realising it doesn't add too much to their telephonic or smartphone experience, they flog it off to their friends and family as if it's the best thing since sliced bread?
In a really roundabout way, that's exactly what I think of the original Star Trek film.

Now I know that is a really quick and easy way to get a lot of hate from loyal Trekkies, but Star Trek: The Motion Picture is ordinary.

It is as if the whole production crew - the directors, producers, editors - just found out about a new program, specifically how it can "add things to films that we couldn't do before, like laser beams", then insert or use this program as much as possible for the full 126 minutes of the 1979 film.
Sure, special effects were newish to the scene and science fiction cinema was riding a tsunami of success courtesy of George Lucas' effort with Star Wars (A New Hope - the original episode one) two years earlier, so Paramount Pictures were keen on capitalising on said success with their own space venture. But I don't think anybody appreciated the amount of special effects that was forcibly shoved down the viewers' throats.
Despite this, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a roaring box-office success, and (along with the original tv series) helped spawn another nine films (plus two recent reboots), about 34 television series (Original TV Series, Voyager, Next Gen...) and countless other forms of media (books, games, etc) that helped populate the universe.

 

So what happens in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?
Captain James T Kirk (William Shatner) leads his crew aboard the USS Enterprise on a galaxy-hopping adventure to investigate an energy cloud of which an alien presence has been detected. The problem is this energy cloud is en route to Earth (with the alien ship, lucky us), and has already taken out three Klingon ships and a human monitoring station.
We get to meet the famous half-Vulcan, half-human Spock in our travels, and come up against our first bad-guy alien the V'Ger, who turns out to be a sentinent being evolving from a space probe sent by Earth in the 20th century that was lost in a black hole.
While it is a recommended stop for every Star Trek or science fiction fan, don't be disheartened if you don't enjoy it - the series gets better.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture: 126 mins (1979).