Reliving a film classic

... and by classic, I mean of course a classic piece of utter crap.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was on the Space channel today. I did not look upon this as a great opportunity to watch a movie (a Star Trek movie, no less) that I haven't seen in a while, since at any given time I think you can watch just about all of the Star Trek films on cable somewhere -- they're always on.

However, while watching it, I did have what I consider to be a new thought about the movie. The conventional view among Star Trek fans is that The Motion Picture was admittedly a bit boring, but was ahead of it's time, thoughtful, and had beautiful cinematography.

I don't think I dislike ST:TMP because it's boring. I dislike it because it's bone-stupid; a stupid concept, with stupid dialogue, and delivered poorly by all of the actors. (You can't blame them; I can't see them being motivated to try to perform that crap with conviction.) This super-machine thinks its name is VGER because some letters got dirty? It yearns to physically join with its creator? (Or something like that, I can never watch it carefully enough to pick up all the subtle points.) Who thought this nonsense was a profound idea? I can handle boring, but the inanity here is overwhelming.

Bill Shatner's Star Trek Movie Memories book is surely filled with errors and fabrications, but he did do a good job of describing the background of this film. Basically, Paramount was desperate to cash in on the 'space' fad after Star Wars made a zillion dollars, and Roddenberry had absolutely no sensible creative ideas left in his drug-addled brain by that time, so some other guys wrote some crap that they slapped together and wasted a pile of money shooting.

Mind you, maybe I'm giving an unfair review, as I haven't watched the whole movie all the way through in over a decade. I flipped channels today after a while - I mean Christ, is that movie ever boring!