This year marks the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and I just happened to come across this old article that I hadn’t posted here before!  It’s a review from the local college paper Pipe Dream, and it has a lot of  nice local Binghamton, NY flavor, which filled me with nostalgia for simpler times.

The writer, Robert Greenberger, was just as excited to see this new incarnation of Trek as the rest of us, and he gives a loving review.   He was clearly delighted, and saw this effort as ‘well worth the wait’.  However, he did note that the glut of special effects did overpower the heart of the story.  He says one of the best sequences is the first time we see The Enterprise and “the ship is explored for the next ten minutes” (To me, that part was 8 minutes too long!)

He also rightly points out the the supporting characters were not given enough to do and that the plot tends to have annihilation encroaching every  every five minutes, leaving character development in the dust.  But he’s still happy to see that the positive message at the soul of Star Trek is still there:  The future need not be bleak.   Something we truly can hope for in these strange times 40 years later.   I hope Robert will find this and say Hi!  Enjoy.