Welcome to another edition of Movie Review Monday!

This week's movie comes to us from Netflix (note: it went off the service 9/1/14, but it seems to keep popping up on streaming services and is one I've wanted to watch for a while) and is 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I've seen pretty much all of the Star Trek feature films, and I have to unfortunately admit, this one is another miss. It just doesn't seem like the best parts of the series translate well to the big screen. This movie isn't terrible, it just seems to be confused and sort of full of itself.

My first big complaint with this movie is a long winded sequence of Kirk riding around outside the Enterprise. I understand that this was the first time it was seen on the big screen but just for the sake of pacing, it seemed to be overdone. Pacing was generally a problem with this movie, and it was made over 30 years ago so there is that but not all classic films has this issue. The best ones stand the test of time.

All of the original cast is back for this adventure, an eager Kirk is ready to take the helm again, a beleaguered Spock is looking for logical enlightenment, and the rest of the team is their usual selves. The main plot of the movie is intriguing enough, but the only real pay off is at the end with an interesting twist as to the reveal of what this alien entity is that the Enterprise crew is trying to stop from destroying Earth.

Perhaps I can't give it a completely fair shake since I saw most of the other Star Trek films first but this one just feels tired and overdone. It doesn't have the heart or interesting moral dilemmas of the show and doesn't really come close for me to any of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Maybe I'd be more invested if I watched the original series, but I haven't so my stance is that this one is a skippable entry in the film series.

Come back next week for another movie to check out!

Thanks for stopping by!