Tumblr crosspost (1 February 2025)
Jun. 19th, 2025 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineContinuing from J's and my re-watch (for me, after a good 20 years) of The Motion Picture:
So, uh, well, I finished it, though my overall feeling is “what the fuck did I just see?” I feel like this conversation J and I had afterwards sort of illustrates our general mood:
J: Even by Star Trek standards, this was incredibly horny in a very 70s way. I’m pretty sure the entire female reproductive system was cosmically represented.
me: RIGHT? So many labia and yonic tunnels and barely metaphorical orgasms and uhhh
J: Many clits also.
me: SO MANY.
J: Though I think the Voyager craft was the, you know, main one.
me: …maybe Voyager was the real clit all along?
Despite this, Spock’s navigation of the horny cosmic feminine is the gayest shit ever, including him icily referring to the various uhhh openings in the tunnels as “orifices” and one of the shippiest scenes with Kirk he’s ever had (a high bar for them!!).
Earlier, the movie sort of tries to convince us that Spock’s motives might be dubious—he’s cold and ultra-standoffish at first, McCoy suggests Spock has his own agenda and is not totally trustworthy, Spock knocks out a crewman and steals equipment, etc. But Kirk staunchly refuses to believe there's reason for suspicion, and Spock is revealed to be transmitting as much data as possible to Kirk so they can escape being trapped by the cosmic vagina (this is one of a long string of instances of Kirk being vindicated throughout the later film, but the most important).
And then Spock tries to mind-meld with the hyper-logical central intelligence of the space vagina to save Earth, is promptly ejected by said space vagina, and is swooning and freezing as he’s catapulted through space where he’s caught in Kirk’s arms (I wasn’t entirely clear when Kirk even left the Enterprise to find him, so Kirk catching Spock Bow-and-Glimmer style floating in space was a lot). When Spock wakes in sickbay, he and Kirk cling to each other’s hands and Spock explains that the horny cosmic feminine just can’t understand “this simple feeling” they have for each other. Heterosexually, I’m sure.
There are ways in which the characters in the movie don’t really feel all that recognizable as the more nuanced TOS versions, and are more like … accessible approximations? Like, McCoy isn’t just grumpy, but keeps acting like Kirk’s attempts to save the Earth’s population from eradication are intrinsically suspect, and he just needs to chill about it and accept his obnoxious XO’s generally shitty and disrespectful input. As we got past the first hour and a half or so, I was just going “damn, justice for James Kirk” because it felt like everyone except Spock and Uhura were acting like Kirk was being wildly irrational and overbearing about the urgency of the situation despite it being objectively true.
(I did appreciate the weary middle-aged glances they exchanged in the background of various scenes, lol.)
So it’s not a terrible movie or anything (a very weird one with comically bad pacing, but by no means terrible). Nimoy magnificently carries the completely unexplained Spock arc, while Shatner does a lot of genuine heavy lifting in these slow, slow scenes that just cut between his face and the model ships doing space things for ridiculous lengths of time (in addition to the equally unexplained, painful estrangement between Spock and Kirk that's compelling purely because of Nimoy's and Shatner's performances). There is a purpose to the slow space scenes as we really get a sense of the massive size of the refurbished Enterprise, so then the shots of it looking absolutely minuscule as it travels through the space vagina really give you a sense of what kind of scale we’re dealing with.
Kirk is easily the most likable character in the movie IMO, despite Spock being the most relatable and having the only real arc of the film that matters. At first, it seems like the character growth of the film is going to center on Kirk's midlife crisis, but once the plot finally arrives, this is pretty sharply undercut by how few people except Kirk seem to get the stakes of the V'ger situation at all (especially the profoundly obnoxious Decker), and by the film fundamentally hinging on Spock's development as Kirk is repeatedly vindicated and pretty evidently just waiting for him to get his shit together. But it does feel like a big step away from quite a few things I loved about TOS. The outfits lack the stylishness and vivid colors of the TOS ones (the Starfleet uniforms of TMP appear to be “color-coded sleepwear” and just don’t fit a lot of the actors right; Kirk eventually puts on what J described as a cruise director polo, and it is somehow more convincingly Starfleet). The TOS characters sometimes feel like the idea of the original characters more than likely continuations of their arcs in TOS, the new ones are deeply underwhelming (Decker is the worst), and the cosmic stuff goes from some genuinely interesting and fascinating designs to uhhhhh barely metaphorical space orgasms.
But the sickbay scene is pure concentrated K/S slashiness, and I was just “holy shit OH MY GOD o_O” while J laughed and was like “RIGHT?!” J thought it was their gayest scene ever, in fact, though I feel like the conclusion to “Requiem for Methuselah” is in the running among others. It is their most married scene, though.
Tagged: #also kind of hilarious to me that kirk is /so/ baffled by decker wanting to fuck the robot lady bc while i'm a bi!kirk truther #this is middle aged kirk with powerful 'long married to his best friend even though things are complicated rn' energy #as well as kirk being the original AI hater #he and spock decide the sexy murderous robot is a child having a tantrum they don't feel like indulging and just start walking out
So, uh, well, I finished it, though my overall feeling is “what the fuck did I just see?” I feel like this conversation J and I had afterwards sort of illustrates our general mood:
J: Even by Star Trek standards, this was incredibly horny in a very 70s way. I’m pretty sure the entire female reproductive system was cosmically represented.
me: RIGHT? So many labia and yonic tunnels and barely metaphorical orgasms and uhhh
J: Many clits also.
me: SO MANY.
J: Though I think the Voyager craft was the, you know, main one.
me: …maybe Voyager was the real clit all along?
Despite this, Spock’s navigation of the horny cosmic feminine is the gayest shit ever, including him icily referring to the various uhhh openings in the tunnels as “orifices” and one of the shippiest scenes with Kirk he’s ever had (a high bar for them!!).
Earlier, the movie sort of tries to convince us that Spock’s motives might be dubious—he’s cold and ultra-standoffish at first, McCoy suggests Spock has his own agenda and is not totally trustworthy, Spock knocks out a crewman and steals equipment, etc. But Kirk staunchly refuses to believe there's reason for suspicion, and Spock is revealed to be transmitting as much data as possible to Kirk so they can escape being trapped by the cosmic vagina (this is one of a long string of instances of Kirk being vindicated throughout the later film, but the most important).
And then Spock tries to mind-meld with the hyper-logical central intelligence of the space vagina to save Earth, is promptly ejected by said space vagina, and is swooning and freezing as he’s catapulted through space where he’s caught in Kirk’s arms (I wasn’t entirely clear when Kirk even left the Enterprise to find him, so Kirk catching Spock Bow-and-Glimmer style floating in space was a lot). When Spock wakes in sickbay, he and Kirk cling to each other’s hands and Spock explains that the horny cosmic feminine just can’t understand “this simple feeling” they have for each other. Heterosexually, I’m sure.
There are ways in which the characters in the movie don’t really feel all that recognizable as the more nuanced TOS versions, and are more like … accessible approximations? Like, McCoy isn’t just grumpy, but keeps acting like Kirk’s attempts to save the Earth’s population from eradication are intrinsically suspect, and he just needs to chill about it and accept his obnoxious XO’s generally shitty and disrespectful input. As we got past the first hour and a half or so, I was just going “damn, justice for James Kirk” because it felt like everyone except Spock and Uhura were acting like Kirk was being wildly irrational and overbearing about the urgency of the situation despite it being objectively true.
(I did appreciate the weary middle-aged glances they exchanged in the background of various scenes, lol.)
So it’s not a terrible movie or anything (a very weird one with comically bad pacing, but by no means terrible). Nimoy magnificently carries the completely unexplained Spock arc, while Shatner does a lot of genuine heavy lifting in these slow, slow scenes that just cut between his face and the model ships doing space things for ridiculous lengths of time (in addition to the equally unexplained, painful estrangement between Spock and Kirk that's compelling purely because of Nimoy's and Shatner's performances). There is a purpose to the slow space scenes as we really get a sense of the massive size of the refurbished Enterprise, so then the shots of it looking absolutely minuscule as it travels through the space vagina really give you a sense of what kind of scale we’re dealing with.
Kirk is easily the most likable character in the movie IMO, despite Spock being the most relatable and having the only real arc of the film that matters. At first, it seems like the character growth of the film is going to center on Kirk's midlife crisis, but once the plot finally arrives, this is pretty sharply undercut by how few people except Kirk seem to get the stakes of the V'ger situation at all (especially the profoundly obnoxious Decker), and by the film fundamentally hinging on Spock's development as Kirk is repeatedly vindicated and pretty evidently just waiting for him to get his shit together. But it does feel like a big step away from quite a few things I loved about TOS. The outfits lack the stylishness and vivid colors of the TOS ones (the Starfleet uniforms of TMP appear to be “color-coded sleepwear” and just don’t fit a lot of the actors right; Kirk eventually puts on what J described as a cruise director polo, and it is somehow more convincingly Starfleet). The TOS characters sometimes feel like the idea of the original characters more than likely continuations of their arcs in TOS, the new ones are deeply underwhelming (Decker is the worst), and the cosmic stuff goes from some genuinely interesting and fascinating designs to uhhhhh barely metaphorical space orgasms.
But the sickbay scene is pure concentrated K/S slashiness, and I was just “holy shit OH MY GOD o_O” while J laughed and was like “RIGHT?!” J thought it was their gayest scene ever, in fact, though I feel like the conclusion to “Requiem for Methuselah” is in the running among others. It is their most married scene, though.
Tagged: #also kind of hilarious to me that kirk is /so/ baffled by decker wanting to fuck the robot lady bc while i'm a bi!kirk truther #this is middle aged kirk with powerful 'long married to his best friend even though things are complicated rn' energy #as well as kirk being the original AI hater #he and spock decide the sexy murderous robot is a child having a tantrum they don't feel like indulging and just start walking out
no subject
on 2025-06-20 07:53 am (UTC)🤣
no subject
on 2025-06-20 05:41 pm (UTC)