<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Release Date	December 7, 1979
Genre	Scifi
Director	Robert Wise
Screenwriter	Alan Dean Foster (story) Harold Livingston (screenplay)
Stars	William Shatner Leonard Nimoy DeForest Kelley James Doohan Walter Koenig Nichelle Nichols George Takei Majel Barrett Persis Khambatta Stephen Collins Grace Lee Whitney Mark Lenard
Studio	Paramount Pictures

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the first feature film based on the television series Star Trek. Originally, the project was going to become Star Trek: Phase II, a second Trek television series.

Plot Summary

Stardate 7412.6: Starfleet detects an energy cloud in Klingon space. It has destroyed three Klingon starships and a Starfleet monitoring station, and now it’s heading for Earth. To the rescue: the starship USS Enterprise. But the ship is in dock undergoing a refit under the supervision of Commander Willard Decker.

In the emergency, Admiral James T. Kirk assumes his former command of the ship. Many familiar crew members are also aboard. But the new systems have not yet been thoroughly tested.

When the Enterprise penetrates the alien cloud, the crew finds an unknown starship inside. An alien probe appears on the bridge of the Enterprise, and abducts navigator Lieutenant Ilia (Persis Khambatta), who is replaced by a robotic probe that reveals that she/it has been sent to study the "carbon units" (living beings) by V'ger. Spock enters the alien vessel, and attempts to mind meld with it. He discovers that the vessel is a living machine that calls itself V'ger.

V'ger was once the unmanned scientific probe Voyager 6, part of the twentieth century’s Voyager program. A race of living machines found the probe and interpreted its programming as instructions from God to "learn all that is learnable" and return that information to its creator. They transformed V'ger into something capable of fulfilling that mission, and V'ger “gathered so much knowledge that it achieved consciousness.” Although fully provided with logic, it lacked the ability to determine a purpose for itself beyond its original mission. Once it learned all that is learnable, V'ger found itself empty and purposeless. The Ilia probe merges with Commander Decker, enabling V’ger to explore illogical things, such as God, other dimensions, and higher planes of being, ultimately vanishing into a higher realm and sparing Earth from destruction.

William Shatner as Admiral/Captain [james T.Kirk] Leonard Nimoy as Commander [Spock] DeForest Kelley as {Dr.Leonard "Bones" McCoy] James Doohan as Commander [Montgomery "Scotty" Scott] George Takei as Lt.Commander [Hikaru Sulu] Nichelle Nichols as Lt.Commander [Uhrua] Walter Koenig as Lt.[Pavel Chekov] Stephen Collins as Captain/Commander [Willard Decker] Persis Khambatta as Lt. Ilia Majel Barret as Lt.Commander [Dr.] Christine Chapel