Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) assumes command of the recently refitted Starship Enterprise to lead it on a mission to determine V'Ger's origins and save the planet.

The box office success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind convinced Paramount to change course, canceling production of Phase II and resuming work on a film.

Released in North America on December 7, 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture received mixed reviews, many of which faulted it for a lack of action scenes and over-reliance on special effects.

Other actors from the television series who returned included Majel Barrett as Christine Chapel, a doctor aboard the Enterprise,[15][16] and Grace Lee Whitney as Janice Rand, formerly one of Kirk's yeomen.

[20] Roddenberry teamed up with Jon Povill to write a new story that featured the Enterprise crew setting an altered universe right by time travel; like Black's idea, Paramount did not consider it epic enough.

[14]: 28  Povill also wrote up a list of possible directors, including Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Lucas, and Robert Wise, but all were busy at the time or unwilling to work on the small budget.

During this time, fans organized a mail campaign that flooded the White House with letters, influencing Gerald Ford to rechristen the Space Shuttle Constitution the Enterprise,[14]: 30  and Roddenberry and most of the Star Trek cast were present for its rollout.

[7] With the studio finally moving forward with a treatment, Roddenberry stopped work on other projects to refocus on Star Trek, and the screenwriters and Isenberg were deluged with grateful fan mail.

[7][25] Barry Diller had grown concerned by the direction Star Trek had taken in Planet of the Titans, and suggested to Roddenberry that it was time to take the franchise back to its roots as a television series.

The fabrication was supervised by Joseph Jennings, an art director involved in the original television series, special effects expert Jim Rugg, and former Trek designer Matt Jefferies, on loan as consultant from Little House on the Prairie.

When the project became The Motion Picture, Robert Abel and Associates (RA&A) art director Richard Taylor wanted to completely redesign the ship, but Roddenberry insisted on the same shape as designed by Jefferies for Phase II.

[14]: 129  As times had changed, the brightly multicolored Starfleet uniforms were revised: the miniskirts worn by women in the original series would now be considered sexist, and Wise and Fletcher deemed the colors garish and working against believability on the big screen.

[14]: 140 [8] In the decade between the end of the Star Trek television series and the film, many of the futuristic technologies that appeared on the show—electronic doors that open automatically, talking computers, weapons that stun rather than kill, and personal communication devices—had become a reality.

Asimov loved the ending, but made one small suggestion; he felt that the use of the word "wormhole" was incorrect, and that the anomaly that the Enterprise found itself in would be more accurately called a "temporal tunnel".

[14]: 188–9 Despite tight security around production, in February 1978 the head of an Orange County, California Star Trek fan group reported to the FBI that a man offered to sell plans of the film set.

Securing permission for filming the scenes was difficult in the middle of the summer tourist season, but the Parks Department acquiesced so long as the crew remained on the boardwalks to prevent damage to geological formations.

)[35] Creative differences grew between RA&A and the Paramount production team;[14]: 204  Wise reportedly became angry during a viewing of Abel's completed effects, of which the studio decided only one was usable.

While the team planned on compositing multiple passes to provide physical movement to the cloud shots, Trumbull felt that it detracted from the sense of scale, and so small animations were subtly introduced in the final product.

[30]: 59–64 Even after the change in effects companies, Yuricich continued to provide many of the matte paintings used in the film, having previously worked on The Day the Earth Stood Still, Ben-Hur, North by Northwest and Logan's Run.

Wise, Kline, and Abel had been unable to agree on how to photograph the sequence, and the result was a poorly designed and ungainly effect that Trumbull was convinced was disruptive to the plot and would have cost millions to fix.

Instead, he recommended a stripped-down sequence that omitted Kirk entirely and would be simple and easy to shoot;[30]: 8  Robert McCall, known for designing the original posters to 2001, provided Trumbull with concept art to inform the new event.

The approach of Kirk and Scott to the drydocked Enterprise by shuttle lasted a ponderous five minutes due to the effect shots coming in late and unedited, requiring Goldsmith to maintain interest with a revised and developed cue.

[66] Owing to the rush to complete the film before the scheduled release date, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was never screened before test audiences, which Wise later stated that he regretted.

[95]: 99  Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer would produce and direct Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which received better reviews (becoming a fan favorite) and continued the franchise.

The website's consensus reads: "Featuring a patchwork script and a dialogue-heavy storyline whose biggest villain is a cloud, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a less-than-auspicious debut for the franchise.

Schickel also lamented the lack of "boldly characterized" antagonists and battle scenes that made Star Wars fun; instead, viewers were presented with much talk, "much of it in impenetrable spaceflight jargon".

[104] Variety, disagreed, calling the film "a search-and-destroy thriller that includes all of the ingredients the TV show's fans thrive on: the philosophical dilemma wrapped in a scenario of mind control, troubles with the space ship, the dependable and understanding Kirk, the ever-logical Spock, and suspenseful take with twist ending".

[105] Scott Bukatman reviewed the film in Ares magazine #1, and commented that "With Star Trek, Roddenberry's trick has been to wear the mask of the humanist as he plays with his Erector set.

Stephen Godfrey of The Globe and Mail rated their performances highly: "time has cemented Leonard Nimoy's look of inscrutability as Mr. Spock [...] DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy is as feisty as ever, and James Doohan as Scotty still splutters about his engineering woes.

"[108] Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the actors did not have much to do in the effects-driven film, and were "limited to the exchanging of meaningful glances or staring intently at television monitors, usually in disbelief".