Why Walter Koenig Was Happy He Only Had A Small Part In Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Most actors want their name to show up when reviews for a big movie come out, but Walter Koenig was relieved when nobody mentioned him in the reviews for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." Koenig, who played Chekov, talked about the 1979 movie in "The Making of the Trek Films," and he didn't have a whole lot of nice things to say about the night it premiered or the reviews that came out after it.
"It was the only time in my life that I thanked God for the relative anonymity that I had on Star Trek," Koenig said, "because I was not mentioned in any way, shape or form." Coming from someone who was in the first "Star Trek" movie, that might sound a little odd, since "The Motion Picture" was the start of one of the biggest sci-fi movie franchises that began in the '70s. However, Koenig wasn't a big fan of the movie himself, and he had a feeling it wasn't going to go well before he even sat down to watch it.
Even Gene Roddenberry wasn't buying into the hype
Koenig was sitting next to Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek," on the flight to the movie's premiere in Washington, D.C. Roddenberry had already seen a cut of the movie, and Koenig hadn't, so Koenig asked him what he thought of it. "He answered, 'It's a good picture.' It was a death knell, as soon as he said that I knew it wasn't going to work," Koenig explained. Roddenberry never said anything bad about the movie, but the way he said it apparently made Koenig start worrying.
The premiere still got his hopes up a little, with limousines, red carpets, and spotlights everywhere, and so did the first few minutes of the movie. Koenig said the music and the opening scenes with V'ger excited him at first. That didn't last long, though. "I began to become aware of time; that time was passing. That I wasn't involved in the picture," he recalled, talking about how it felt to watch the movie as someone in the audience and not as one of the actors in it. The longer the movie went on, the more his heart sank, and by the end, Koenig had decided that it just wasn't a good movie.
The reviews were rough on the rest of the cast
The first review Koenig remembers seeing the next day came from The Washington Post, and he called it devastating. "I had no way of knowing what the critics would do," he said. The Post's review of the movie didn't go easy on the main cast, either, with one line saying William Shatner played Kirk as "such a supercilious old twit that one rather wishes he'd been left behind that desk." Koenig, meanwhile, wasn't mentioned.
Not every critic hated it. Roger Ebert said the movie was "probably about as good as we could have expected" in his review, though he also felt like knowing Kirk, Spock, and Bones so well from TV got in the way of the "sense of wonder" the movie was going for. Leonard Nimoy was also so frustrated with "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" that he didn't want to come back for the sequel, nearly denying fans one of the franchise's greatest moments in "Star Trek II." Things turned out much better for the crew with "The Wrath of Khan," though, which remains one of the best movie sequels to TV shows ever released.