This film didn't have much going for it, other than it was the first one. After five years of different writers, different venues, and even a brief stint as a TV series for a new network, Star Trek - The Motion Picture tried to be 2001: A Space Odyssey and failed miserably.

The production itself was a mess. Screenwriter Harold Livingston had a falling out with producer Gene Roddenberry.  As a consequence, the film went before cameras without a completed script. You just didn't do that with a complex movie with an enormous amount of pre-production.  Thirty years later, Lucas could shoot whole films on a greenscreen and change important details at a whim.  In 1979, that was simply impossible.  Script problems alone turned the film into a mess.

The special effects ended up being hastily re-done in many cases. Leonard Nimoy actually passed out while hanging on wires for the "Spock Walk" scene -- which was itself a complete re-working of a scene that originally involved Spock and Kirk, but that was impossible to film as written.

In short, this film was a mess. It has two things going for it: Jerry Goldsmith's score and Alan Howarth's sound effects. Unfortunately, very few of the effects are available in collections or in the clear on the soundtrack. This is a small collection of a few that are.