The Sci-Fi 1st Runner Up

Our Big Empty Movie Awards Sci-Fi category continues after a couple of detours.  Recall that Star Trek was somewhat panned in the previous Sci-Fi thread.  It earned that, and the attempt to boldly take the show where it had never gone before, namely the movies, didn't help matters.  The very cleverly named Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released in 1979 after Star Wars invigorated the public about where modern special effects could take our imaginations and Close Encounters of the Third Kind proved there was an appetite for Sci-Fi that wasn't about dog fights in space.  What Star Trek: The Motion Picture brought us was state of the art special effects and a very cerebral concept.  What they forgot to pack in this lunchbox though was any kind of a discernable plot.  The first time I saw it as a kid, it was playing on TV at a house we were visiting, and us youngsters found ourselves saying "I don't get this" and "what's going on" and "let's go outside" and then coming back in and saying things like "this is STILL on?" and "how did they get to this?"  I watched it again from beginning to end a few months ago for the second time and I don't have anything to add to that.  The movie was a financial success, but a massive critical failure, and it called into question whether or not the ride that we were enjoying from Star Wars and Superman was coming to an end.  Superman II and The Empire Strikes Back would answer that question with a resounding "No!", meaning that there must be something wrong with Star Trek.