Jerry Goldsmith's magnificent score for the first Star Trek movie helped the film attain its unusual success—finally alerting Paramount Pictures to the fact that in buying Desilu Studios (formerly RKO) from Lucille Ball it had unwittingly obtained, in the form of Gene Roddenberry's "failed" TV series of the 1960s, their strongest corporate asset.

The film's plot, unfortunately, was a reworking of an original Trek episode which revolved around an old NASA space probe that has been refitted by some aliens and has taken on a deadly new mission. Doubly unfortunately, the main means to transform the story's medium was to throw money at it to beef up the special effects, making the movie ultimately rather slow and ponderous.

The surprise was that this didn't matter. The Trek audience was panting to see new stories about Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise. And Goldsmith's grand, adventurous theme (later used in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation promised continued adventure and wonder. It also used an strange new musical invention, the "beam blaster," consisting of magnetically activated artillery shell casings, to portray the powerful particle weapon used by the mysterious entity VEEJUR. More traditionally, the score featured a stunning and exotic march that represented Klingons.

The 1979 LP was a success, and was remastered without additions as an early Columbia LP. In 1999, to celebrate the film's 20th anniversary, Goldsmith re-edited tracks from the film, presenting 30 minutes more of the score than before. The musical sections were assembled in theatrical order, as they occur in the film, and Goldsmith called this new suite the "definitive version" of his score.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide