With its premiere in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture launched the Star Trek franchise into a new era of big-screen adventures for Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew. In the opening sequence of director Robert Wise’s special effects extravaganza, a massive space cloud easily destroys three Klingon vessels before continuing its course to Earth. When the Starfleet monitoring station, Epsilon IX, informs Starfleet Command of this approaching cloud, they assign the newly retrofitted USS Enterprise to intercept the entity before it reaches Earth.