The new one?
That piece of garbage? 
No, he did not mean the new one. That one's anything but motionless. He meant the original Star Trek: The (slow) Motion Picture. The one with V'ger, Ilia the bald chick from Delta and a 15 minute undocking sequence which I guess audiences found interesting at the time.
You do have a plot and missions (some of them quite good).
And you don't HAVE to build a space empire. And evne if you want to, you can automate 90% of it.
You can smuggle stuf and pick up missions. But I guess you never got to that part. 
In X3, no I didn't get that far. Not sure if they fixed it in X3 but in X2 picking up side missions was a waste of time. At least where accumulating profits is concerned. The rewards were peanuts, not nearly enough to cover the (astronomical) costs of fixing any damage your ship might have picked up during flight. Frankly, I was pretty much done with the franchise by the time I finished X2. I completed X1 and X2, having played through the plot and having a huge space empire. But frankly getting it all set up is a major drag for me, and I pretty much hate cheating. I feel much more at home with games like I-War 2, or even Freelancer. Fl had a large, cool universe to explore, a pretty good plot (much more interesting, for me, than the slow paced X stuff), lots of characters, ships, weapons, etc. Ship control was arcade like to say the least, planet scales totally off, but it was what any game is supposed to be first and foremost - tons of fun. X series, for me, was always more work than fun. I prefer being paid for my work. Unless it's Diaspora
One other thing that the X universe always failed to convey, in my opinion, is the vastness of the universe. Even in completely astronomically wrong universe of Freelancer I had a feeling of being in a vast explorable universe. The X universe feels like a bunch inter-connected at 90 degrees boxes, each having a 2d texture of planet and local universe on it's walls, a few space stations, and gates on some ends of the box that lead to other boxes. Never felt right to me, I had a constant feeling of flying inside a small skybox and that totally killed all immersion for me.
Not saying they're bad games, they just concentrate on things I don't find all that interesting. So no need to be defensive, if you like those games that's fine. We're not talking about the same game anyway, I'm pretty much explaining how X1 and X2 put me off that entire series, and you keep talking based on your experience with X3, a game I didn't play and have little interest in.
