Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

We Have Found the Nuclear Wessel.

I do find myself a little impatient to reach the end of my run with the Star Trek movies.  I’ve been reviewing and watching so much Star Trek stuff recently that girls literally run at the sight of me, whereas before they just laughed and walked calmly away from me.  I guess they can smell it on you.  But I also hate leaving a series unfinished, so I must continue on.  It’s not as if it’s that painful to make it through these movies.  Thus far, I’ve enjoyed two out of three of the Star Trek movies, but I’m still waiting for the drastic drop in quality I’ve heard about with them.  Could this be one such movie?  We’ll find out as I review Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, written by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, and Nicholas Meyer, directed by Leonard Nimoy, and starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Catherine Hicks, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Mark Lenard, Jane Wyatt, Majel Barrett, and Robin Curtis.

After the events of the last movie, the crew that survived the destruction of the USS Enterprise – Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), helmsmen Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), Commander Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), and communications officer Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) – agree unanimously to return to Starfleet headquarters on Earth to face prosecution for the crimes they committed.  But on their way back, they receive a distress signal from Earth, saying that they’re about to be destroyed because a tube in space is trying to find whales and we killed them all.  The only way for the Enterprise crew to save the planet is to travel back in time to the present (or this movie’s version of the present 1986) to when whales still existed and bring two of them back to their time.  In 1986, they find two whales that are about to be released into the wild under the care of Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks), but convincing her to give up the whales is not their only concern.  They must also repair and repower their ship while fitting it to handle whales in a time where the technology doesn’t exist to accomplish any of those things.

I would say that I now enjoy three of the four Star Trek movies that I’ve seen.  This one is still good.  I’m really waiting to see that drop in quality I keep hearing about.  Most of the movie was light-hearted and fun, and the movie was based around a message I agree with, but it was a little heavy-handed.  The movie was basically all about how we need to save the whales, all set into a Star Trek back drop.  I agree with your message, and I even think that it’s a proper enough premise to base a movie around, but it doesn’t really feel like a Star Trek movie.  And the probe didn’t even come to take the whales back.  It just showed up to check to make sure we hadn’t fucked up too badly.  So their motivation was basically just to see what big jerks humans would be.  But though I was torn about the premise the whole movie was based on, I still found it an enjoyable experience.  A lot of the moments when the Enterprise crew were trying to get around in 1986 were amusing and made the heavy-handed message the movie was beating me over the head with much more tolerable.  Time travel can also be dangerous in movies, making overcoming obstacles a little too easy.  That could be considered the case with this movie as well.  All they have to do is fly around the sun and they’re back in the 80’s?  That’s like Superman problem solving.  If it’s that easy then why don’t they just do it every time they need a second chance at something?  Also, I know that Kirk’s line to Spock where he says, “Start your computations for time warp,” was a second draft.  The original line was obviously, “Let’s do the time warp again.”  I also took issue with how incompetent they made the “present” day military seem.  They announced a security breech and yet none of the military people walking through the halls of the ship seemed to be that interested in the stranger in street clothes running past them.  I think military people are trained better than that, even back in 1986.

The movies still seem to be improving visually.  Even though I still think that green is an odd style choice for Klingons, the ship looked good.  They still have not really figured out a good excuse for how they’re able to watch the previous movies though.  They start out the movie watching scenes from the previous movie, but never think of a good reason that all of those camera angles were recorded by security cameras.  Are we to believe that the vessels of Starfleet have cameras in a constant orbit to get the camera angles to make security footage more interesting?  It also made me wonder why there are always such fights between Trekkies and Star Wars fans when Industrial Light and Magic did the visuals for this movie.  I also took issue with the audio in some parts of the movie.  First, the first thing I thought when I heard the probe was that it sounded like a robotic whale.  About 10 minutes later, the Enterprise crew figured out the same thing.  I can’t necessarily say that I’m smarter than them though because I vaguely remember hearing that whales took some part in the movies.  Later, I also took issue with the shitty, 80’s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles style music they drop.  I know they’re in the 80’s, but I also know that some good music came out of that decade.  The worst issue with the music was the music they played when they were running around the hospital.  Think of the worst, most corny and on the nose music you can think of for a goofy chase scene.  …You got it.  It was ridiculously close to Yakety Sax or something.

Again, the performances are mostly unchanged and offer not much to say other than what I’ve already said about them.  Though they had done it frequently in the television show, I don’t recall Spock having too many humorous moments in the previous movies, but it was the greater majority of what he did in this one.  As humorous as I found it to see some of the other Enterprise crew interact with the people of 1986, Spock topped it out.  Well, there was at least one moment I found amusing with George Takei, but I’m not sure it was intentional.  It was when he said he was born in San Francisco.  Sulu may have been born in San Francisco, but there’s also a chance Takei was just dropping hints before he was ready to kick open the old closet doors.  I liked Catherine Hicks well enough.  She was cute in personality and in appearance, and she got inexplicably nipply around the end of the movie.  I was also entirely confused by the guy that owned the factory that Doohan visited.  What was the reason for the giant “I Quit Smoking” pin that he was wearing?  Good for you, buddy.  But what does that have to do with the manufacturing of Plexiglas?

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was a solid enough movie.  The story was fun in the parts where they weren’t trying to make a point, and the point they were trying to make – though it was a good one – was a little heavy-handed and perhaps not best suited for a vaguely goofy science fiction movie.  But the cast still does a great job, and I’d say I’d be able to recommend this movie for a watch as well.  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home gets “They like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales” out of “Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word.”

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

I Know Engineers.  They LOVE to Change Things.

In my video review for Star Trek Into Darkness, I suggested that J.J. Abrams may turn me into a fan of the Star Trek series were he to keep making such good movies from them.  Ever since I made that claim, something powerful has been brewing inside me.  It was my nerdiness.  It had overridden the bias that caused me to write off Star Trek lest my love of Star Wars be tested.  Also, the BluRays of the original movies were on sale just after the new movie’s release.  Inspiration enough for me!  I bought the original movies, but delayed watching them until I watched the entire original series on Netflix.  We’ll review those later.  TV series take much longer.  After finishing the TV show, I finally sat down and watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, based on characters created by Gene Roddenberry, written by Harold Livingston, story by Alan Dean Foster, directed by Robert Wise, and starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Persis Khambatta, Stephen Collins, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Majel Barrett.

A monitoring station for Starfleet detects a massive cloud of energy that destroys some Klingon warships, and later the monitoring station itself, en route to Earth.  Starfleet sends out the newly refitted starship Enterprise as a test of her new systems.  Her former Captain, Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner), comes aboard the Enterprise and takes command from Captain Willard Decker (Stephen Collins), citing his experience with the Enterprise as precedence over Captain Decker’s experience with the Enterprise’s new systems, creating friction between the two.  Elsewhere, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is interrupted from a ritual to purge himself of all emotion when he detects the cloud, and he rejoins the Enterprise to help find it.  The Enterprise encounters the cloud, where a probe is sent onboard that attacks Spock and abducts the navigator, Decker’s love interest, and Hair Club for Women model, Ilia (Persis Khambatta), who is later replaced by a robotic doppelgänger.  The crew of the Enterprise must work together to find out what this cloud wants before it destroys Earth.

I agree with the general population in saying that this was a less than substantial movie.  I kind of understand the problems with this movie, but I feel they pretty much damaged the movie beyond interest.  It was basically like watching a longer, prettier version of one of the less interesting TV show episodes.  It was mostly about getting the band back together on their new decked out ship, showing off that they have more money to spend on the movie than they did on the TV show.  But I didn’t understand that either.  Has time forgotten the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?”  The Enterprise did great on the TV show, but you have to go and update everything and now nothing works?  Then I got bothered with the resolution to the movie.  Turns out the cloud surrounds a planet that itself surrounds the Voyager 6 probe that just wants to return to Earth to drop off its information, as it was programed to do.  But everyone thinks it’s called V’Ger because all of its nameplates are covered up coincidentally in exactly the same spots.  Then it ends with Decker fisting the Voyager and it decides that its mission is accomplished.  It’s something that would be done on the TV show, but didn’t really feel like it required a movie.

The look of this movie is really good for its time, but it’s also to the movie’s detriment.  It’s a great step up from the TV show, but I think they were a little too aware of it.  I have heard this movie described as a bunch of glory shots of the Enterprise, and it’s not a lot more than that.  They love showing off their pretty new graphics though.  The opening scene looked a lot like Star Wars mashed up with Tron.  Then they reintroduce the Enterprise, and Mister Scott takes Kirk on a three minute ride around the outside of the Enterprise, sitting quietly in a dock.  They do the same thing with pretty much every ship shown, even the space station that is doing absolutely nothing.  They also love to show random people floating out in space in space suits doing busy work for some reason.  It’s either done to pad out the film or just to show off how much more money they had this go around.  And it’s true that most of it is really pretty for its time, but there were a couple of things I found goofy.  For instance, the fact that the Klingon ship has a butthole cannon.  And, since we’re on the topic, the opening to the robotic planet that the Enterprise sits outside of for a long time looks like a giant, pulsating, blue anus.  But when travelling through it, it doesn’t look like you’d expect an anus to look like.  Instead, it looks like a series of screensavers.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the performances in the movie.  After playing the same characters in around 80 episodes these people are going to know how to do it better than anyone.  All of them still remember how to do what they’d been doing for so many years before.  Shatner is great.  I’ve made fun of his delivery before, but it just seems right when he’s doing it.  He may be overacting a bit, but when Shatner does it, I still like it.  I didn’t appreciate the changes in uniform as much.  I think the yellow, blue, and red shirts worked.  Plus, they had full sleeves and didn’t reveal that Shatner has unpleasantly hairy upper arms now.  I would also say that, as someone who just recently got turned into a Star Trek fan, I didn’t like seeing Kirk confused on the Enterprise.  I like him much better when he knows what he’s doing.  I think Leonard Nimoy is my favorite amongst the cast.  I like Spock.  He’s got super powers!  And the lack of emotion thing always makes the character more mysterious and interesting.  When Spock rejoins the Enterprise though, I thought he came off more as a dick than a Vulcan, but he eased up a bit on that.  I also love DeForest Kelley.  He’s kind of comic relief without being too overt about it.  Except in that outfit he’s wearing when he first shows up, as if they beamed him up straight out of Studio 54.  Persis Khambatta never really worked for me.  I assume they wanted me to be able to tell what she was saying because she might be saying something that would help me understand what was going on, but the greater majority of things she said did not compute in my brain.  At first it might have been her accent, then later the robotic quality they added to her already hard to understand accent.  Also, she was hot and looked great with that really high skirt, but women don’t really look good bald.  At least not on their head.

I am saying nothing new about Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it’s all new to me because this is the first time I have seen it.  The story lacks substance and feels more like a longer version of one of the less interesting episodes of the show, and they wasted a lot of time staring at the Enterprise doing nothing to show off their new graphic capabilities.  I still like the greater majority of the actors playing the roles that they created, but they couldn’t do much with what they were given here.  I still look forward to what they can do with a good script, and I’ve heard good things about the next movie.  We’ll find out how that worked out later.  For now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture gets “No, Admiral.  I don’t think you’re sorry.  Not one damned bit” out of “It knows only that it needs, Commander.  But, like so many of us, it does not know what.”

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