Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home
As fortune smiled upon the box office take for Star Trek 3, so was things now allowed to go in a new direction creatively. With Leonard Nimoy’s initial foray into directing on The Search For Spock considered to be a rousing success, this time around the producers basically gave Nimoy carte blanche to do absolutely any kind of story that he pleased, provided that it would still fall within the realm of being a Star Trek movie. Nimoy responded by coming up with a concept that was true to his more environmental activist instincts (and that came out way better than Christopher Reeve’s similar attempt on the fourth Superman movie) where it turns out that the only way to save all life on Earth was by saving the whales. Many laughed at the idea (and still do) and even a handful of longtime fans shunned the movie completely due to what they thought was a ridiculously stupid story, which in many ways it is, but Nimoy still managed to temper much of that disapproval by furthering the “mission” in this movie to also require the crew of The Starship Enterprise to have to travel back in time to modern day 1986, the exact same year that the film was produced, thus giving us the one time only enjoyment of watching this beloved group of sci fi pop culture icons walk around, interact, and mingle in our own “primitive and paranoid culture” with the same types of people who for 20 years up to that time were most responsible for making Star Trek the phenomenon that it was, and so what we end up having here is a weak setup and premise (i.e. excuse) for the crew to wind up in our own era, and then be treated to an extended series of awesomely funny and well played moments with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura coming from their more advanced civilization having to now deal with the great unwashed, namely us, with our monetary systems, medical butchery, and as Spock puts it, our use of “more colorful metaphors”, which Kirk not only flippantly dismisses as “simply the way these people talk here”, but he also winds up showing his own expertise at it as well (and blowing the roof off at nearly every theatre that played the film with the cheering) by telling an obnoxious cab driver “double dumbass on you!”. The story begins with a bunch of Federation politicians (including The Klingon Ambassador and Mark Lenard’s Sarek) debating about what should be done about Admiral James T. Kirk after his actions in the previous film, with The Klingons wanting his head on a stick while Sarek (obviously) argues for clemency. Meanwhile, the crew members themselves remain on Vulcan, overseeing Spock’s “recovery” in coming back from the dead and repairing Kruge’s Klingon Bird Of Prey for traveling back to Earth in order to face the music. We even get quick cameos from Robin Curtis as Lt. Saavik (on her way out of the franchise and allegedly pregnant with Spock’s baby after having to mate with him in order to save his life in Trek 3) and Jane Wyatt as Spock’s human mother Amanda (only the second time that this character has ever appeared, with the first time being on an episode of the original series also played by the same actress). Suddenly back on Earth, all the wrangling over Kirk’s impending trial is halted because of the sudden appearance of a mysterious giant probe (which harkens back to V’Ger in Trek 1) that has an electromagnetic pulse like effect in shutting down all electrical energy that it comes into contact with and which is moving closer and closer to Earth itself to apparently shut it down too (and kill everybody in the process) all while singing a sad and bizarre song that no one can seem to figure out. Except Spock of course, who tells the crew while they are en route that it appears to be the song of the now extinct humpback whales, who can apparently reply to the probe and tell it not to kill everybody (uh, okay) and that is the reason why the time travel gimmick is required so that they can go and retrieve a couple of live ones and deposit them into the water so that they may redeem us all (hmm). Once you get around that idea and finally are able to witness the sight of our legendary heroes walking around San Francisco circa 1986 (the true reason for being worth the price of admission), we are treated to one great lighthearted moment after another, with even the lower end members getting MUCH more to do than usual, as Sulu laughingly commandeers a military helicopter (which must seem like a toy to him), Scotty visits an engineering company and good naturedly gives away a formula for an uninvented form of aluminum (while also hinting that he knows that the company owner he gave it to was the actual inventor of it and even more amazingly, it really was invented in 2009), McCoy goes undercover at a 1986 hospital and is appalled at what he sees to be the barbaric tactics of the doctors there and even manages to cure patients left and right with what are to him simple treatments, and best of all, Uhura and Chekov are sent to obtain some energy from the nuclear vessel at the local Naval Base, completely oblivious to the fact that The Cold War was still raging on at that point and so sending a Russian like Chekov to retrieve some nuclear power might not have been the best idea, but at least it gives Walter Koenig arguably the funniest moments in the film with Chekov’s simplistic, sweet natured, almost innocent personality leading his government interrogators to conclude that he can’t actually be a Russian spy because he seems more like a “retard” to them (another great moment). Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock take on the most important task of actually locating and obtaining a pair of humpback whales whom they can take back 300 years into the future with them, which they manage to find at the local marine aquarium, complete with a pretty young marine biologist working there played by Catherine Hicks in a role that was originally intended as a guest shot of sorts for of all people Eddie Murphy, a major Trekkie himself who was keen on doing the film, but thankfully dropped out and avoided a major casting stink bomb that wouldn’t have cleared up for years (think Richard Pryor in Superman 3). Moreso, with the cute and spunky Hicks in the part, it allows us to finally see in the movies what Shatner’s Kirk did best on the old TV show, that of charming and romancing the ladies in order to move closer to his intended goal which is to get those whales onto his ship, which as a result also gives us delightful bits including some improvised wordplay between Kirk and Spock when asked by Hicks if they like Italian food (since Spock cannot tell a lie), Spock using the Vulcan death grip to put out an obnoxious punk rocker on a public transit bus (to the cheers of the others on board), and Spock actually climbing into the whale tank to mindmeld with one of them to the shocked faces of those on hand taking the aquarium tour. This along with many other bits all help to make this certainly the lightest of the series that in many ways only works as well as it does because of our overall love and familiarity with these characters (the kind of warmth that the Next Generation crew never really got to build up properly) and the trust that we have in their chemistry always being spot on. It’s interesting that Shatner demanded (and got) a substantial raise here to come back abroad, but as he truly is the skipper of this crew, there was really no other option but to satisfy his salary requirements, although it is Nimoy who really comes to the fore here as a director, getting in his long winded environmental message but still making an extremely entertaining film if you can look past that and just enjoy the so called modern day gimmick, proving for all time that no other cast or crew of any kind related to Star Trek could ever get it done better than the all time beloved originals when they were cooking on all cylinders together…
8/10