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STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986)
A fun story, well told I didn't expect this movie to age as well as it has, but it kept me with a goofy smirk on my face throughout and reminded me that Star Trek can, sometimes, make me giggle for the right reasons. The closest thing these movies have ever had to a crossover hit, Star Trek IV brought the legendary crew back to the 20th century (where they'd been at least twice before, and subsequent TV shows would revisit countless times) and set them loose in a comic adventure that's lighter than ai....uh, vacuum. People who hated Trek liked this movie, which these days strikes me as a pretty good sign. The Enterprise is dead and gone, its crew R&R'ing on Spock's homeworld while Vulcans with goofy hats work on their captured Klingon bird-of-prey. Everybody's ready to go home and answer for the naughty things they did in the last movie, even Spock who is blameless but feels compelled to testify as a witness anyway. We first see newly reborn and re-integrated Spock enduring some rapid-fire mental callisthenics, interrupted by his human mother Amanda (Jane Wyatt) who poses a question he cannot answer. He's as sharp as he ever was, is at the top of his logic game and remembers everything about his old life almost as if he'd studied it intensely in a book but hadn't actually lived it; all the ways which Spock had learned to appreciate and handle his human side over the years are gone. Two movies later he would say that logic is only the beginning of wisdom, and here he is all the way back at the beginning again. He has essentially lost his entire personality; he doesn't even know how metaphors work anymore. And yet by cutting out all the ways Spock had developed over the years, he's made more Spock than ever, infuriatingly logical without any real understanding of the motives of more passionate creatures. (he would even later say that as a Vulcan, he's incapable of lying - which he'd said before, before lying, but it sounds this time like he actually believes it) It's a beautiful scene, for wrapping up the events of the previous movie, elegantly explaining all the Vulcan/human dichotomies for newbies without forcing it, and as just a nice mother-son scene. Amanda understands both the old Spock and the new Spock better than anyone, and confidently guides her son toward an understanding of what, before his death and rebirth, was hard-won wisdom. Good timing for them to leave then; an alien probe, looking something like an inanimate carbon rod with a retractable volleyball, is on its way to Earth, broadcasting a strange signal nobody understands. All well and good, except every ship and starbase it goes near shuts down (and some people call $3 for a gallon of gas an energy crisis), and when it gets close to the planet it causes atmospheric disturbances so dire they threaten to soak us all - which the probe either doesn't notice or doesn't care about. Kirk and crew pick up the garbled distress call from Earth and try to figure out how to save the world. They figure out that the probe is calling out to humpback whales. Great! But they've been extinct for hundreds of years, shit. (Klingon ships have databases on centuries-extinct Earth animals?) Undaunted, Kirk decides to take the Klingon ship back in time to 1986, snag some whales, bring them forward to the future, and hope they're not so sore about the whole extinction thing that when they answer the probe they say something that really pisses it off. Great plan, even if many Trek fans might (rightfully) cringe that if that's the answer to the problem here, why can't it be the answer to every problem? They go back to 1986 (and endure a weird magic-mushroom vision, which I guess is this movie's answer to 2001's "big trip"), park their cloaked ship in Golden Gate Park and head out into San Francisco to acquire what they're going to need to fly some whales out of there. The none-too-subtle environmental message put forth here (vague mention is made of nuclear power's "toxic side effects", and they can tell it's the late 20th century because of the pollution content in the atmosphere!) could've been unbearable, but I liked that it mostly concentrated on that most easily embraceable environmentalist agenda: saving the whales. I mean, fuck the seals, seals are bitches - who doesn't like whales? They're big, they're nice, they seem pretty bright for animals that'll never get around to discovering fire. Nobody would want to hurt a whale, except for the Japanese and Norwegians, and crazy sea captains, and Eskimos. The comedy here is expectedly pretty mild, but there's so much of it it seems to build on itself, and when it gets on a roll I found myself chuckling at things that really weren't that funny, just...well-placed and truthful about its characters. I liked the dorkier, Trekkier gags best (like Kirk's rationale behind why it's okay to pawn glasses McCoy gave him two films previous, or the abortive argument over Italian food), but I imagine it's the more overt fish-out-of-water gags (getting sworn at by taxi drivers, a punk getting the spockbite) that helped make this a big hit. If there's one gag that stuck with everyone at the time it's one that probably doesn't quite play as well after the cold war, as Uhura and the obviously Russian Chekhov pester passers-by for directions to the "nuclear wessels", and get some good reactions (and non-reactions). With the seven-piece crew divided in four, Uhura and Chekov's mission is to secure a charge from the nuclear reactor on a battleship to fix the engines on the bird of prey (unconvincing tech babble about how nobody has ever known how to fix this, and Spock just thinks of something on the spot). Their story is the weakest of the four; there are some laughs early on but it has two "merry chase" scenes (with "merry chase" music), useless guard dogs (if they can't smell two intruders a few feet away with nothing between them, what are they for?), and a bunch of repetitive one-liners from McCoy that suggest that he doesn't understand that 20th century medicine is doing the best that 20th century medicine knows how to do. He even gives one surgeon shit for, essentially, not having the same gadgets he does, while Chekhov leaves a couple of gadgets from the future - ALIEN gadgets! - in the hands of military intelligence, a fact that is not even noticed in the movie and forgotten by Trek forever. The only real contribution to the movie this passage gets is to get Spock to make a "human" conclusion. McCoy and Scotty sneakily acquire some material to make a giant aquarium out of; I think they only had the one scene off the ship on their own, but it's a good one as they don't alter history so much as tweak it, Scotty hunting and pecking at velocities not seen since before I first took a typing class. Sulu's job is to secure a helicopter with which to fly those huge sheets of transparent aluminum to the cloaked ship in Golden Gate Park that nobody's bouncing Frisbees off of. How he does this is left completely vague; he meets the pilot, chats him up for a moment, and next we see of him he's flying it. Even if I knew how to fly a helicopter, I don't know what I'd have to say to a pilot I just met to get him to let me fly his helicopter, without him on board. What did he say to that pilot? What did he do? Ooh! Ooh! I think this calls for a gay joke! Nnnno, too obvious. The bulk of the 1986 adventures though are centered around Spock and Kirk trying to get some whales. They don't have too much trouble finding some; they just have to convince pretty biologist Catherine Hicks (my dad always confuses her with Elisabeth Shue, a resemblance I now find pretty striking) to help them. There is of course a romance between Kirk and the girl, but it's so slight and unforced that they never even come close to making out. Whether they save the whales, bring them to the future, and the whales successfully tell the ecocidal probe to take a hike is, I suppose, a foregone conclusion. Spock even gets a companion scene to his intro at the end, as he speaks with his father and, I think, elicits the most understanding from him he'd ever get while they were both alive. Star Trek IV closes off an unintended trilogy, by far the best block of movies to be found in the Trek series. What would go wrong after this? Star Trek: The Next Generation, I fear? That show is dear to me, but my appreciation of it is getting increasingly bittersweet. Yes, this one is lightweight, and the most danger we ever see anyone in is when some sweaty guy has trouble breathing on a viewscreen. But nothing out of Trek's been half this much breezy fun since, which I think is probably the bulk of the reason why this managed to appeal to many Trek non-fans as it did. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |