Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home

Brutish Whale Rays

Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home
USA 1986
Directed by Leonard Nimoy
Paramount Blu Ray

Warning: Some spoilers here for Star Trek virgins.

And so on to the fourth and what is, in actual fact, my personal favourite of all of the Star Trek movies.

Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home has a lot going for it with a brilliant script, mostly played for laughs, the usual solid performances from both the regular and guest cast and even Leonard Nimoy’s direction seems more confident in this one. The camera movement, shot set ups and editing seem a lot less ‘quick and dirty’ and more graceful. Some of the sets, effects and even alien make-up still seems a little less than special in this one... although nowhere near as ropey as some of the stuff in Star Trek III - The Search For Spock (reviewed here).

The story is a continuation and conclusion to the events depicted in the last two movies, with Kirk and his shipmates still fugitives from justice and on their voyage home from Vulcan to the planet Earth, ready to turn themselves in for their breaches of Federation law in the last installment. The scenes from Vulcan don’t look all that realistic in places, it has to be said, and the opening of the movie features the third and final appearance of Saavik, played for the second time by Robin Curtis. Again cut from the film, as it was cut from being mentioned in the last one, the reason Saavik stays behind on Vulcan (appearing in only a couple of brief scenes), is the detail that she is pregnant with Mr. Spock’s child, after helping him out through his ‘pon farr’ phases in the last cinematic installment.

This is also the only film in the franchise to feature both Spock’s father and mother as played by the original actor and actress returning from their TV appearance in the Star Trek episode Journey To Babel, in the same film... although they never actually appear on screen together. This was Jane Wyatt’s last performance before she died but Mark Lennard would, of course, play Sarek at least four more times... twice in the next two Star Trek movies and twice in episodes of Star Trek - The Next Generation. I always find Sarek a reassuring presence in these moves as he seems to lend an instant sense of gravitas to any given situation.

The plot of the film is very simple... the scriptwriters needed to devise a way of having the crew of the now destroyed Enterprise redeem themselves and be able to continue serving in starfleet. Nimoy also throws in a very clear and present plea to “save the whales” and although some people might find this absolutely noble message a bit preachy... well, it may be but it’s a welcome message for a Star Trek movie to deliver and its obviously pursued and presented with a lot of passion.

And so we have an alien vessel beaming down sound rays to the oceans of planet Earth and almost destroying our planet in the process. Kirk and his chums make it back to Earth in time to witness this near ‘destruction by accident’ but Mr. Spock realises the probe is trying to communicate with hump backed whales, a species now extinct in this future era. So the crew of the H.M.S Bounty, as McCoy christens our heroes’ ‘acquired’ Klingon Bird Of Prey (which was never supposed to be a Klingon ship but that’s another story) realise they have to go back to Earth’s ancient history and bring back some whales to the future... which they do. By calculating a time warp (something they’d done before in the TV series and which would be done again in a later Star Trek productions) and landing in San Francisco in 1986.

And , of course, like the various episodes of the original TV show where the crew of the starship Enterprise found themselves either back in Earth’s history, or on a planet mimicking Earth’s history, the script writers have a field day using various ‘fish out of water’, future versus the ‘present day of the contemporary audience’ jokes... making this movie a very light hearted affair and that’s possibly why I like this one so much. The writers, quite frankly, seem to be having a whale of a time with this one and the humour is infectious.

Another thing that’s infectious is the music but it’s also problematic. Rather than keep musical continuity with the previous two films in the franchise, which form an unofficial trilogy within the movie series, Nimoy wanted to use his friend Leonard Rosenman to do the score. This means that, once again, the only musical continuity with the other movies is a few quotes from Alexander Courage’s original Star Trek TV series theme... but the tone of the rest of the score is completely different, once again, from any of the previous films in the series.

Now some of my regular readers might remember I have some personal problems with Leonard Rosenman’s music which, I have to say, is absolutely nothing to do with his ego and more about his use of those damn, irritating ‘tone pyramids’ which have always sounded so dated and clichéd to me. Rosenman is, of course, noted for being a composer who uses a lot of atonality in his work and this is a style which I love, although for some reason I always seem to be less than inspired by this composers own explorations of that style of music. That being said, there are also some great melodies in this one including two truly great pieces of music for when Chekhov is being chased by the navy and a second when he is being rescued from a hospital.

Rosenman’s main titles are also great but they’re similarly problematic in that they’re very close, in some sections, to the main titles for his score to the 1978 version of Lord Of The Rings. I know some people who can’t even tell the difference although they aren’t that used to listening to ‘scores’ and any similarities are usually picked up on. But, yeah, play them both together and some sections do sound almost identical... which is unfortunate because it’s really not a bad piece of music. I do enjoy certain sections of Rosenman’s score for this film, tone pyramids aside, but I do think the choice to use him was possibly a bad decision in the case of this one and its ‘shared story’ with the previous two installments, both of which were scored by James Horner using the same themes (not necessarily all his themes but the less I say about that the less I’m going to get in trouble, methinks).

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. A greatly entertaining movie which even has a cool trick ending...

After saving the Earth from certain doom, all charges are dropped against our heroes apart from one remaining charge for Kirk. However, as his punishment, he is demoted in rank back to Captain and once more given a starship to command... something he’s been trying to get back to in his rank of Admiral since the first movie. He even gets given a new Starship Enterprise, the first of the ships to end with a letter in its serial number... NCC 1701-A (the one Captain Pickard commands in Star Trek - The Next Generation is NCC 1701-D). So a crowd pleasing end all round in a Star Trek movie that pretty much gives the audience everything they could want from it and, as it turns out, was the highest grossing of all ten of the first wave of movies... something which was finally toppled with J. J. Abrams reboot of the movie series a few years back. Regardless of the back story being somewhat essential in terms of picking up the constant references, if you see only one Star Trek movie in your life and you are looking for something to give you a way in, then Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home is the one to go for.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek - The Motion Picture

Slow Motion

Star Trek - The Motion Picture
USA 1979
Directed by Robert wise
Paramount Pictures Region B Blu Ray

So... I got a boxed set of Blu Rays of the first ten Star Trek movies for Christmas 2015 so you can bet I’ll be slowly posting reviews as I watch through them for the next couple of months. I saw all of these movies at the cinema on their initial releases and again on VHS tapes over the years but never got around to getting them again in the DVD age... so it’s been almost two decades since I last watched this one. I remember it being a big deal at the time though.

The original Star Trek TV show was one of the few of its kind where at least some small amount of fan merchandise was available for people to buy in the years before the first Star Wars movie made the secondary spin offs as important as the actual movies. I remember owning the original TV show blue prints pack and the original photonovels... not to mention the old Mego action figures... before then picking up stuff based on this movie such as another photonovel, Weetabix cards, Topps Bubble Gum cards, the Star Trek The Motion Picture blueprint pack and so on. I still have most of this stuff, by the way, although the Mego action figures were a casualty of my past and my Dinky Starship Enterprise exploded when it was thrown at a family member in a fit of rage when I was a young ‘un (not by me, I might add).

Born from the ashes of the original TV show and the aborted Star Trek Phase 2 TV show (reviewed by Tim Pelan at Cinetropolis here), the movie was really only made possible when it was seen as something that could bandwagon off of the popularity of the space opera genre that Star Wars had created two years earlier... although it absolutely wasn't trying to be a close copy of that movie like so many were. I remember first seeing it advertised on an episode of either Tizwas or Multicoloured Swap Shop and I was so struck by the snippets of Jerry Goldsmith’s score in the clips they showed that I even entered a competition for the soundtrack recording on vinyl for one of those shows (I didn’t win so I eventually had to track down a copy for myself a few years later from soundtrack specialist shop, Dean Street Records... but it’s an amazing score and it was well worth it).

The film itself is... well it’s kinda slow. I remember it being a criticism at the time that the long special effects sequences which are dotted throughout the movie drag on interminably and, even then, I guess I kinda agreed with that diagnosis... although to be honest, the scoring in those sequences is so sublime, it really didn’t bother me the way it obviously did some people. Looking back on it now... yeah, it really drags with these long sequences of 5 or 6 minutes of, basically, looking at how good the effects photography is. It’s a bit like the director thought he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey but the gravitas that made viewing the effects work compelling in that one is not present in Star Trek The Motion Picture. Still, it really doesn’t bother me to this day because... well, like I said, the music is so good in this one and I’d be foolish to deny that I’m watching it now with a certain sense of nostalgia. It probably really doesn’t hold up these days for a lot of people but I’m still good with it. I can only imagine what younger generations who are used to seeing special effects handled less reverently than they are here must think of this movie. It probably bores a lot of people silly these days, I suspect.

The story was, and still is, the key to this one, though. Partially based on/inspired by the 1967 Star Trek episode The Changeling... well, I wont spoil the final revelations of the movie here for you but I will say that the threat to mankind in this one is partially of it’s own making, to an extent... although plain random luck completes the rest of that equation. It’s really not an action movie either and I suspect this disappointed a lot of people who went to see it when it came out... although some of the sequels certainly took care of that element, for sure.

The other main strengths of this movie, asides from the story and music, comes from the cast. All of the original regulars from TV were back including William Shatner (in a highly improbable wig), Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Grace Lee Whitney, Majel Barret and even Mark Lenard in a sort of cameo as a Klingon Commander (as opposed to his more familiar Star Trek role as Spock’s father Sarek). The film also stars Stephen Collins and Persis Khambatta in new roles and, luckily, their chemistry and the well written dialogue for all the old crew members certainly does a lot to make up for the movie’s rather obvious shortcomings in the pacing department. Something which Goldsmith’s monumental score also does a lot to hide.

Director Robert Wise uses a lot of classic triangular/pyramid style set ups in terms of the height of the actors and their placement in the foreground and background... everything seems to tend to gravitate to the middle of the shot and it pulls your eyes right to the centre of the widescreen frame a lot of the time... but the way the camera moves through these compositions is not very dynamic, it has to be said. There seems... at least this is the way I generally perceived it... to be a lot of static set ups which the camera moves into or out of, rather than centering around moving content and following that for a lot of the time. Not true for all the film, to be sure, but it certainly seems to be the way a lot of it is put together. It certainly is a slow one and I’d have to say that, although I’m personally fine with the movie and will always have some time for it, I have to agree with the detractors on the general sluggishness of the finished result. I find it fascinating that the director of what I consider to be the scariest horror movie ever made, the original 1963 version of The Haunting, not to mention well loved classics such as West Side Story, The Sound Of Music and the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, did a fairly bland job, in some ways, with this assignment. After all, this was the guy who edited Citizen Kane for Orson Welles.

What people these days fail to take into account, though, is the general zeitgeist of the era when the very first Star Wars film had just came out. This was one of the better “riding on George Lucas’ coat-tails” movies out there at the time and the financial rewards bore this out. It was successful enough to make a big amount of money and, as a result, they still haven’t stopped making sequel movies and TV shows to this one, still, to this day. So dull or not, in places, it did the numbers and ensured a future for the franchise, forging a steady income stream for the regular actors (who I guess got along just fine with money from various convention appearances over the years).

This is not the greatest Star Trek movie by a long chalk but... it did revive the franchise from the cancelled original TV show over a decade after it had been killed off. It could have remained a much loved but ultimately forgotten footnote if it hadn’t been for this movie rescuing it from TV Hell... so, you know, it deserves some of your time and respect, I think, if you are a fan of Star Trek. It lives long and prospers in the hearts of many, still, I suspect.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond