Well, here we are. I actually had to go out to a shop and buy a copy of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier on DVD, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to write this review. Before making this noble sacrifice, I think I’ve only seen this particular instalment in the movie series twice, once at the original cinematic release, and once on TV. It has the reputation of being the worst of all the Star Trek films, and for good reason.

It opens in Yosemite Valley, where the Enterprise bridge crew are spending shore leave on a camping trip. Kirk is shown free climbing El Capitan, a feat that by all rights should be physically beyond anyone of William Shatner’s physical condition at the time. He is saved from falling to his death by Spock, in a Chekhov’s-gun-setup use of gravity boots. Kirk says he was never worried, since he’s always known that he will die alone.

On the distant planet Nimbus III, we see a wretched hive town. The Romulan ambassador Caithlin arrives at a seedy bar (complete with a catgirl alien), and explains in excruciating expositionary detail to the human and Klingon ambassadors there that Nimbus III is the “The Planet of Galactic Peace”. The peace is short-lived, as a strange mystical Vulcan and his fanatical followers attack the place and take the ambassadors hostage.

The Enterprise crew are called back to deal with the hostage situation, but the ship is in a mess, despite Scotty working full time on it. Basically anything on the ship that could be broken is broken, for no explicable reason. It’s mind-boggling to think a military vessel not actually in combat would ever be allowed to get into such a state – it really makes no sense at all.

We’re then treated to a shot of a Klingon vessel blowing up an Earth space probe, apparently just for the heck of it. The probe looks remarkably like Voyager, bringing up echoes of V-ger from the first film. The Klingon commander (who is a glam rock star, judging by his hairdo) is ordered to Nimbus as well, and starts salivating at the prospect of destroying Kirk and the Enterprise.

The Enterprise arrives at Nimbus and Kirk decides the best way to approach the city is on space-horses. Nichelle Nichols has to undergo her most embarrassing acting scene ever, as she does a fan dance to distract some nomads so the guys can steal horses and ride into the city. But the ambassador hostages have become followers of the Vulcan, who Spock recognises as the renegade Sybok, and they capture the heroes. Mixed up in a fight scene Spock gives a Vulcan nerve pinch to a horse; apparently their physiology is enough like humanoids that it works on them too.

They take a shuttlecraft back to Enterprise (evading the Klingons mentioned earlier on the way) – the shuttlecraft pickup scene has very strong echoes of the landing scene in Alien. When the shuttle lands on the Enterprise, Spock has a chance to kill Sybok and end the entire crisis, but he refuses to kill his own brother. Wait… Spock has a brother?! Half-brother, it turns out, since Sarek apparently had a Vulcan wife before Amanda – something never before (or after) hinted at in any Star Trek canon. Also wait… why didn’t Spock just set the weapon on stun and shoot Sybok? I guess that particular gun only had a kill setting.

Sybok takes control of the Enterprise and tosses Kirk and Spock in the brig. The toilet in the brig has an obvious sign on it: “Do not use while in space dock”. Presumably somebody on the writing team thought that was funny. Scotty busts them out, after warning them to stand back by tapping on the other side of the brig wall in Morse code. The gravity boots reappear as a way to quickly move up and down the access tubes of the ship.

Sybok is taking the ship to the centre of the galaxy, to find the Vulcan legendary world of Sha Ka Ree, where he hopes to find God. They get there and meet a being who looks and sounds like God, and asks to be taken away on their ship to spread his word throughout the galaxy. Kirk asks the only memorable line of the film: “Excuse me, what does God need with a starship?” “God” goes into a rage, Sybok sees through it and sacrifices himself to give the others time to escape. The Klingon ship reappears, but the Klingon ambassador who Kirk and Spock saved arranges for it to fire a torpedo at “God”, killing it. The Enterprise and Klingon vessel part company on peaceful terms, and the heroes head back to Yosemite to finish their camping trip.

Whew, I’m glad to have that one over and done with. About the only highlight of the film is Jerry Goldsmith’s music. It opens the film in fine style, with echoes of the original TV series theme, before segueing into the Motion Picture/Next Generation theme, which sounds much more refined and enveloping than in the first film. Throughout the movie, while cringing at what was happening on screen, I was enjoying the music. There are a lot of bad scenes in this film, and the overall story is simply dull and uninspiring. The best moments are the camping sequences that book-end the film, and the scene on the Enterprise where it’s shown to have an old-fashioned sailing-ship-style wheelhouse room, complete with brass and wood ship’s wheel. Now that’s what a starship bridge should look like! If you haven’t seen this film for a long time, like I had, you’re not missing much.

Tropes: Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb, Catch A Falling Star, Not The Fall That Kills You, Chekhov’s Gun, Tricked-Out Shoes, Wretched Hive, Mr Exposition, Cat Girl, Expospeak, ’80s Hair, Horse Of A Different Colour, Show Some Leg, Long Lost Relative, Canon Discontinuity, Everyone Knows Morse, Armour Piercing Question, No Such Thing As Space Jesus, Heroic Sacrifice, Book Ends.
Body count: “God”, Sybok.

Like the movie before it, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a direct continuation of the previous instalment in the series. It opens with a recap of the previous two films, followed by an upbeat musical theme over the main titles. This music has distinctive glockenspiel notes in it, twinkling in the manner of stars in space – a nice effect.

The opening scenes show a mysterious black cylinder moving through space past the USS Saratoga, which reports it’s headed straight for Earth, in an eerie mirror of V-ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Then we cut to Starfleet headquarters on Earth, where the Klingon ambassador is calling for Kirk to be extradited and tried for destroying a Klingon vessel and crew (in the previous film). During this accusal we are treated yet again to the Genesis computer graphics created for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and repeated in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, since in 1986 they still looked impressive. Sarek argues in Kirk’s defence.

On Vulcan, Kirk and his crew are banging the captured Klingon bird-of-prey from the last movie into shape for the trip back to Earth to face the consequences of stealing the Enterprise in the previous movie. They lampshade the rather silly predicament that Starfleet hasn’t bothered to send a better ship to pick them up and take them back to Earth for court martial. Spock is still rebuilding his intellect after his brush with death and we see him studying with some computers asking him tricky questions, when one asks, “How do you feel?” Spock is stumped, and his mother appears and reveals she programmed the computers to ask him this, to remind him of his human heritage. Spock takes his leave without answering her and elects to return to Earth to face trial with his colleagues.

Back at Earth, the mysterious probe arrives and starts vapourising the oceans. Things rapidly deteriorate, to the point where the President of the Federation issues a distress call, stating that the probe has “almost totally ionised the atmosphere“! (While this is possible, everything on Earth would be dead already.) When our heroes arrive, they cleverly figure out that the probe is transmitting sound into the Earth’s oceans. Modifying the sound to what it would sound like underwater, Spock recognises it as whale song. They quickly realise that the probe must have come to investigate why the sounds of whales ceased coming from Earth a couple of hundred years ago – when they died out. To respond and stop the probe, they need whales. Thus is hatched a hare-brained scheme to travel back in time to before they became extinct and pick some up!

We are treated to some trippy mind-screw hallucinatory images as the Klingon ship slingshots around the sun and is flung back to… 1986! Uhura reports that she is “receiving whalesong!” One wonders how the whales are transmitting it into space – presumably through the same means they use to communicate with the mysterious probe’s civilisation. They land in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, with the ship cloaked – thus explaining why they had to retain the Klingon ship, since Federation vessels don’t have cloaking technology. Interestingly, in the previous movie, the cloaking device on this same ship produced a rippling effect against the background stars in space that allowed Sulu to see the ship anyway, but now it produces complete and utterly flawless invisibility. Presumably Scotty did some of his magical engineering tweaks on it to improve it.

In town, this being San Francisco, nobody comments on their weird 23rd century clothing, especially Spock’s nightrobe-like Vulcan garb. Kirk is shocked to learn the natives are “still using money”. He sells the antique pair of glasses McCoy gave him at the beginning of Star Trek II. When Spock protests that they were a gift from McCoy, Kirk says, “That’s the beauty of it, they will be again,” implying the glasses enter a stable time loop. The group splits up, Kirk and Spock to look for whales, Scotty and McCoy to find some materials to build a whale tank inside the ship, Sulu to arrange transport for the materials, and Uhura and Chekov to locate a nuclear reactor so they can scavenge some high energy photons to recharge the ship’s warp engines. Scotty also generates a time loop when he teaches a materials scientist how to make transparent aluminium in exchange for some plexiglass. When McCoy protests that he could be messing with history, Scotty rather flippantly dismisses him with, “How do we know he didn’t invent it?” This is dealt with better in the novelisation, in which Scotty recognises the man as the guy who actually did invent transparent aluminium, thus reducing the flippant disregard for creating a time paradox.

Kirk and Spock find some whales at a fictional Cetacean Institute in Sausolito, as well as their carer Gillian. Kirk woos Gillian and eventually tells her they are from the future and need the whales. She rejects him, but comes back to find him when her boss releases the whales into the open sea, where they will be hunted and killed by whalers. Meanwhile, Uhura and Chekov locate a reactor, on board the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise(!), and beam in, getting into trouble when Chekov, a Russian, is caught inside an American naval vessel, at the height of the Cold War. He tries to escape but is injured and rushed to hospital, where the others stage a rescue mission. Then they fly out with Gillian on board to locate the whales’ tracking devices. They find them just before they are about to be harpooned by some evil Scandinavians, beam them aboard into the tank, and fly home to the future.

There they release the whales into San Francisco Bay to repopulate the species, the probe is happy and departs, and the Earth is saved! At the court martial, all charges are dropped due to extenuating circumstances, except the charge against Kirk of disobeying orders, for which he is demoted from Admiral to Captain, and therefore given command of a ship. The Klingon ambassador is outraged and Sarek is smug. Spock tells Sarek to tell his mother, “I feel fine.” The crew head to their new ship… which is revealed to be a brand new Enterprise. Awwww.

This is a very different Trek movie, which played more heavily with humour and light-hearted action than drama. And it worked, it really did. Some of the comedy moments with Kirk and Spock in the 20th century are truly hilarious, pushing but never quite falling into slapstick and ridiculousness. It’s an incredibly fun story, which is ultimately uplifting and hopeful – just what we needed in the dark and pessimistic times of the mid 1980s. Star Trek as it was truly meant to be. Wrath of Khan is a more edgy, dramatic, tense, and probably better movie, but this one is way more fun, and easily my second favourite of the entire series.

Tropes: Big Dumb Object, Ass in Ambassador, Lampshade Hanging, Artistic Licence – Physics, Crazy Enough to Work, Space Whale, Space Whale Aesop, Changed My Jumper, Stable Time Loop, Time Travel Romance, Mistaken for Spies, Time Travellers Are Spies, Adam and Eve Plot, Green Aesop, Unishment, Fish Out of Temporal Water, Everybody Lives.
Body count: None!

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock picks up where Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan left off, after the defeat of Khan and the creation of the Genesis planet. In fact, the film opens by repeating the death of Spock scene. It also recycles the Genesis effect computer graphics from the previous film, mostly because in 1984 this was still an amazing piece of graphics.

The movie proper opens with the Enterprise limping back to Earth after the events of the previous film. On the way, McCoy is caught breaking into Spock’s quarters and acting bizarrely. We cut to a space rendezvous between a merchant ship and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey warship. Valkris, a Klingon woman aboard the merchant ship, transmits data on Genesis to Kruge, the captain of the Bird-of-Prey, who then promptly blows the other ship out of the sky, with a bittersweet adieu to Valkris for her spy work. Kruge decides to go to Genesis to learn the secret of this planet-destroying weapon. Kruge is played by Christopher “one point twenty-one jiggawatts” Lloyd, which adds touches of both coolness and oddity to the character.

On Earth, McCoy continues acting weird, making out-of-context references to Vulcan and collapsing. Spock’s father Sarek visits Kirk and engages in a cross-purposes berating of Kirk for failing Spock. The confusion is only cleared up when Sarek mind melds with Kirk, then explains that Spock would have tried to meld with someone before he died, to transfer his consciousness, or katra, to them so it could live on in their body. Kirk points out Spock was isolated in the radiation chamber, then reviews log tapes of the incident, spotting Spock touching McCoy and whispering the word, “Remember.” Sarek tells Kirk they have to get McCoy and Spock’s body to Vulcan as fast as possible or he will die.

And here’s the plot hole in the film. Kirk appeals to Admiral Morrow to get back Enterprise, but Morrow refuses because Genesis is a “political hot potato”. It looks like Kirk never explained that McCoy’s life was in danger, and there was no diplomatic word from Sarek to assist in the request. And the USS Grissom is out there surveying Genesis anyway, what’s one more ship going to do?! On board the Grissom are Saavik and David. Saavik is very disappointingly not played by Kirstie Alley, but by wooden newcomer Robin Curtis. Kruge appears and unceremoniously blows the Grissom out of the sky, with only Saavik and David surviving, doing a survey on the planet and its incredibly fake cacti and snow. They find it’s unstable, because David cut corners in the research (remind anyone of his father and the Kobayashi Maru?). They also find Spock’s torpedo tube, distressingly empty except for some giant mutated rubber worm things, which David says must have been mutated by the Genesis effect.

Back on Earth, Kirk decides to screw the rules and do what’s right, arranging with Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty to steal the Enterprise and take McCoy to Genesis then Vulcan. This is a cool sequence in which they sneak around and outsmart an unlikeable smug captain in charge of the new, faster Excelsior by having Scotty steal the space-spark-plugs. At Genesis, David and Saavik have found Spock’s body, regenerated by the Genesis effect into a mind-blanked young boy, who ages rapidly. He goes thorough pon-farr and Saavik tries to ease this by stroking his fingers in the same way that Sarek and Amanda did to demonstrate their love back in “Journey To Babel”. Hmmm. A Klingon landing party soon find them and take them prisoner.

The Enterprise arrives and there is a brief space battle in which both ships are damaged. Kruge demands Kirk surrender and hand over the Genesis device, or he will kill prisoners. Kirk tries to delay, but Kruge has one of this flunkies kill a prisoner. David interferes and gets the knife himself, sending Kirk into a rage. He says he’s surrendering, sets the Enterprise to self-destruct, and beams down to Genesis. The Klingon boarding party are blown up as the Enterprise destructs. I always figured the Enterprise would self-destruct by breaching the antimatter containment thingy, resulting in an enormous explosion that vapourises the entire ship instantly. But no, the front half of the saucer sort of blows up, leaving the rest of the ship – including the engines and the engineering section – intact. (Supposedly canon says there are two different self-destruct modes: this one, and the full-on antimatter explosion. Kirk happened to choose the milder version, so as not to destroy the Klingon ship and their only potential means of escape.) It then forms a fireball as it falls from orbit, watched by the stunned crew. It’s an emotional moment, and I vividly recall watching this scene in horror in the cinema when the film was first released.

They find the Klingons and Saavik and Spock. Kruge beams down to engage Kirk in a clifftop fistfight, in which Kirk kicks Kruge off the cliff and he falls into lava as the planet breaks up. Kirk tricks the last Klingon crew member into beaming him up and takes control of the Klingon ship. They fly it to Vulcan, where a ceremony restores Spock’s consciousness from McCoy into the regenerated body of Spock. Spock is naturally a bit shaken by being split in half, killed, regenerated, and recombined, but the film ends in a feel-good scene when he recognises his friends. And the adventure continues…

EDIT: Oh, I suppose I should add my opinions on this film. Well, it’s not terrible, but it’s not great either. The biggest emotional impact comes from the destruction of the Enterprise (by which time it’s pretty clear that Spock would be coming back to life). Lloyd as Kruge is good. The sets and props are not great, particularly the fake looking scenery on the Genesis planet and the rubber worms which Kruge strangles. Curtis as Saavik is disappointing and stiff. The stealing of the Enterprise sequence is very cool. Overall… eh… middling.

Tropes: Face Death With Dignity, Our Souls Are Different, Sharing A Body, Obstructive Bureaucrat, The Other Darrin, Screw the Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right, Smug Snake, Vehicular Sabotage, Stolen MacGufin Reveal, Back From The Dead, Rapid Aging, Heroic Sacrifice, Self-Destruct Mechanism, Disney Villain Death, Lethal Lava Land, And The Adventure Continues.
Body count: Valkris and all on board merchant ship (destroyed by Klingon Bird-of-Prey), All hands on board USS Grissom, Klingon gunner (shot by Kruge), David (stabbed by a Klingon), various Klingon crew (blown up on board Enterprise), Klingon crewman (shot by Kirk), Kruge (falls off cliff), USS Enterprise (self destruct).

Ah, now here we have something. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what really drove me to continue this series of reviews into the films. It is widely regarded as the best of the original cast Star Trek films. Watching it again, I am reminded forcefully why this is the case.

Although, the music over the credits is nowhere near as memorable as the music from the first movie. Perhaps just because that music was later used for The Next Generation, whereas this one still sounds unfamiliar (despite me having seen the movie multiple times). The opening scene makes up for it though, with the new character Saavik apparently in command of the Enterprise, in the now-famous Kobayashi Maru simulation. The impressive 1980s computer graphics are no match for the young Kirstie Alley, who bravely orders the ship into the Klingon Neutral Zone (the lesser known cousin of the more famous Romulan Neutral Zone, which is probably why we haven’t ever heard of it before now). In the simulated attack, Spock “dies”, prompting Kirk’s witty, “Aren’t you dead?” line a bit later when they meet. That’s an interesting bit of foreshadowing I hadn’t really noticed before.

We then get to see Kirk’s apartment, with a gorgeous view overlooking San Francisco Bay. The crew arrive to celebrate his birthday, and we learn that Kirk apparently has a fondness for antiques – something that somehow eluded our perception in three years of episodes. McCoy gives him a pair of eyeglasses, which Kirk has to amusingly ask what they are. Spock gives Kirk an antique edition of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, from which Kirk reads the opening lines.

Meanwhile, Chekov is on the USS Reliant, surveying planets to find a dead world for testing of the mysterious Genesis project. He and Captain Terrell check out Ceti Alpha VI, beaming down to check out some weird sensor readings. They find a shipwreck, sending Chekov into a panic when he discovers the nameplate Botany Bay. But it’s too late to escape, as one of the most awesome dramatic reveals in cinema history occurs. The cloth-swathed figure who captures them is slowly revealed (to the best music of the movie) to be none other than Khan, last seen in the episode “Space Seed“, in which Kirk stranded the genetic superman and his followers on Ceti Alpha V. It turns out there was a planetary catastrophe soon afterwards, disrupting the orbits and rendering Ceti Alpha V almost uninhabitable (and now apparently the 6th planet out). Khan’s wife died, and now he wants nothing but revenge on Kirk.

Khan sticks nasty parasites into Chekov and Terrell’s ears; the parasites’ mental influence gives him command over them. He uses this to capture the Reliant, go to and destroy the Genesis research base, and then ambush Kirk when he arrives to investigate what’s going on. Kirk is led there by a call from Genesis lead scientist (and old flame) Carol Marcus, when Khan makes her believe that Kirk ordered the civilian project turned over to Starfleet. To explain Genesis to Spock, McCoy, and the audience, Kirk plays a classified recording or Carol presenting the research proposal. We are treated to stunningly impressive computer graphics for 1982 (they look dated now, but it was genuinely mind-blowing then), showing the “Genesis effect” transforming a dead rocky planet at the molecular level into one primed to support life. As McCoy points out, it could also be used to wipe out an entire populated planet.

When Kirk arrives at the research station, Khan is ready, and cripples the Enterprise with a pre-emptive attack. Kirk pulls a trick to deactivate Reliant‘s shields and get a shot in, and the two ships withdraw. Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik check the research station and find dead scientists, barely alive Chekov and Terrell, and a transporter recently set to beam inside the nearby asteroid. Spock on board the Enterprise reports the transporters have died and Kirk asks how long until they are repaired. In a transparent piece of codespeak, Spock tells Kirk “hours would seem like days” and that they will be ready in two days. It’s kind of clever, since they know Khan will be listening in, but it’s a bit of a plothole that Khan (a genius, remember) can’t decipher the real meaning of this message.

In the meantime, the landing party beams down inside the asteroid, finding a hollowed chamber. Carol’s son David attacks Kirk, thinking he’s behind the attack, but she calls him off. Chekov and Terrell reveal they are still under Khan’s mental command, and contact Khan, who beams up the Genesis device. Terrell kills a redshirt scientist who tries to jump him, then fights off the parasite’s influence and turns the phaser on himself. Chekov collapses and McCoy tends to him. Carol explains to Kirk that David is his son, and then they reveal an enormous cave in the asteroid, terraformed by Genesis. On cue, two hours later, Spock beams them aboard and the final showdown with Khan commences.

The Enterprise limps to the Mutara Nebula, which clouds ship’s sensors and gives them an even chance against the less damaged Reliant. Khan again plays against his alleged genius intellect by famously thinking “two dimensionally” as Spock points out. Kirk commands the recovered Chekov to pilot the Enterprise down, and they manage to get behind Khan this way and deliver a killing blow. Khan decides to take Kirk with him, activating the Genesis device in a ploy to convert the entire nebula and everything within it into a new planet. The Enterprise can’t get out without warp drive, and the engines can’t be fixed because of radiation flooding the engine chamber.

Unknown to Kirk, Spock races down the engineering. McCoy tries to stop him entering the chamber, but Spock nerve pinches him, then in an odd move grips the unconscious McCoy in the Vulcan mind meld grip and whispers, “Remember.” Spock then enters the chamber and performs the necessary repairs, allowing the ship to escape in the nick of time as the nebula implodes. Kirk breathes a sigh of relief, interrupted as he notices Spock is not on the bridge and by McCoy calling from engineering and saying to get down there. Kirk arrives in time for poignant last words as Spock dies on the other side of the clear radiation screen. After a moving funeral, they shoot his body into space in a torpedo casing over the new Genesis planet, presumably to burn up in re-entry.

In the denouement, David and Kirk come to terms with their relationship. Then on the bridge, Kirk quotes the ending lines of A Tale of Two Cities, bookending this literary reference to Spock’s sacrifice to save his friends. The final shot is of the Genesis planet, on which we see Spock’s torpedo tube, apparently soft-landed. The famous “Space, the final frontier” speech is then delivered for the first time in the franchise by Leonard Nimoy.

The revenge theme is what drives this film. And despite the more obvious use of A Tale of Two Cities, it is another book that forms the core of the film. As Chekov and Terrell are surveying the wreck of the Botany bay, we see a copy of Moby-Dick on a shelf. Khan is Captain Ahab, and Kirk is his white whale. The parallels are deliberately played up, including the final showdown game of cat and mouse in the Mutara Nebula between the Enterprise and Khan’s captured Reliant that echoes battle on the high seas. Khan’s last words are even a direct quote of Ahab’s. And in a piece of coincidence that couldn’t have been better if it was engineered, Ceti Alpha is the brightest star in the constellation of Cetus – the whale.

This film is so much better than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in so many ways. The villain is more accessible, more real, more threatening, more of an actual villain. There’s real conflict. There’s more emotionally involving backstory, as Kirk faces up to old age, and to his past. There’s a young Kirstie Alley. There’s more quotable dialogue. There’s more intense drama and tension. There’s Starfleet uniforms that actually look good. I’ve seen some reports floating around the net that this used to be generally considered the best original cast Star Trek film, but that nowadays many people prefer VI: The Undiscovered Country. I went into this viewing open-minded, knowing I’d be reviewing both films eventually. But watching it again just makes me more certain that this one is the best. By far.

Tropes: Naive Newcomer, Unwinnable Training Simulation, Sealed Evil In A Can, Bus Crash, Best Served Cold, Orifice Invasion, Puppeteer Parasite, Technology Porn, Genesis Effect, Creating Life, Doomsday Device, Cryptic Conversation, Luke, You Are My Father, Ham To Ham Combat, Space Clouds, 2-D Space, Taking You With Me, Heroic Sacrifice, Outrun The Fireball, Anyone Can Die, Whole Plot Reference, Space Is An Ocean.
Body count: Peter Preston (killed in initial attack on Enterprise), 5+ scientists (killed by Khan’s mob), 1 scientist (phasered by Captain Terrell), Captain Terrell (phasers self), Joachim (victim of Kirk’s attack on Reliant), Khan (Genesis explosion), all Khan’s followers (Genesis explosion or final attack), Spock (selfless sacrifice).