Star Trek movie retrospective Part 4: the Voyage Home
Another decent Star Trek film. Remember last post when I said that Klingon ships were second only to the Enterprise itself? Well, in this one Kirk and crew get to fly around in one. (Voyage Home image courtesy, as always, of the Star Trek T Shirts category).
Anyway, Nimoy was approached to direct the 4th film after his success on the last one. He came up with a pro environment story with no real villain. Paramount brought in the great Nick Meyer to help write parts of the screenplay. The film came out in November of 1986 and was generally a success.
What was happening in 1986? Well, I was a senior in high school and the first glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel made it slightly more bearable. However, the year before I had broken my kneecap, which pretty much took me off the wrestling team, which I loved and was pretty much the only slice of cool I had in my high school experience. I also managed to develop type 1 diabetes (the kind you get from genetics, not from being a fat bastard), which was hugely complicated, dangerous, and squashed my original plans to join the Marine Corps after graduation, something I had wanted to do ever since I was a kid. I was past the suicide planning freshman and sophomore years and the homicidal “I’m going to kill everyone in my school and stand around laughing while the parents came to claim the bodies” junior year (one of many dark periods of my life). I was feeling as good as I ever was in high school, and the only thing I was doing was cutting a little. In an ironic blast from the past the US bombed Libya, Chernobyl blows up, the first bits of Glasnost happens, Halley’s Comet approaches and fails to blow up the planet in spite of many doomsday predictions, seven million Americans hold (hopefully recently washed) hands in the “Hands Across America” event, an earthquake in El Salvador kills 1500, Ollie North gets caught in the Iran-Contra Affair, Mad Cow Disease is identified in the UK, Mike Tyson becomes heavyweight champion of the world, the smoking ban is lowered on all planes, trains, and buses to much whining from nicotine hounds, space shuttle Challenger blows up (I cried) and leads to a number of really bad jokes (I laughed), Intel releases the 386 processing chip, the worlds first laptop comes out, and the nicotine patch was invented.
In movies it definitely wasn’t the great year 1984 was. Besides the Voyage Home, the only movies really worth noting were Alien (Sigourney Weaver in her underwear!), Platoon (not TOO depressing), Top Gun (adrenaline fueled recruitment movie), and Crocodile Dundee (suddenly Australia seemed cool). In TV the A Team, Cheers, and Magnum PI were on the good side, but on the bad side we had Growing Pains (groaning pains), Murder She Wrote (how many murders does a writer encounter in a life time? Also, why didn’t one of the hundreds of murderers she ran into just put a bullet in her?), Remington Steele (pretty boy solves crimes before becoming 007), and the Cosby Show (Bill Cosby shows us how be be good parents. Actually helped drive home how messed up my own family life was, so thanks Bill). Music more or less sucked. Pet Shop Boys, Culture Club, Madonna, and the Bangles (Walk Like an Egyptian) to name a few.
I’d like to say culturally we were ready for another Star Trek film, but by then it was pretty much a franchise and the studio was going to crank out a sequel if the entire planet were about to fall into a black hole.
Anyway, Kirk and crew are headed back to Earth to pay for the crimes they committed resurrecting Spock. They are headed to Earth in their stolen Bird-of-Prey but it’s 2286 and time for the human race to pay for past sins, specifically in the extinction of the hump back whale. This is less like delivering a message as it is having the message and six of his friends come over to your house and beat you with sand filled rubber hoses. An alien probe comes to Earth looking for the whales and is going to more or less wreak the planet until they are found. Apparently the sound the whales makes travels through the airless void of space and is picked up by the aliens. Kirk and crew decide they can travel back in time and scoop up a couple. They land in San Francisco, where the more or less abuse the timeline and completely ignore the temporal prime directive. I’m no scientist, but I would think doing stuff like kidnapping whales (with tracking devices on them), giving some local yahoo the secret of transparent aluminum, and taking a whale biologist forward in time just might have an effect on the timeline. Talk about the Butterfly Effect. Anyway, awkward people-from-the-future-trying-to-fit-in hijinks ensues. Chekov asks around for nuclear wessels. Spock acts spacy and disjointed. McCoy has a fit about the primitiveness of 20th century surgical techniques. Kirk insults the Mormon church. Scotty turns into the temporal rogue planetoid (and is the size of a planetoid) and more or less hands out advanced technology left and right. Chekov, forever the show whipping boy, gets run down by military police and ends up in the hospital, just like on the show. Sulu manages to figure out how to fly a Huey helicopter. I guess all that time spent flying around space with no gravity teaches you a lot about dealing with the most complicated flying machine of our modern world. Whales get tracked down by the chip in their heads. They get dumped off in the San Francisco Bay (just a few miles from my house) and everything is hunky dory.
What the movie had:
Spock with more than two speaking lines. A lot of really good humor. All the rest of the original crew. Some headache inducing time paradox questions. Time travel as a plot device. The line “nuclear wessels”. A Klingon Bird-of-Prey. Whales. A court martial.
What it didn’t have:
Cool space battles. Aliens. An epic fight scene. A hot Vulcan girl (or any other hot girls, for that matter).
Like the last movie, this one raised some serious questions for me. For example:
If Kirk sold off his antique glasses in the past and then reacquired them again in the future, where did they come from originally? Were they the spontaneously manifesting plot device? Also, if they more or less gained 300 years every time they went through the cycle, wouldn’t they eventually just be a small pile of decayed metal dust and ground up glass?
How exactly did Sulu know how to fly a Huey? I’m not kidding, a helicopter is godawfully complicated, and hovering carrying huge loads is one of the hardest things to do with one. If you took a modern pilot and transported him 300 years into the past, putting him in a clipper ship he might be able to figure out how to pilot in a given direction, but the finer aspects of navigating reefs and so one would most likely be beyond him. Also, wouldn’t he need to show a pilots license of some kind when they rented it?
I get that they dropped the plexiglass plates into Bird-of-Prey with the helicopter, but how did they get it into the craft? Did the Klingons build a huge cargo bay or perhaps retractable sun roof into their ship, or did Scotty rip the roof off the ship and then later rivet it back on? Also, once they got the plates into the ship, how did they maneuver them into place? Each one of them should have weighed several tons. For that matter, what part of their plan required them to be able to see the whales during the 40 minute flight from Earth to future Earth? Couldn’t they have just used steel plates and not had to deal? If it were me, I would have welded the cargo bay shut and just parked the whales in there, not having do deal with any of these weird materials at all.
If they brought forth two whales, a male and a female, in order to propagate the species and keep the aliens from destroying the planet, aren’t they all worried about the third generation being all inbred weird finger mutant babies when the brothers and sisters mate? Also, what if the two whales have all male of female kids? As my PHD geneticist friend tells me, any species that is reduced to even a couple hundred specimens is effectively dead from a genetic point of view. I mean, a couple hundred years down the road wouldn’t the aliens be like “Wow, these whale calls we are getting sound kind of weird and disjointed. They all sound of inbred.” Sounds like a temporary fix to me.
If the cloaked Bird-of-Prey is approaching the whales and those whales are being hunted by whalers, why was it necessary to decloak the ship to scare the whalers and piss on the temporal prime directive even more before transporting the whales on board? Couldn’t they have just transported the whales on board and left the whalers going “Hey, where did those whales go?”?
If the whales were moving at speed when they transported up onto the ship into the small tank wouldn’t they have kept their momentum and bonked their heads into the front of the tank? Plexiglass isn’t that strong. Also, shouldn’t they have been totally freaked out and gone into a massive thrashing fit, possibly injuring each other?
Scotty puts the formula for transparent aluminum onto the computer screen and then (apparently) labels it “Transparent Aluminum”. The plexiglass sales guy takes one three second look at it and has a spontaneous orgasm. Is he a super genius in chemistry and strength of materials and can interpret that stuff instantly? Wouldn’t he want to test it before giving away tens of thousands of dollars worth of plexiglass? How does he know that Scotty isn’t some kind of industrial spy and just gave him a formula that the patent office is three days away from awarding to DuPont? Or for that matter just threw a bunch of random chemical crap on the screen?
Can anyone walk into an emergency room and take over the surgical theater for a critically injured person, asking for stuff that doesn’t really exist yet and bitching out the doctors present for their primitive techniques? Don’t any of the other doctors or nurses more or less know everyone who works there? Also, wasn’t Chekov a prisoner of the Marines who captured him? Wouldn’t they want to at least speak to McCoy first before granting access to their suspected Russian spy?
Anyway, the list goes on. Still, in spite of the weird holes in the plot and the never ending questions, the movie was fun and enjoyable. In retrospect I found the pro environment message pretty didactic and annoying, and the lack of anything action related can make for a slow movie. However, I loved it because was the movie that was most like the TV show. They had a goal. There were weird complications that required unusual stuff (like collecting radiation from nuclear wessels). Some humorous moments. Kirk being Kirk. Spock being Spock. All around a nice flashback episode.
That’s it for this one. Before I go I’d like to mention that I saw a great Tron tribute video by a guy named Anthony Scott Burns called Tron Destiny. Worth checking out IMO.
With luck next post will be a modern movie (couch cough Bad Teacher cough cough). I’m looking forward reviewing the new Transformers movie too, but have heard some negative reviews so my expectations for Michael Bey remain at my usual level. See you soon!
