Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Star Trek VI: The Franchise Recovery Mission

- After the film farce of 1986 and film flop of 1989, the Star Trek film series returns with a dramatic direction in 1991 with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - and what a welcomed return it is. Returning The Wrath of Khan (1982) director, Nicholas Meyer, to the Star Trek director's chair, The Undiscovered Country is a good Sci-Fi film and a great end for the original Enterprise crew.

Since the previous Star Trek film, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), was a critical and box-office failure, The Undiscovered Country pretends that it never existed, creating a stand-alone story and drawing small references from other films of the series instead. Mirroring the actual 20th Century peace (well.... sort of) between the Western Nations and the former Soviet Union, The Undiscovered Country builds its story around a possible peace between the Federation and Klingon Empire. After an accident on the Klingon moon, Praxis, the Klingon home world becomes affected to perilous levels (Chernobyl, anyone?). Unable to come out of the situation alive without help, the Klingons turn to peace with the Federation. To not appear in a weak position, the Federation sends their best and most feared man, Captain Kirk, to escort the Klingon Ambassador to Earth for the historic peace talks. There is a problem however: Kirk still has a chip on his shoulder because Klingons killed his son and he flat-out does not trust the entire race.

But nothing goes according to plan anyway, as a bunch of Klingons get assassinated before the peace talks can occur. Now the opportunity for peace becomes very thin as Kirk and McCoy are named as the Klingon killers (oh yeah, and then there is the fact that Kirk's and McCoy's lives are at stake). In standard Enterprise fashion, the crew plays games with galactic leaders in their search for the truth and the evidence to save Kirk and McCoy. Unique to the other films of the Star Trek series, a futuristic "whodunit" develops. This detective-like aspect is great and adds mystery and of course entertainment to the film.

The original cast leaves the Star Trek film series in quality and style, giving real good performances all around. Nimoy is at a Spock-best not seen since The Wrath of Khan, DeForest Kelley is great as McCoy with both the dramatic and humorous aspects of the character (as usual), and William Shatner recovers from his Star Trek dry spell of the previous film and delivers a fine leading performance. Walter Koenig is even good! What a surprise! He is actually not annoying at all! Christopher Plummer is also fantastic as Klingon General Chang, giving a performance that ranks among the best of the Star Trek villains. It is now proved that there is no character that Plummer cannot portray. Plummer is a great villain and a great Klingon - he even recites Shakespeare; and, at times, in Klingon no less! Come on!

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened in December of 1991, over a month after Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry passed away, and the words "For Gene Roddenberry" appear at the beginning of the film. With all of the good screen writing, performances, and atmosphere, The Undiscovered Country becomes not only a nice addition to the Star Trek film series but a great tribute to Gene Roddenberry as well.


CBC Rating: 7/10

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Star Trek V: The Wrath Of Shatner And His Toupee

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***

- Having watched in envy as his Star Trek costar directed the last two Star Trek films, William Shatner finally got a crack at the director's chair and subsequently gave us the worst Star Trek film ever in 1989: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. This film is similar to one of those horrible TV movies that you happen to catch on the Sci-Fi network when you are surfing channels on a Saturday afternoon. You stop and watch it for 20 seconds and then laugh out loud as you change the channel, shaking your head and wondering if the people involved with the "film" have anything resembling dignity. The Final Frontier is poorly written, poorly staged, poorly shot, and poorly acted out. Ouch.

While the Enterprise crew is away on shore leave (or is it planet leave? Whatever....), a hostage situation occurs on the planet of Nimbus III - also called "The Planet of Galactic Peace" - and the crew is wrestled away from their vacations to solve the matter. If you ask me, you are asking to be pushed around if you name your planet "The Planet of Galactic Peace." You do not ever hear about anyone messing with "The Planet of Galactic Badasses" now do you? The laughing Vulcan zealot Sybok is the one responsible for the crime, hoping to steal a ship and fly to the planet that God is supposedly staying at (apparently Heaven was not cozy enough).

Alright, so not every Star Trek plot has been 100% intelligent, but many have been able to be fun while being stupid at the same time. Well, not The Final Frontier. It is amazing how this film tries to be serious in some parts but then in other parts it tries to force farce down your throat. The problem is that neither the serious nor the humorous direction takes and we the audience gag and ultimately heave both the supposed drama" and "humor" back out in the form of eye rolling and sighs. I am sorry, but it is just not funny to see Kirk robed in flannel as he and Dr. McCoy try to teach Spock "Row Row Row Your Boat" on a camping trip. In the same way, it is not funny to see the newly-built Enterprise-A falling apart at supposedly comedic levels (what? even the hand-held gadgets are falling apart?), seeing the Scotty character reduced to a "bumbling fat Scottish dude" role instead of the usual "amusing miracle worker" - walking his big fat Celtic head right into a part of the ship, or any other unsuccessful attempt at humor in the film.

The low quality acting does not help convince the audience that they should go along with the different tones of the film. Shatner had a good run: three good performances in a row since portraying a parody of himself in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). But Shatner is back at it again here in The Final Frontier with plenty of humorous attempts to be serious and failed attempts to be humorous - for the love of all things, beam him out of the film Scotty! Most of the Enterprise cast members do a good job (with a few exceptions) but the rest of the film's supporting cast is beyond awful: specifically, Cynthia Gouw is just terrible in her Romulan role and Charles Cooper and Todd Bryant play two of the worst Klingons ever seen.

And then there is Laurence Luckinbill's character Sybok, the film's primary villain. But "villain" is not all he is: Sybok is also Spock's half brother. Wait, what? Spock has a half brother? His dad was dumb enough to cheat on Winona Ryder (that's a Star Trek (2009) joke)? And when exactly did Spock plan to drop that little tidbit of information to his best of friends of whom he has spent 30-some years of space travel with? Eh, it does not matter - forget Spock's part in all of this, Sybok is simply the pinnacle of Star Trek bad guy lameness. The character is dumb on paper but the ineffectiveness of the character is mostly due to Laurence Luckinbill's terrible performance. As Luckinbill's Sybok makes people "lose their pain" in the film, I was wishing I could release the pain I was feeling on account of his performance.

What a surprise, Shatner and his toupee never sat in the Star Trek director's chair again, though much of the film is not all Shatner's fault. While much of the film is poorly set up and executed by Shatner, the producers apparently whittled away Shatner's ideas, approved a terrible story, hired a handful of bad actors, and signed up a poor special effects team. Unfortunately nothing can change the fact that The Final Frontier still sits in its immortal cinematic state, forever existing to make future audiences cringe - perhaps even into the 23rd Century!

So yes, everything you have heard is true: The Final Frontier is the worst Star Trek film to date. This Star Trek movie is the film equivalent to a fish helplessly flopping around on a dock trying to get back into the water - only it cannot do so, and just flops around until it runs out of energy and dies because it cannot breathe. But hey, let's look on the bright side: at least Jerry Goldsmith came back to score the film!

....

Yeah, you know, that's really not doing it for me.


CBC Rating: 2/10

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek IV: The Damnable Voyage

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS****

- Picking up from the last Star Trek film, The Search For Spock (1984), the Enterprise crew go on yet another voyage in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Leonard Nimoy directs The Voyage Home (it is a "Leonard Nimoy Film" no less), only this time he is in front of the camera as Spock as well as behind it directing the picture. Unfortunately, this Leonard Nimoy directed Star Trek film does not measure up to his last one, The Search For Spock, or many others in the series. Utterly ridiculous from its send off, The Voyage Home ends up dead in the water.

The Voyage Home is in the same vein of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) in that a big unknown thing is heading for Earth with intentions about as exciting as an Aaron Neville concert and just as bad. The crew, after giving the middle finger to Star Fleet and breaking ranks to save Spock, return to Earth to face their trial. Unknown to them, a dangerous probe that sends out an Earth-ravaging signal in the form of the song of a humpback whale is destroying the planet. Nimoy and company might as well have just come right out and shouted "save the whales pretty pretty please with whipped cream and cherries on top" because according to the film, the humpback whale went extinct in the 21st Century. That is an odd thing to say nowadays as there are more humpback whales now in the 21st Century there were in 1986 - go figure. But theoretically, there are no more humpback whales in the era of the Enterprise - alright, we will go with that. After other successful time travel sci-fi films of the era like The Terminator (1984) and Back To The Future (1985), the Enterprise crew naturally go back in time to go catch 'em some humpback whales! So all this danger and destruction is going on during the film and we as the audience know that humpback whales are the answer - well, that is some exciting stuff right there I tell you what! On with the show!

Here in this film, the Enterprise crew encounter the exciting, um,-1980s! How exotic a time! Here, they run into colorful characters with colorful uses of the English language - something that rubs off on a few members of the crew ("double dumbass on you!"). The crew sure had an exciting vacation when they were supposedly crunched for time: Captain Kirk meets a dame, Scotty looks like an idiot typing away randomly on a computer keyboard to create a wonderful moving 3-D graphic and talking into a computer mouse like it is a communicator, Mr. Chekov is mistaken for a Soviet Spy, and Sulu gets to fly a helicopter. Other supposedly "funny" things occur throughout the film but they are just not funny at all. Here is one of the biggest pitfalls of The Voyage Home: all the humor is so dumb you are either laughing because everything is so stupid or you are frustrated that you are wasting time watching this piffle.

Surprisingly, with such a dumb story and poor attempts at humor, the main cast does a good job. Shatner, Kelley, Nimoy, Doohan, Takei, Koenig, and Nichols all end up performing their roles well for what they have to do. There is one bad member of the cast that sticks out like Calista Flockhart's spinal cord however: Catherine Hicks. As if casting one terrible future 7th Heaven cast member in a Star Trek film was not enough (Stephen Collins in Star Trek: The Motion Picture), the filmmakers cast another one. Hicks plays her Dr. Gillian whale-hugger role to annoyance levels far beyond the readings of mere 21st century technology. Boy, is it ever not fun to watch her flip out.... or do anything, really. The film's soundtrack, composed by the Oscar-winning Leonard Rosenman, is not bad but is ultimately nothing special - though sometimes it actually adds to the cheesy unfunny gags found throughout the film and becomes insult to injury.

What you undoubtedly knew was coming before you even sat down to watch the movie, the crew gets their whales (one packed so full of whale spawn it will be able to repopulate the 23rd Century's whale-less Earth). Of course needing a climatic ending, the crew saves the whales just in time from the whalers! Those pesky whalers are just as numerous in the sea as fishing ships apparently. That's right Kirk my boy, de-cloak the ship and hover over the whalers! That'll show 'em - yeah! After such an exciting conclusion (and not dumb at all), everything else in the film ends the way everyone knew it would: the whales sing, the probe floats away, the Enterprise crew splashes around in celebration, they get off scot-free, and we see a montage of events we just spent two hours already watching. End curtain - thank heavens.


CBC Rating: 4/10