Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home 1986

[8.0/10] Here’s a dirty little secret -- I never really cared for the “let’s go back in time” episodes of The Original Series. Whether it’s the nonsensical sneakery of “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” (which Star Trek IV borrows its time-travel method from) or the perturbing backdoor pilot of “Assignment: Earth”, or the half-baked jaunt through history in “All Our Yesterdays”, they’re consistently weaker outings for the show. (I’m even colder on “The City at the Edge of Forever” than most.) All of these episodes involve undercooked adventures that make salad out of the time travel concept and hope to coast on the coolness and/or cost savings of seeing our heroes in the present.

But the one exception to that is “A Piece of the Action”, more often referred to as “that 1920s gangster episode.” Technically, it’s not a time travel episode, merely one of those “my gosh, we’ve stumbled onto a planet that’s suspiciously like Earth at this point in our history” episodes that were even more prevalent, but it fits the spirit. And what makes “A Piece of the Action” so much more enjoyable than those other installments is its tone.

It goes for straight comedy amid the adventure in a way those other episodes don’t. It gives Kirk and Spock a chance to pretend to be gangsters themselves, to use silly slang, and find the humor in these futuristic spacemen being subject to the whims and wiles of some locals who don’t know quite who they’re messing with. It gives Shatner a chance to play a comic lead rather than a dramatic one, and most of all, it finds the fun in the scenario, for everyone involved.

It’s that same spirit that makes Star Trek IV such an enjoyable installment of the franchise when there’s so much working against it. It features the best overall character work of the films so far; it finds the most levity and humor in the situation, and it allows the lead actor to play to his strengths in a way that both fits the character who strolled across the bridge in 1966 and endears the viewer to the version walking the streets of San Francisco in 1986. The laughs, the chances for almost every character to have a moment in the sun, make all the ridiculousness of the time travel plot and aquatic mammal macguffins an afterthought.

Make no mistake, Star Trek IV has an utterly ridiculous plot. I can be summed up as “our heroes have to go back in time to fetch some whales who can talk to a gigantic flying cigarette butt that’s threatening to destroy the Earth.” Bones is right when he calls it an insane idea. The movie has the good sense to handwave it as a one-in-a-million shot, but the only chance the former and future crew of the Enterprise has to save the day. But in truth, it’s an easy excuse to plop Kirk and company into the present day and let the hijinks ensue.

Damn if it doesn’t work like gangbusters though! The reason is the same one that so many outlandish episode of the 1960s T.V. show worked – if you can get the characters right, if you can make their interactions believable and endearing, and if you can pepper in enough humor and charm, the audience will easily forgive the fact that, as here, your story makes no sense.

That’s aided by the nonchalant tone the film takes with respect to time travel. Sure, it takes it seriously enough for Spock to have meaningful concerns about computing the right calculations to get back and forth (and it involves a strange, impressionistic sequence that feels a bit out of place). But for the most part, the film takes its clock-shifting moves in stride. Kirk sells the antique glasses he received from Bones at a 1980s pawn shop, and after some brief questioning by Spock, shrugs and reasons that they’ll make it back to him in the future. Scotty doesn’t agonize over giving the formula for transparent aluminum to a local manufacturer, figuring maybe that’s how it happened in the first place. With so many “butterfly effect” films about time travel, it’s refreshing and effective that The Voyage Home takes a relaxed attitude.

It’s also refreshing that every member of the cast gets something meaningful to do here. While, as is unfortunately typical, Uhura is rather underserved, each member of the main Enterprise crew has a part to play in the plan. Uhura and Chekov collect the photons from “nuclear wessels” in an amusing “fish out of water” fashion. Sulu gets to nab a helicopter and show how malleable his flying skills are. And Bones and Scotty manage to con their way into a Plexiglas factory and barter their way for the materials necessary to construct a whale tank on the Enterprise.

That just leaves Kirk and Spock, who are in charge of whale reconnaissance. That part of the mission has them crossing paths with Gillian (Catherine Hicks, ensuring that both parents from 7th Heaven make it into the Star Trek movies), a whale biologist who’s fiercely protective of George and Gracie, the two humpback whales in her care.

It’s here that the film truly shines. After three movies worth of stories where Kirk and Spock were understandably separated or stilted, Star Trek IV remembers what a great comic duo they make. Spock’s deadpan responses to Kirk’s attempts to be sly, Kirk’s off-the-cuff explanations for his friend’s odd behavior, and the two of them debating whether or not Spock likes Italian food all master the ringer/straight man dynamic between them that sustained for than a few episodes of TOS.

(While Spock has a pretty perfunctory arc about embracing the human side of his recovery and being willing to make “a good guess,” his best moments have him playing up the Vulcan oddball attempting to fit in among humans even further removed from his experience.)

For that matter, Kirk and Gillian have great chemistry, with the pairing allowing Shatner to play the amusing, almost romcom-esque romantic lead rather than the overly heartstruck and dramatic one. Hicks slips perfectly into the expert comic patter of Shatner and Nimoy, and makes for an enjoyable third banana in their efforts to rescue Chekov or save a couple of whales.

The film isn’t subtle about using those whales to drive home its environmental message. While turning whalers into the bad guys of the film, and having the ominous probe symbolize a supernatural, almost divine punishment for humanity’s treatment of endangered species, makes clear what point the Star Trek team is trying to make, it’s mostly set dressing for a rollicking, utterly charming adventure.

So much of the charm derives from the film’s humorous bent, one that, like “A Piece of the Action”, finds the fun in the “wagon train to the stars” concept behind the shows. Shatner gets to play the wry, smiling conman that was often Kirk’s best look; Bones gets to be his best, Oscar the Grouch-esque self, slinging sarcastic remarks and witty barbs, and the whole gang gets to take part.

It’s fitting that the penultimate scene of the film features all the main characters laughing, smiling, and splashing around with one another in the San Francisco Bay. While the slow zoom across the old crew, a glimpse at a new version of the Enterprise, and an affirmation that they’re the best at what they do is heartening, it’s that scene of the group of them living and laughing it up in the water that best captures what makes Star Trek IV so great.

It’s the same thing that made “A Piece of the Action” great – letting things be light, but not dull; heightened, but not too serious; and silly but too much fun for anyone to care. The Voyage Home is a film with a truly ridiculous premise, but one that finds its footing in its comic charms and great character moments, and doesn’t stop running until it gets its feet wet.

The plot is strangely imbalanced. There's this gigantic threat to Earth. And it's the Enterprise's crew time to shine. Now, after we have learned more fascinating stuff about Half-Vulcans, the band of brothers is back and I really like the comradeship that was lacking in movie III due to the "absence" of Captain Spock. It's really a nice idea that the crew is only consisting of the core crew of the "late" Enterprise.

Then the imbalance starts: it's all getting a bit too non-scientific and too comedy like. Why not travel to the past? Easy right? I hated this in Assignment: Earth and I hate it now. How does this work? The rest can only be described as a comedy.

Still, as a comedy, I like this movie. It created many memorable scenes. Spock diving! It also explores some of the core ideas of Sci-Fi: how would people react when confronted with future versions of mankind (and vice versa) and how far did future humankind really evolve? We have seen very similar stories in other installments of the franchise, like when the Voyager crew visited Sarah Silverman. I recently watched Crocodile Dundee. The vibe is the same: people unaccustomed to contemporary city life try to fit in. And that's a lot of fun. Even the eco-stance seems to be as relevant today as it was back then when the movie was released.

The last part is a bit more serious again. Again, I hate that there's no explanation for the time travel. Plus, I think it's very strange that they don't care to explain what this alien probe really was.