Now that I've covered the entire original series, linked here for
Season One,
Season Two,
Season Three, and even the
Animated Series, I will now turn to the first six Star Trek movies, a.k.a. the ones featuring the original series cast of William Shatner as
Admiral James T. Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Captain Spock, DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, James Doohan as Scotty, Nichelle Nichols as Commander Uhura, George Takei as Commander Sulu, and Walter Koenig as Commander Pavol Chekov. It was with these first six movies where the idea that the best Star Trek movies were the even numbered ones took root, and they are right, though with one obvious exception, they were all pretty good, even the first one (but only the Director's Cut).
Star
Trek: The Motion Picture
Grade: B
The Director’s
Cut fixes many of the problems that previously plagued this film, but even the
original version boasts the first adventure for the Enterprise and its crew on
the big screen. They were dealing with
some serious, heady themes, and the special effects had never looked better! Perhaps that’s why they spent so much screen
time languishing over long shots of the ship or the really gigantic, menacing,
machine cloud called V’Ger. Thankfully,
the new cut manages to take care of most of the pacing problems without losing
the grandeur!
The plot has Admiral Kirk taking command
of the Enterprise to stop V’Ger from destroying earth, and the way he finagles
command away from Captain Matt Decker, drafts a reluctant (and bearded) McCoy
back into service and creates an unstable wormhole effect before they even get
out of the solar system makes it seem like he should be wearing his “Kirk is a
Jerk” shirt. Spock has been on Vulcan
trying to purge his emotions, but telepathic contact with V’Ger has made this
impossible for him.
His stoic reunion
with an excited crew shows he almost achieved his goal, but he, and Kirk, lighten
up a bit before the end, and Spock’s conversion back to normalcy actually holds
the key to how they are going to deal with V’Ger.
A bald Persis Khambata as navigator Lt. Ilia
of the extremely sexual Deltan species, and who shares a past with Decker, joins
the other familiar faces: Scotty, Uhura,
Sulu, Chekov, Chapel, now the ship’s doctor, and even Rand, though two people
die while she mans the transporter controls.
The ship flies through V’Ger and the crew marvels at the special
effects. V’Ger eventually sends a light
probe that kills Lt. Ilia and creates a robotic version of her so it can
communicate with the crew. Spock
attempts to mind meld with V’Ger and nearly dies, but comes to understand what
V’Ger is: An old Earth Voyager probe
found by a planet of living machines.
They perfected it and sent it back to Earth to join with its creator so
that it may know all that is unknown.
With nothing else to do now, Decker decides to join with V’Ger in a
final effects light show, and a new being is born…
With some new effects shots, this
slow and very long film is tightened and pretty much corrected with the much
needed Director’s Cut.
Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Grade: A+
In a word,
Brilliant! This is just about as perfect
a Star Trek movie as they can make! Not
only is there a lot of action and great character moments, but the writing
shines with a myriad of themes dealing with the old and the young, how we face
death, the human condition and the ego, and the needs of the
many outweighing the needs of the few or the one.
Not only does intergalactic villain
Khan return, in a great performance by Ricardo Montalban reprising his role
from the original series episode “Space Seed”, but they introduced Kirstie Alley
as a sexy Vulcan trainee Saavik, Kirk’s old girlfriend and his grown son are revealed,
Carol and David Marcus, and their fantastic, extremely powerful device called
Genesis that can make a living, thriving planet from lifeless rock, Chekov gets
a beefed-up role, and it ends on a very emotional note when the crew loses one
of its own!
While working for the Marcus’, Chekov
and Captain Terrell happen across the madman Khan, who uses parasites in their
ears to control them and gets the upper hand against Kirk in a big space battle
that ends in the Mutara Nebula. Finally defeated, Khan starts the Genesis devise,
which will kill everything. To get away,
Spock suffers fatal radiation poisoning to get the engines back on line. The new planet is born, and Spock’s body is
laid to rest there.
From the nasty bug Khan puts in
Chekov’s ear, to the heart-to-hearts between Kirk and McCoy about growing old,
Scotty’s nephew being killed, Kirk cheating death time and time again, his
standoff with the scenery chewing Khan and his difficult relationship with
Carol and David, to the almost magical Genesis device and its implications, the
cat and mouse game in the Nebula, Spock’s touching death and funeral, and the
hope that still exists for the characters as Kirk, who told McCoy and Carol he
felt so old, saying that he felt young again in the denouement, almost every
aspect of this adventure is perfect.
Star
Trek III: The Search for Spock
Grade: B+
A little bit of
cheese only slightly mars this very enjoyable, plot-driven outing with a lot of
action! The Enterprise limps home the
worse for wear without Spock and with McCoy suffering from Spock’s final Vulcan
Mind Meld (“That green blooded son of a bitch; it’s his revenge for all those
arguments he lost.”). After a visit from
Spock’s father Sarek, where they determine that he left his Katra, or living
soul, inside McCoy, Kirk tries to wrangle use of the Enterprise to return to
the Genesis planet and retrieve Spock’s body, but Starfleet won’t budge; the
Enterprise is to be decommissioned, and Genesis is a quarantined planet and a
forbidden subject. McCoy tries to
charter his own illegal space flight and is arrested, so Kirk accepts help from
the rest of his team, including Chekov, Sulu (“Don’t call me tiny”), Uhura
(“You want adventure, how’s this?”), and Scotty (“The more they overtake the
plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain”). Together, they all break McCoy out of the
Federation funny farm and steal the Enterprise.
Meanwhile, David and Saavik are part
of a scientific expedition exploring the new Genesis planet and happen across
Spock, who has been made young again due to the Genesis effect, and Saavik even
helps him through the Vulcan mating drive Pon
Farr! Along the way, she learns that
David cut corners when developing Genesis, as he used outlawed and very
unstable proto-matter to make it work, and now the planet is on the verge of
ripping itself apart. As if all this
weren’t enough, a rogue band of Klingons, led by Commander Kruge, want the
secret of the Genesis device, destroy the science vessel, and take Saavik,
David, and Spock as prisoners. When the
Enterprise arrives, the Klingons kill David as a negotiating ploy, forcing
Kirk’s hand, which includes the destruction of the Enterprise! A final showdown with the Klingon commander is
just a bit underwhelming, but leaves Kirk and his crew in possession of the
Klingon Bird of Prey, which they use to take back to Vulcan in an effort to
reunite Spock’s body and mind. The
ending brings Spock back into the fray, and it is quite a satisfying and
emotional ending at that!
Star
Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Grade: A+
“There be whales
here!”
Another stellar
winner, only this time, the crew embark on a fun, adventurous, and comedic time
travel romp! It starts on Vulcan. Spock is still not quite himself, and while
being reeducated in a Vulcan fashion, his mother reminds him he’s half human. Lt. Saavik is around long enough to tie up a
loose end from the last film.
Back on Earth, the Klingons want
revenge, Starfleet wants to file charges, and Spock’s father Sarek offers his
advice as the Vulcan Ambassador. All of
this is interrupted, however, when a very large alien probe cuts off all power
to space stations and ships as it transmits a message to Earth’s oceans, causing
a planetary disaster! On their way back
home in their commandeered Klingon vessel, Kirk and crew deduce the message is
meant for humpback whales, now extinct, so, as Dr. McCoy expounds, “You’re
proposing we go backwards in time, find humpback whales, then bring them
forward in time, drop ‘em off, and hope the hell they tell this probe what to go
do with itself!”
The rest of the movie has the seven
person crew engage in all manner of fun and funny adventures trying to do just
that! They “park” their cloaked vessel
in the park, and Kirk and Spock locate two whales named George and Gracie at an
Oceanic museum, with Kirk really hitting it off with whale expert Gillian
Taylor. Scotty and McCoy find material
to build a whale tank (possibly altering the future in the process!), Sulu
flies the tank walls in on a “borrowed” helicopter, and Uhura and Chekov collect
nuclear energy from a “naval wessel” called “Enterprise”, but Chekov is caught
and questioned by the military. He is
severely wounded in an escape attempt, forcing Kirk, McCoy, and Gillian to
rescue him before saving the whales, now on the open sea, from a whaling
vessel. Once collected, it’s back to the
future, with one more adventure for Kirk to free the trapped whales from the
tank when the ship loses power and crashes into San Francisco bay! The plan works, the probe leaves, the crew
receives commendations instead of a court martial, Spock reconnects with his
father, and Kirk and crew are given a brand new Enterprise-A!
This is just about as perfect as Star Trek II, but with a very different
tone, and proving that Star Trek can
work as light comedic adventure as much as heavy Shakespearian tragedy.
Star
Trek V: The Final Frontier
Grade: C-
Alas, poor Star Trek V!
It seems like
the actors were just starting to get comfortable again, and to seem like a
favorite, worn-out, old recliner! The
adventure starts with a camping trip, with Kirk climbing El Capitan in Yosemite
and making the usually cantankerous McCoy completely livid! After Spock, wearing jet boots, saves the
captain from a fall, Kirk and McCoy try to teach Spock to sing “Row, Row, Row
Your Boat” around a campfire! Meanwhile,
Sulu and Chekov are lost, but they don’t want Uhura to know. They all get their big moments here: Scotty manages a jailbreak and then knocks himself
out, Uhura performs a naked moondance, Sulu executes a difficult manual
maneuver in a shuttlecraft, and Chekov carries out a deception, pretending to
be the captain during a covert mission.
And if you ever wanted to see Spock fly around in jet boots and give a
Vulcan neck pinch to a horse, this is your movie!
The story concerns Spock’s
half-brother Sybok, a galactic Dr. Phil of sorts, who has embraced emotions
instead of logic. He causes people to
follow him by revealing and then helping them release their pain. He takes “hostages,” forcing the Enterprise
to investigate, and with Kirk, McCoy and Spock the only hold-outs in his quest
to cross an inter-galactic barrier to find God.
One of the better parts of the movie is when he eventually tries to
enlist them as well, revealing the death of McCoy’s father and Spock’s birth. Along the way, some young Klingons, pinning
for the glory of action in combat, use this incident as an excuse to battle the
famous Starship. The ending, as they
find a creature claiming to be God, was a complete disappointment! The effects looked quite shoddy, and after
it’s all over, the crew has a cocktail party with the Klingons! Oh, my!
It’s all just a bit ridiculous, and
perhaps too comfortable. This is
the first of the Star Trek movies that could be considered a failure, and
wouldn’t have done the business it did if it didn’t already have the name Star
Trek stamped upon it. Shatner in the
director’s seat does not impress like Nicolas Meyer or Leonard Nimoy did, or
even Robert Wise! The resulting movie is
rather silly, with only brief moments of what fans have come to love about the
series.
Star
Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Grade: A-
Now that’s more like it! This final, fast-moving adventure with a lot
of interesting twists and turns at least allowed the original series cast to go
out with a bang instead of a whimper!
Politics is the name of this game,
when the Klingon moon Praxis explodes, throwing the Klingons into turmoil. Some see this as an opportunity to finally
get the upper hand against them, while others, particularly Spock, see this as
an occasion for friendship and peace, and Kirk himself is offered up as the
host to the peace conference. Trouble
ensues when, after a rather amusing yet disastrous dinner party, it appears
that the Enterprise fires on the Klingon ship, disabling gravity control, and
then two human assassins beam aboard the Klingon ship wearing magnetic boots
and murder Chancellor Gorkon. Trying to
unravel what happened, Kirk and McCoy beam aboard and try to save the
Chancellor, but they can’t, and are placed under arrest by the villainous
General Chang. They are quickly run
through the Klingon justice system and sentenced to Rura Penthe, a foreboding
Klingon gulag on a frozen ice planet.
While Gorkon’s daughter Azetbur
plans to go ahead with the peace conference at a neutral site, Kirk and McCoy
plan their escape, with the help of a shape shifter named Martia, played by
famed model Iman, and the remaining Enterprise crew tries to uncover the
conspiracy behind the assassination. Spock
soon learns that his protégé, Lt. Valeris, is a traitor. Betrayed, he performs a mind meld on her akin
to mental rape in order to extract the names of her co-conspirators. Sulu, now the Captain of the Excelsior, lends
Kirk a hand in the end, as they battle General Chang above Khitomer, the site
of the peace conference, and they are able to stop a second assassination attempt
and unravel the conspirators’ plan.
The addition of Christopher Plummer
as General Chang, David Warner as Gorkon, and even Kim Cattrall as Spock’s sexy
Vulcan protégé Valeris all add much to the proceedings, and the special effects
and writing are back on track as well, for the most part. As with some of their best adventures, the
seven main characters are each given lots of great character moments throughout,
and there are some great cameos as well, including Star Trek’s own Mark Lenard,
Grace Lee Whitney, Brock Peters, Kurtwood Smith, John Schuck, Michael Dorn and
Rene Auberjonois, and even Christian Slater!
I found it an exciting and enjoyable way to end the movies featuring the
original series cast. The final shot even shows the Starship Enterprise riding into the sunset!
