The End of Future History and the Last Klingon

The time has come for a confession, and not one I ever recall making before. Here we go; brace yourselves. I have never really understood what all the fuss is about when it comes to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I mean, I’m not saying it’s actually an actively bad film, and it’s certainly an improvement on Star Trek V, but I get the sense it’s considered to be some kind of cinematic triumph, a return to form to match the best films from the 1980s. (That said, looking at the Rotten Tomatoes percentages for the Star Trek film series is very nearly enough to make you lose your faith in the human race anyway.) And I’m afraid I just don’t get it.

Nicholas Meyer, writer-director of Star Trek II and co-writer of Star Trek IV, came back to oversee the proceedings. Apparently this was partly a political decision, as it was thought that giving Leonard Nimoy the gig might annoy William Shatner, but this seems to have been a troubled production in many ways – the future of the film series had been thrown into doubt by the failure of Star Trek V, and it was only the looming 25th anniversary of the TV show, and the desire to do one last movie with the original cast, that led to this movie being given the green light. Even so, Harve Bennett, the writer-producer who had overseen all the 80s movies, walked away from the series after his idea for a prequel showing how all the characters had met was rejected (it is customary at this point to crack wise about how this idea eventually resurfaced in 2009; feel free to do so if you wish). In short, this was a movie made on a punishingly low budget and brief production schedule – I suppose the fact that it is reasonably accomplished does qualify as something of an achievement.

Well, anyway: the political settlement of the late 23rd century is thrown into turmoil when a major industrial accident deep within the Klingon Empire threatens to render Qo’NoS uninhabitable and bring about the collapse of Klingon civilisation. This does however give the visionary Klingon chancellor (David Warner) the opportunity he needs to negotiations with the Federation, with a view to ending decades of hostility and bringing about a new age of galactic peace and unity.

The Enterprise senior staff, who are months away from retirement (the film has a tendency to get a bit meta about this, not to mentiona sentimental), are rounded up and given the mission of escorting the Klingon diplomatic party to Earth. (The only person not back at his post is Sulu (George Takei), who – unusually for a long-running Trek character – appears to have developed a career and is now in charge of his own ship.) Kirk (Shatner) is less than delighted that Spock (Nimoy) has volunteered him for this, as he still has issues with the Klingons killing his son a few movies ago. But duty is duty.

An uneasy atmosphere between the two groups degenerates into open distrust and hostility when the chancellor’s ship is attacked, apparently by the Enterprise, and the chancellor himself is murdered. Kirk and McCoy are arrested, put on trial, and packed off to the Klingon equivalent of Siberia, and it’s up to Spock and the others to solve the mystery of the murder and work out who is trying to sabotage the peace settlement…

When The Undiscovered Country came out in 1991 (or 1992, depending on where you were living at the time), the world was a radically different place to that of five years earlier. The TV show The Next Generation, initially viewed by some members of the original cast as a preposterous upstart, had become well-established as a popular and (eventually) critical success, and the failure of Star Trek V seemed to have proven that the future of Star Trek really lay with the Enterprise-D and its crew (you could argue the movie acknowledges this by giving a cameo role to Michael Dorn, playing an ancestor of his TNG character). Bearing this in mind, Star Trek VI seems like a bit of an indulgence, one last chance to see the old gang, an opportunity for them to leave the stage gracefully and with a little dignity. And you can’t fault the sentiment behind that, but it’s not necessarily a recipe for a great movie.

This is a film which is dealing with some powerful themes – intolerance, racism, fear of the future – and you would expect it to go into some fairly dark and intense places. Yet it doesn’t. There are some fleeting moments of genuine drama – Spock tells Kirk the Klingons will die if a peace treaty is not agreed, and Kirk snarls back ‘Let them die!’, there is the scene where Spock uses a mind-meld to tear information from the brain of the traitor Valeris – but much of the time this is trying too hard to be a fun, light-hearted romp. I think it was Kim Newman, reviewing the movie in Sight and Sound, who suggested how much more effective it would have been as a drama had, say, Scotty turned out to be one of the conspirators, but that would have run totally counter to the purpose of the film, which is not to provide complex drama, but nostalgic fun. As it is, the tone of the film never quite feels right.

I think that to some extent Nicholas Meyer’s lack of grounding in Star Trek is a little more on display here than was the case in his earlier scripts for the movies. Quite apart from controversial innovations such as putting a kitchen on the Enterprise (apparently that’s controversial, if you’re a Trekkie), it doesn’t feel like he ever quite gets the Klingons exactly right – they’re not the mostly irredeemable villains of the TV show, nor really the slightly more nuanced and alien culture that had been established in The Next Generation by this point. That said, he does write a good villain in Christopher Plummer’s General Chang.

Instead, Meyer’s Klingons are transparently based on the Soviets – they have show trials, a gulag, and so on. However, this does make sense when you consider that the whole film operates as an allegory for US-Russian geopolitical relations in the late 80s and early 90s. It opens with a deep space version of the Chernobyl accident, and goes on to cover what Meyer described as ‘the Berlin Wall coming down in space’. Fair enough, but it’s hardly handled with the greatest of subtlety, or really much subtlety at all. And it never really touches upon the central paradox of the plot, which is that humans and Klingons find the prospect of peacefully co-operation so objectionable that they co-operate together to stop it happening. Nimoy himself later admitted that they had missed a trick in not taking the opportunity to explore just why the Klingons had always been so implacably hostile.

Still, as I say, it’s not what you’d call an awful movie, just a little underwhelming. I think that by the time it reached the UK, we knew that Next Generation movies would eventually be coming, Deep Space 9 was on the way, Gene Roddenberry had died, and there was a general sense that Star Trek was moving on, away from the original characters. I think it may be the film’s very affection for Kirk, Spock, and the gang that keeps it from giving them the really memorable swan song they surely deserved. A curious problem; I’m not sure how it could have been solved.

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The One with the Whales

I trust I am not revealing too many secrets of the scrivener’s craft if I briefly tweak the curtain aside and reveal that some things are easier to write than others. Give me something truly awful, misconceived, or objectionable to review, and I am as happy as can be; the thing about Hampstead practically wrote itself. Something a bit more indifferent – or, even worse, boring – and it can be quite hard work getting my thoughts in order, or even finding enough to say. Worst of all can be writing about something which seems really good, or which I really like (not always the same thing, of course) – how to avoid just a string of ‘this bit is really good… this bit is also really good… this bit is really good too’?

I mention all this because we are about to look at Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which was for quite a few years my favourite of the series (since displaced by The Wrath of Khan), and which remains to this day not just my father’s favourite Star Trek movie but almost certainly his favourite science-fiction film, full stop (his absolute favourite film of any kind may be The Muppet Christmas Carol, which he will happily sit down to watch on a broiling August afternoon). ‘The one with the whales’ is how it is known in my parents’ house, which is as good a description as any, I suppose.

Nevertheless I feel it is incumbent upon me to look at Star Trek IV with a slightly more objective eye than I have customarily done in the past, hopefully not just to be critical for its own sake, but to see what makes this film so distinctive and a bit of a landmark for the series.

This movie was released in 1986 and, like its predecessor, was directed by Leonard Nimoy. To be honest, it gets off to a slightly rattly start: the action opens a few months after the end of Star Trek III, and finds an alien probe of immense power heading directly for Earth (again), swatting aside all resistance and generally causing consternation and outright panic. On Earth, the Klingon Ambassador is demanding Kirk’s extradition for crimes against the Empire (this is a decent scene, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie). Kirk (William Shatner) and the rest of the gang are still holed up on Vulcan (or possibly, to judge from the hats, in Tibet) getting ready to fly home in their captured Klingon vessel, because apparently Starfleet can’t send a ship to Vulcan to collect them.

(Hmmm. I mean, hmmm. In four out of the first five Star Trek movies, the plot is driven by the fact that Starfleet ‘doesn’t have any other ships in the area’. Just how big a fleet is this? Exactly how enormous is Federation territory, if Starfleet is always spread so thin? It compares very oddly with latter episodes of Deep Space 9, admittedly set about a century later, in which dozens of Starfleet ships routinely appear.)

Oh well. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is almost back to his old self, though perhaps a little flakey (and Harve Bennett, who wrote this section of the film, appears to be under the impression that pure-blood Vulcans don’t have emotions at all, rather than exercising control over them). Nevertheless he decides to go back to Earth with everyone else. Inevitably, news of the probe’s attack on Earth causes a change of plan. (Apparently Leningrad is back on the maps in the late 23rd century – maybe all those complaints that the Federation is a communist superstate are true.) Spock figures out that the alien probe is trying to talk to humpback whales (the Klingon ship’s databanks are remarkably detailed when it comes to Terran marine biology), which were wiped out centuries earlier, and comes up with a somewhat outlandish plan.

‘You’re proposing that we go backwards in time, find humpback whales, then bring them foward in time, drop ’em off, and hope to Hell they tell this probe what to do with itself! That’s crazy!’ cries Dr McCoy (DeForest Kelley). Nevertheless, that’s what the script has been setting up (in its own, somewhat contrived way) and so back they zap to San Francisco in the mid 1980s. Save the whales – save the planet!

The meat and heart of the film is the visit to the present day by Kirk and the gang. As you might expect, the general tone is rather comic, with various scenes of the Trek regulars being baffled by public transport, profanity, the attitudes of the locals, and so on. The 20th century portion of the film is written by Nicholas Meyer, who had form with this sort of thing, having written Time After Time, another time-travel adventure story set in contemporary San Francisco, a few years earlier.

Apparently the general intention from the start was to ‘do something nice’, and the decision to play much of the film for laughs may well have been influenced by the fact that for part of its development, this film was going to star Eddie Murphy alongside the Star Trek regulars. Quite why this never happened is a little unclear – some sources indicate Murphy wanted to play a Starfleet officer or an alien, others suggest that the studio realised that releasing a Star Trek film and an Eddie Murphy film would be more profitable than a single movie combining of the two brands. In the end the Murphy character ended up being re-gendered and played by Catherine Hicks, who does as well as anyone in the thankless role of Trek movie guest character/love interest.

Much of what goes on is genuinely funny, even today, with everyone involved clearly having a – hmmm – whale of a time (well, George Takei was apparently distraught when an uncooperative child actor meant his big scene in the movie had to be abandoned). The movie continues the trend, which began in the previous film, for Star Trek to now be specifically focused on these seven characters as a group, rather than Kirk and Spock, or the voyages of the Enterprise. And it works well, even if Meyer arguably pushes it in search of the laughs he’s clearly going for. The crew’s familiarity with 20th century idiomatic English is preposterously selective, given that’s basically what they’ve been speaking for the previous three movies and seventy-odd TV episodes – although I suppose most of the jokes are at the expense of the slightly-addled Spock (Chekov is still slightly too much of a dipstick to be credible). The problem, of course, turned out to be that the studio got the impression that cramming jokes into their Star Trek movies was a sure-fire boost for their box office, which would prove to be bad news for Star Treks V and VI.

In the end the film is so good-natured and funny, and its general message about saving the whale so unexceptionable, that it would take a titanic effort of will not to cut the film some slack and enjoy it on its own terms. (Even if the music, by Leonard Rosenman, is not even close to James Horner’s standards.) And there is a pleasing sense of the world returning to its proper state at the ending, with Captain Kirk back on the bridge, his friends around him, new adventures awaiting a new Enterprise.

Of course, new adventures were awaiting a new Enterprise, only not this one, and not for this crew. It was a few weeks before the release of Star Trek IV that Paramount announced the production of what would eventually become Star Trek: The Next Generation, the long-term popularity of the series now seemingly proven (and, apparently, a new crew of unknown actors being a more appealing prospect than the ever-more-expensive Shatner and Nimoy). The next six films in the series would all be released into a world in which Star Trek was back on TV, and perhaps it’s no surprise that they feel less cinematic, more narratively constrained, than the first three or four films in the series. I still feel that II, III, and IV are the highpoint of the Trek movie series, simply because they are Star Trek when it manages to be very true to itself, and yet also truly cinematic. The Voyage Home may be the most indulgent and soft-centred of any of them, but that doesn’t make it any less likeable.

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Lord Meyer’s Show

It occurs to me that there was nothing on the blog to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Trek, but then – other than a few small mentions in the news – it didn’t seem like that big a deal generally. The latest movie doesn’t appear to have made much of a splash (and I’m tempted to add ‘not without reason’), the only UK TV channel to do anything to mark the occasion was CBS Action, and all they managed to scrape together were some documentaries from about ten years ago.

Hey ho. At least news about the new series, Star Trek: Discovery, is starting to trickle out, although breath-holding is not an advisable procedure, Captain, as the show has already been pushed back to early next Summer. News that the show will focus on a ‘minority female’ protagonist is hardly a surprise; the revelation that the programme will a) be set in the proper Star Trek timeline and b) occur about ten years prior to the original series and explore an event from the mythos, probably is. Not, apparently, the Romulan War, the dates are wrong anyway, so what could it be? If that ‘ten years’ reference is accurate it cuts the possibilities down quite significantly.

Well, anyway, my expectations are under strict management (this is the twitchy, burnt-out state to which the likes of Moffat and Abrams have reduced me), but one hopeful sign is the presence as writer and producer of Nicholas Meyer. Whenever Star Trek is spoken of, the name accompanying it most closely is that of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, and this is only right and proper, but at the same time it was not Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek which became a popular and critical success in the 1980s and gave the franchise its second great lease of life, but that of Meyer, who wrote and directed Star Trek II, for many people (including myself) the best of the Trek movies and a high point of the franchise generally.

I just recently finished Meyer’s memoir of his career up until 2009, The View from the Bridge, and a curious but definitely entertaining read it is. One of the things Meyer comments on is the attitude of the original Trek crew to the series – how they variously came to terms with the fact that, one way or another, this was the thing they will forever be associated with. Meyer doesn’t seem to consciously think of himself as being in the same situation, but then he goes and organises his book into three sections entitled ‘Pre Trek’, ‘Trek’, and ‘Post Trek’ – one senses his tongue may be ever so slightly in his cheek, but even so.

One senses very little animus towards the series from Meyer, anyway, even though there are many other interesting lines on his CV, some of which the book deals with in some detail – his Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which were hugely successful in the mid 70s, the steampunk time travel movie Time After Time, which isn’t nearly well-known enough nowadays, and various other productions (some of which I hadn’t realised he’d been involved with). Objectively, perhaps the most significant thing Meyer has ever done was the TV movie The Day After, which presented the effects of a nuclear strike on the USA in such sufficiently dismal manner as to make Ronald Reagan start thinking in terms of arms limitations treaties rather than Mutually Assured Destruction. Just think – we might all have ended up as clouds of radioactive vapour, were it not for Nicholas Meyer. And he wrote that scene where William Shatner shouts ‘KHAAAAAAAAAAN!’ I don’t know about you, but I would kill for a CV with either of those achievements on it, let alone both.

This is a professional memoir rather than a personal one, and so Meyer’s domestic situation only gets referred to when it impacted on his career (or vice versa). One commentator thought that the book comes across as ‘slightly grumpy’, but I can’t say I really found this to be the case. He comes across as a guy who knows his own mind, and not really one with the greatest tolerance for idiots, but not really congenitally irascible.

For a book which is mostly likely to get read by people with a greater-than-average interest in Star Trek, I’m not sure there are many great revelations to be discovered: William Shatner ‘liked to be the first man through the door’ (an interesting euphemism), and was ‘no ego, all vanity’ (something I struggled to understand until it occurred to me I could imagine people saying the same about me). The (in Trek circles) famous anecdote about how Star Trek II came to be written in less than a fortnight is retold, along with various other old favourites plus a few I hadn’t encountered before: Ricardo Montalban started work on the film by bellowing all his lines at the top of his voice, and when Meyer tentatively suggested there might be something to be gained from a more moderate approach, the star’s response was ‘Ah, you are going to direct me? Good!’

Much of the non-Trek stuff is just as interesting, although for a book which opens with Meyer reflecting on the intrinsic decency of the majority of the people he has met in Hollywood, there’s an awful lot of material about arguments with the studio and friendships disintegrating under pressure. The only real omission, if you ask me, is any reference to the fact that Meyer apparently did some uncredited work on the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies – the fact that there were script difficulties explains a lot about this movie, if you ask me – presumably because he was friends with Pierce Brosnan and related by marriage to the director. But no mention whatsoever here, which is curious and a bit of a shame.

If one were to take anything away from this book, it would probably concern the dangers of over-familiarity and over-reverentiality. A running theme is Meyer’s near-total lack of awareness of Star Trek prior to starting work on his first movie – ‘the TV show with the guy with the pointy ears’ is his not-especially-shorthand for it – with the obvious conclusion that this served the franchise better than dogmatic fidelity to Roddenberry’s own vision (in its 70s and 80s version at least). Then again, you could probably argue that Meyer’s influence on Star Trek didn’t really extend beyond the Kirk-era movies, and was of variable significance even then: his scripts are all about characters and their choices, they don’t have the reliance on techno-bibble or the slightly laboured sense of This Is Our Theme you get later in the franchise.

It will be interesting to see just how indicative the appointment of Nicholas Meyer proves to be, when it comes to the direction of the new Trek. Personally I think the series could use a bit more zest and wit and Hornblower right now. The expectations bar may have crept up a few microns.

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It’s A Mid-life Crisis, Jim, But Not As We Know It

The circumstances of what I laughingly refer to as my career currently dictate my living in London for a month or so. This is the first time I’ve been based in the great city for an extended period and so obviously I intend to make full use of the opportunity to explore the full depth and breadth of the London cinemagoing experience. For obvious reasons, I decided to begin my odyssey by enjoying a hugely popular summer SF movie, continuing a successful franchise and featuring Leonard Nimoy in a key role (he dies at the end).

The movie in question is, of course, Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which I discovered playing in grindhouse rep just off Leicester Square. (I hope no-one was expecting another film fitting roughly the same description.) Yes, I know, you wait nearly ten years for a George Takei movie review and then two come along in a row…

Anyway. The year 2285 finds Admiral James T Kirk (William Shatner, obviously) overseeing a Starfleet training program run by his best friend Spock (Nimoy). But Kirk is uneasy, struggling to come to terms with his advancing age and uncertain of his place in the universe.

Luckily, something comes along to take his mind off this when a starship involved with an advanced terraforming project stumbles upon a lost colony of genetically-augmented supermen on a hellish wasteland planet. They are led by Khan (Ricardo Montalban, who isn’t afraid to put pedal to the metal performance-wise), who has something he wants to get off his (non-prosthetic) chest. He blames Kirk for stranding them here fifteen years earlier. Seizing control of the research ship, the vengeful Khan sets about luring Kirk and the Enterprise into a trap…

I believe this was the fourth time I’ve seen The Wrath of Khan on the big screen (the last was at the legendary Hull Trek-a-thon in 1995) but I have to say it’s still as enjoyable as ever – winningly played and tautly written (legend has it Meyer had to write the script in only nine days to meet ILM’s deadlines), and tense, thrilling, funny and moving in all the right places (even if some parts seem ever so slightly camp nowadays). The screening I attended was practically singalong cinema (there was a lot of sniggering in the wrong places and William Shatner’s famous cry of ‘KHAAAAAANNNNN!’ was accompanied by virtually the entire back three rows of the theatre) but, tellingly, the beautifully written and performed scene in which Spock dies was met with hushed silence – right up until Scotty starts playing the bagpipes.

It became very fashionable (and understandably so) to mock the Star Trek movies of the 80s and early 90s as basically being Geriatrics in Space, with tales of an ever-more-elderly crew resolutely refusing to even acknowledge they were ageing. What makes this particular movie more than just a terrific adventure is that it doesn’t fall into this trap. The fact that they’re getting older and moving on with their careers is central to the story.

Most crucially, this is at the heart of the film’s story, which revolves around the mid-life crisis of James T Kirk. Kirk being who he is, this crisis is a little more histrionic than most (few of us are likely to find ourselves hounded by maniacal supermen fond of rewriting Melville and under the delusion they’re the Demon King of Space), but it still concerns coming to terms with growing old, facing the facts of mortality, and accepting the consequences of past decisions.

One can’t really imagine anything comparable happening in this kind of movie today, and one suspects it only happened here because there were no plans to continue Star Trek beyond this film. Following an underpowered final TV season and a disappointing (though financially successful) initial movie, The Wrath of Khan was essentially intended as one last milking of the concept – hence the decision to kill off Spock, probably the most popular character.

(Spock’s death was intended as a way to lure an ambivalent Nimoy back on board, and was originally intended to occur much earlier in the movie. Nimoy found himself regretting his decision to sever his ties with the series and agreed to leave the door open for a possible return. Nicholas Meyer, on the other hand, was unhappy about the material setting this up, which was inserted into the film without his involvement, feeling it spoilt the tone of the ending. One can see his point – it is a little too obvious.)

The irony is, of course, that Star Trek II‘s massive and deserved success led to a string of further sequels, and then new TV series, which in turn spawned their own movies, and so on (with the character reset button always to hand, of course). Not for the first time, a willingness to embrace the end proved to be a new beginning – a message entirely fitting for this particular movie.

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