STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

I experienced mixed feelings in re-screening VOYAGE. I certainly remembered getting immense joy from the theatrical screening, and for many years it was at the top of my list as the best of the TREK theatrical films. In re-watching VOYAGE straight through for the first time in several years, I didn’t find it to be a bad film at all—but I no longer found it to be excellent.

There’s no question that Paramount, with the help of director/co-writer Leonard Nimoy, meant VOYAGE to be a crowd-pleaser, and a marked contrast to the heavy sturm-and-drang of the first three films. This meant abandoning all of the heavy drama about the Enterprise crew getting long in the tooth; like the reborn Spock, they’ve all got a second lease on life, running about with renewed vigor as they once again try to stave off cosmic disaster. Perhaps it helps that their mission involves going back in time and righting the wrongs of their distant ancestors, to whom all Federation citizens are, no matter how old, “children.” Of the three time-travel jaunts made by Kirk and company in the original series, the first emphasized tragedy, the second pure suspense, and the third suspense with a heaping helping of “fish-out-of-water” comedy. Nimoy chose the third model for VOYAGE.

Back in 1986, I must have liked that type of humor a whole lot, because I remember laughing in pretty much all the right places. This time around, the amusement was a bit less pronounced, but a lot of comedies are like that: funny the first time you see them, but not able to provoke guffaws on the second go-round. I certainly don’t take points away from VOYAGE for not being endlessly laugh-worthy, though, when there are so many comedies that can’t make me laugh even once.

It’s the suspense/drama aspects of VOYAGE that seem somewhat weaker this time out. Following up on the events of the third film, the crew of the Enterprise has taken refuge on Vulcan with their stolen Klingon vessel, hiding out from the wrath of the Federation after they broke numerous regulations to succor the reborn Spock. While Kirk and the others lick their wounds and prepare themselves to go back and face the music, Spock undergoes a rapid retraining program on his native world. He still doesn’t have his old memories with any consistency, but he’s able to upgrade himself to something like his old self in cognitive terms. In the first and possibly best of the “crowd-pleasing” scenes, Spock’s mother Amanda (Jane Wyatt) appears with her son, attempting to restore to him some of the emotional potential that’s been buried by the process of rebirth. In any case, Spock joins his crewmates as they depart Vulcan to face Federation justice.

Providentially, a new threat arises. A mammoth alien probe invades Federation space, emitting energy waves that play havoc with all defenses. The Federation dopes out that the waves are repeated signals seeking to re-establish contact, but no one living knows how to respond to the alien broadcast. Kirk and company learn about the current threat, and Spock deduces that the probe is trying to contact an intelligence it contacted centuries ago: that of humpback whales. Unfortunately, due to the abuses of twentieth century Earthpeople, the species is now extinct. The only solution: the Enterprise must travel back in time and bring whales back to future-Earth.

Even granting that the premise sounds like a shill for Greenpeace, the script never flags in reminding the audience of the challenge of the mission. Once the crew has landed in 1986, they have no access to the information of their 23^rd-century computer banks, or even to their distant ancestor the Internet. Thus they must blunder around somewhat, less like fish out of water than like the blind men trying to figure out the nature of the elephant. This makes for a number of comedic encounters, ranging from the fair to the merely okay. Kirk and Spock, seeking out a San Francisco aquarium from which to harvest a pair of humpbacks, befriend cetologist Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks), who ends up becoming the time-travelers’ only ally in their improbable quest. But Taylor’s presence is nugatory: the script is most successful in giving most of the support-cast interesting things to do, with the probably inevitable exclusion of Saavik, unceremoniously left back on Vulcan, never to appear in the film series again.

The crew rises to the challenges of invading the twentieth century for the most part. though I could have lived without the cumbersome scene of Kirk and crew rescuing Chekhov from a modern hospital. The Enterprise brings the two whales (with Gillian along for the ride) to the future, where the singing humpbacks answer the probe’s call and send the intruder on its way. Thus, the history of humpback extinction is effaced by tampering with the temporal order, allowing the “children” to right the wrongs of their “parents.” In keeping with this rewriting of the past, the Federation dismisses all charges against their saviors, aside from one “pleasurable punishment” to Kirk, permanently demoting him to the rank of “captain,” and thus ensuring that he will resume his original (and youthful) identity as the captain of a new Enterprise.

I remarked in my review of SEARCH FOR SPOCK that Spock was never quite the same after rebirth. Nimoy has fun with making his iconic character go through a period of literal self-actualization, in which he no longer remembers the torments of his once divided self and yet must somehow regain access to that part of his identity. There are some modest successes here, summed up at the end with the Vulcan science officer’s acceptance of his mother’s imperatives to value emotion. Yet the film doesn’t really put across the mythic presence of Spock as realized even in the inferior episodes of the teleseries. Without having re-screened the other two “original cast” movies, it’s my recollection that they simply leapfrog over the problems of the reborn Spock and start treating the character as if he was identical with the Spock of the teleseries. With the exception of the first movie in the series, all of the movies seem very Kirk-centric. Perhaps, given the way Nimoy often overshadowed Shatner during the original series, one could devise a single subtitle for the six original-cast flicks as “THE REVENGE OF KIRK.”