Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Director: Nicholas Meyer

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Ricardo Montalbán

Have I Seen it Before: Hoo, boy. Long established in my family lore is the screening my mother went to at a second-run theater in the summer of 1984. As the USS Reliant exploded in a wave of the Genesis Effect, I—a learned elder, as far as fetuses were concerned—decided to give my ma a bit of a break and cut it out with the kicking and whatnot. It’s entirely possible that while some babies were exposed to classical music or the neurosis and bitterness of their parents in utero, I absorbed the bombastic score of James Horner and the sneering villainy of Khan Noonien Singh (Montalbán) as the foundation of my very being.

The first time I remember watching the movie while sentient was on a feeble VHS copy. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old and spent the rest of the day giddily recounting the plot to anyone who would listen. This time, my poor suffering mother got the raw end of the deal and had to hear a ten-year-old’s impression of a Ceti eel.

During this particular screening, I was able to lip sync every line of dialogue. I even felt the need to argue with several of the trivia questions before the feature presentation. Because they were wrong.

Yes. I’ve seen it a couple of times.

Did I Like It: At one point after the nadir of Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) and the particularly wheel-spinning seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise, I wondered quietly whether I actually didn’t care much for Star Trek at all, but was so in love with this film that I was willing to give every other entry in the series a pass because it shared some basic elements with this film.

It is a thrilling story, told at a breakneck pace that still manages to let smaller character moments have their due time. It is about friendship, and aging, and revenge, and sacrifice, and living the first, best destiny you know in your bones. It is told with a startling simplicity that allows fully-steeped fans and newcomers alike to delight in the proceedings. Any time I am trying to create a story on my own, I’m reaching for an experience somewhere in the vicinity of this film.

It is not only my favorite Star Trek film, it is certainly one of my favorite movies of all time. It may be my favorite film of all time, although I tend to blanche at ranking these things so precisely.

Every time I see the film, I notice something new. During this particular screening I noticed that Chekov (Walter Koenig) is not seen on screen after purging himself of the Ceti eel without cotton in his bloodied ear. Also, somehow I had never put together that the Genesis Effect billowing out of the Reliant also caused the Mutara Nebula to collapse in on itself, harnessing the material of the nebula to create the Genesis Planet that would be the setting of most of the action of Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984). I honestly don’t know how it has taken longer than my actual lifespan to put that one together. It is a film that keeps on giving.

And yet, it is not a perfect film. The subplot with Midshipman Preston (Ike Eisenmann) doesn’t resonate, and it is only in the director’s cut (first released in 2002) that things are slightly illuminated, although I still don’t understand why Scotty (James Doohan) brought the poor suffering crewman to the bridge first, and not directly to sickbay. Additionally, the effects of the Genesis Cave on the Regula planetoid are alternately a triumph of matte work (back when such a thing was still done) and a completely befuddling choice in animated optical processing. But the flaws give me comfort. Even if I am flawed in my own work, I can still reach for the ideal. 

As with most films, watching it at home on a television is only imitating the experience in many ways. I had the delight to see it a few years ago during a Fathom Event screening. Seeing it projected on the big screen was a blissfully different experience. However, that screening was sparsely populated. This time, I saw it in conjunction with a live event hosted by none other than William Shatner. While the Captain Kirk emeritus was understandably more interested in talking about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), seeing the film with a packed and enthusiastic crowd was sublime. The cheering for cast members during the opening credits, the polite applause for GOAT writer-director Nicholas Meyer (which I believe he would have found staggeringly appropriate), the laughing at jokes I had long since internalized, and the genuine feeling that accompanied the climax gave every inch of the film a new life, as if it had been goosed by the Genesis Wave itself. I couldn’t help but feel like Kirk at the end. A movie that was old news at my birth was all new again.

I couldn’t help but feel young.

Three Men and a Baby (1987)

Director: Leonard Nimoy (no, really)

Cast: Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson, Nancy Travis

Have I Seen It Before?: Yep!

Did I like it?: I would watch the three stars of this film do almost anything. Well, I’d watch Ted Danson do anything. I’d watch Tom Selleck do most things, besides guest star on Friends, which I just can’t anymore. I usually only get interested in Guttenberg if he’s paired with a wise-cracking robot.

At any rate, the film uses the amiable chemistry between the three leads to fuel its way through a heroin smuggling storyline that is completely and totally abandoned by the time the third act begins.

Goddamn, this movie is weird. And that’s before we even get to the ghost.

A long since debunked urban legend posits that just beyond the curtains in a scene with Danson, the specter of a young boy with a shot gun. Back in days when humanity had any sort of credulity left, the legend about the image grew to suggest that the set of the apartment shared by the titular men was occupied and quickly vacated by a family whose son had shot himself.

It’s a really dumb mystery because this fabled ghost is clearly a carboard of Danson himself. It’s not even kind of hard to figure it out. No wonder we as a society need snopes.com.

The much truer mystery is how Leonard Nimoy came to direct such an otherwise workmanlike comedy that is so much of its age. Did Disney read the script and say that the man behind Spock was the only one who could bring this story to life for an American audience? Why would Nimoy be interested in it? He had always expressed an interest in allowing actors mostly identified for the television roles to play against type, but there are very few parts of Jack Holden (Danson) that aren’t Sam Malone at their core, especially when we’ve been allowed to see the menagerie of weirdos that he has played in recent years. Maybe <Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)> was the most successful fish-out-of-water comedy in recent years, and the Mouse House was willing to ignore the spaceships and whales.

Either way, it boggles the mind, and regardless it speaks to Nimoy’s talents as director that he was able to pull off such a perfectly watchable film.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan

Have I Seen it Before: There’s something about this movie that makes it feel like I’ve never quite seen it all the way through. Like they are still making the movie as I’m watching it.

Did I Like it: Now, that above thought could be taken as a dig about its interminable runtime. It’s only just over two hours, but it feels like 40 years passes from the prelude to the final warp effect.

But it’s worse than that. The film’s plodding pace is a matter of accepted film and Trek canon. Given the rampant, directionless egos (mostly in the form of Gene Roddenberry) that tried to come together to make the film, it’s a minor miracle that any moment in the film works, even if the whole isn’t quite the sum of its parts. The movie spends a befuddling amount of time featuring characters looking out windows or at viewscreens, but the expression on the face of Kirk (Shatner) as he sees the newly re-fit Enterprise for the first time is one of the best performances the actor has ever given.

Other movies—and even movies in the science fiction genre—have a similarly deliberate pace. Blade Runner (1982). 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). When I finally got a chance to see 2001 on the largest screen possible, the film transformed before my eyes. While most of Star Trek was meant for the smaller screen, maybe when I finally saw this first film in the way it was meant to be seen, it would improve.

Sadly, it does not. I’m struck by and expanding realization that Kubrick truly knew what he was doing, as even on the big screen, this film can't embrace the majesty of its more traditional special effects, or the weirdness of its more oblique imagery. The star gate via the monolith is a panic inducing experience, whereas the V’Ger is cheap and predictable. The Discovery seems like a real spaceship, whereas there are shots (and there are many, loving shots) of the Enterprise where the distant edges of the ship blink in and out existence.

How a film could be edited this poorly under the auspices of Wise, one of the greatest editors in the history of the moving picture is beyond me.

Maybe the voyages of the various crews of the Enterprise are better left to the small screen.

Maybe the odd-numbered films aren’t very good.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Director: Leonard Nimoy

Cast: William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Christopher Lloyd

Have I Seen it Before: What, are you trying to tell me Spock is alive again? 

Yes, of course I’ve seen it.

Did I Like It: Let’s really drill down on something that has been long accepted as cardinal truth of this series.

Even-numbered films are great. Odd-numbered movies are the pits.

And yet, Star Trek Nemesis (2002) is the tenth film in the series and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) is the twelfth, and they both are the cinematic equivalent of drinking chancey milk that is well-past its due date.

So, too is it with this film. It largely works, and is early enough in the franchise’s motion picture history to conclusively put the even/odd framework about these films in serious doubts.

It’s hard to doubt that it suffers ever so slightly by having to follow the series apex, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), but that does feel like an unfair judgment. Nemesis and Into Darkness tried to steal various aspects of plot and pacing from that far-better film, and never quite rise to the level of competent mimicry. 

Here, Nimoy appears to be aware of his potential shortcomings as a first-time director (a self-awareness that William Shatner never quite mastered five years later in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier [1989]) and tries to learn his craft before attempting to master it. Therefore, the film echoes more of a feeling or motif from the previous film. This may be in no small part due to James Horner returning to produce the score, but every frame of the film feels as if it is a companion piece to Khan, not a blind attempt to replicate it.

It helps that this film has its own story to tell. Part mystic resurrection tale, part classic duke-it-out-with-the-Klingons episode from the original series, and just enough of a heist story to keep things interesting.

Another element of note is to remember that—along with this film’s follow-up, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)—introduce so many elements to Trek that will be load bearing for many years to come. The Excelsior and the Klingon Bird-of-Prey are first glimpsed here. The models of both ships are reused by Trek shows well into the twenty-first century, and much of the footage of the new enemy ship is reused for nearly the same length of time.

Also, one can’t help but dwell on the casting for the supporting roles. The studio balked at the idea of Christopher Lloyd playing Commander Kruge, the heavy. They could not move past the image of the actor as Reverend Jim on Taxi. Knowing a thing or two about being type-cast from appearances on a TV show, Nimoy insisted. One wonders if he would have ever been on the radar of Robert Zemeckis when Back to the Future (1985) began filming around the time fo the film’s release. I don’t want to live in that world. In fact, I want to live in a world with the most possible performances by Christopher Lloyd as possible, so I’ll be damned if I view this as one of the typical odd-numbered Trek films.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Director: Leonard Nimoy

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, Catherine Hicks

Have I Seen it Before: Honestly? I really think this was the first piece of Star Trek I ever watched. For any number of years, my only copy of the film was on VHS recorded off the broadcast of the film on March 28th, 1993. I know this because the movie was interrupted every few minutes with an add for the 65th Academy Awards the next night. Not the best way to watch a movie repeatedly, but there it is.

Did I Like It: It’s an even numbered movie, right? It’s written—at least partially—by Nicholas Meyer, right?

As I mentioned before, this was—to my memory—the first piece of Star Trek I had ever taken in. As anyone who knows me can attest, that moment proved seminal to me, and as such it can’t be denied that The Voyage Home is perhaps the perfect gateway piece of Star Trek ever constructed. The Wrath of Khan (1982) may be the superior film, and some of the J.J. Abrams movies may possess a more self-assured modern blockbuster feel, but this is the one that is a straight ahead crowd-pleasing comedy.

And every inch of the film is devoted to that effect. Large portions of the screenplay were cannibalized from material that didn’t make it into Meyer’s fish-out-of-water Time After Time (1979). The score—by Leonard Rosenman—is a jaunty skip through San Francisco of the 1980s. It’s exactly the right score for this kind of movie, and I say this while maintaining that Rosenman’s score for Robocop 2 (1990) is perhaps the most incorrect score ever attached to a particular movie. Even the ingenue role played by Catherine Hicks was originally written for Eddie Murphy, although one imagines there was a fair amount of re-writing to make the transfer the roles between the two performers.

It’s also a comedy that likely wouldn’t work under any other circumstances. Nimoy and the writers had an intimate understanding of—if not Trek lore—the beating heart of what made Trek continue to work. The jokes spring out of the chemistry between the characters, and I challenge anyone to find another comedy film wherein the characters have twenty years of interplay to inform their reactions. I’ll wait here in the park for your answer. See? That hypothetical film just doesn’t exist.

Star Trek V - The Final Frontier (1989)

Director: William Shatner

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, Laurence Luckinbill

Have I Seen it Before: Sybok, please…

Did I Like It: This is the deep dark question that ever Star Trek fan must reckon with. Many don’t reckon with it at all and are content to write it off as forever the worst film in the entire series. These people clearly have never seen Star Trek Nemesis (2002). Clearly.

That being said, one cannot deny that the film is riddled with problems. Do they stem from a studio unwilling to let the vision for the film come to life or other production limitations that no filmmaker could have overcome? Or is the film weighed down by a director who just didn’t understand the material (despite being an integral part of that material for over twenty years)?

As with so many things, there appears to be an either/or choice in this case. Shatner, in his first and only attempt to direct a major motion picture, had lofty ideas that Paramount grew increasingly disinterested in as production marched along. A Writer’s Guild strike in 1988 didn’t help matters, either. And yet, I always got the impression that Shatner was never terribly interested in making a Star Trek film, but aptly understood that after Nimoy parlayed work on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) into a solid directing career, this was his chance to branch out.

The film suffers from all of these problems, and there are elements that never quite gel.

It’s starts with… an obliterated desert pockmarked with steaming holes? And that’s supposed to be the extended Lawrence of Arabia (1962). That Shatner wanted to make the Lawrence of Star Trek films that deep-dives into the big questions of the universe is admirable, but it’s hard to blame Paramount for wanting another Voyage Home or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and trying to gently redirect things. It’s also worth noting that the search for God was the basic framework for an early version of what became Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and everyone involved blanched at the notion then, but cooler heads did not prevail here.

The power Sybok holds over his people and eventually the Enterprise crew is amorphous and ill-defined, not unlike the Temporal Nexus in Star Trek Generations (1994). It’s a common trait of the least engaging films in the series that the fundamental problem is that the plot just doesn’t work.

There are things that irritate the deep-canon Star Trek fan, but others might not notice. Quadrants are huge. It takes decades to traverse them, but this crew makes it to the center of the galaxy in (suddenly, inexplicably) in less than reel of film. Large swaths of the crew turn on Captian Kirk on a dime. Also, not for nothing, everything about that scene in the turbolift shaft doesn’t make sense. There’s no way the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-A has that many decks, and they increase in number as you go down, not up.

Sigh.

Now that I’ve beaten up on the film in most of the familiar ways, and a few I hope aren’t as obvious, let’s go way off the path of accepted Trek dogma (and become the laughing Vulcan inside each of us?) and praise the movie for what it gets right.

If—at it’s core—the original series is truly about the friendship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, then this film does a profound job of having those three characters live within that friendship. 

The score is fantastic. Jerry Goldsmith returns to the series for the first time since The Motion Picture. His rousing score is often the best part of any of the films/shows he’s associated with, and the fact that Paramount spared no expense here definitely elevates the more groan-worthy moments. One wonders if the film works even less without the music, and the studio relented to the idea of a more majestic score to try to rescue things.

That’s… it on the good stuff, as it turns out. So, the film doesn’t really work, as it turns out. But it is two hours with some version of the original Star Trek cast. We don’t get those every couple of years, so let’s ease up on the movie, shall we? Again, I guarantee it’s better than Nemesis.

Star Trek (2009)

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quntio, Zoe Saldana, and keeping the whole thing together, the late, great Leonard Nimoy

Have I Seen it Before: I saw it four times in the theater. 

Did I Like It: It may have launched some irritating things (including its own 2013 sequel), but it is hard to deny this film its charms, or, more importantly, the moments where it absolutely sings.

The last ten years or so should be a difficult time for action-adventure movies like those that make up the Star Trek series. They aren’t about anything, other than the thin connective tissue that will propel characters from explosion to explosion. So that this first attempt to relaunch the franchise after the petering out experience by Nemesis (2002) and the then most-recent series, Enterprise, does something incredibly smart. It presents the space opera as coming of age story. Sure, it’s not the loft ambition of a Horatio Hornblower story, or even a parable about Chernobyl in space, but telling the tale of James T. Kirk (Pine) and Spock (Quinto), Angry Young Men, is certainly a good starting out point for the film.

And it mostly works! There are things that serve to annoy. The lens flares are ubiquitous, but commentary about them has become far more irritating than the flares could ever have hoped to be. The decision to shot any utilitarian section of a starship in a brewery has never made sense to me. The Beastie Boy-laden scene where the spunky tween-who-would be Captain Kirk (Jimmy Bennett) faces off with Robocop and gravity remains one of the most irritating scenes in recent memory, compounded by the unassailable reality that it lifts right out of the movie. Not many people talk about how there’s some serious post-production jiggery pokery that leaves the bad guys waiting around for twenty-five years with nothing to do, and I will opt not to go into it much further here.

I could go on. Honestly, it should be a little bit harder to beat the Kobayashi Maru test, even if you have reprogrammed the simulator. But the parts that do work far outweigh the nitpicks. The film is cast perfectly, with the new cast bringing new energy to roles we already think we know. Karl Urban might (and I stress, might) have been more born to play the role than even Deforrest Kelley. The mini-tragedy at the beginning of the movie heralds the coming of Chris Hemsworth, undeniable movie star and latches the film to real emotions, even during those scenes and plot holes I can’t abide. 

And there is one moment, and one spark of performance, that makes this film—and, indeed, the entire “Kelvin” series—work on the whole. It is the first moment in which Kirk encounters Spock Prime (Nimoy). The elder Spock takes one look at this brash upstart and says, haunted by everything we as the audience has already seen. “James T. Kirk…I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” In that moment, I believe Pine is Kirk, Quinto is Spock, and on and on. It’s a moment the film absolutely depends on, and Nimoy nails it with such subtlety, that it’s hard not to marvel at the moment with every repeat viewing.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Director: Nicholas Meyer

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, Kevin Spacey Christopher Plummer*

Have I Seen it Before: Well, this is the first film in the Star Trek series I’ve reviewed, so unless we happen to be dealing with a new release, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ve seen it before.

Did I Like It: It might objectively be the best Star Trek film of all time. Does that mean it is the best Star Trek film of all time, or even the best Star Trek film directed by Nicholas Meyer? Well, that’s a different story.

I’ve written a couple of times in these reviews about timelessness in films. It’s appropriate to broach the subject of the film, because the notion was put into my head by Meyer, and he perfects the reach for a timeless quality in this film. Beyond a few scant special effects that might have been a little ahead of their time, there’s not really an aspect of this movie, from the music, to the cinematography, all the way to the hair styles, there is almost nothing about this film that restricts it to being made in the early 1990s. It’s a marvel to behold, and a phenomenon that Meyer’s other great space-opera Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) can’t even claim, even though that is one of my all-time top five movies.

Even the one element that threatens to make the film strictly of its time manages to transcend. Clearly a parable about the end of the Soviet Union (with just a pinch of Watergate-esque intrigue thrown in for good measure), the film is clearly commenting about the end of the 80s and the beginning the 90s. The Klingons have their own version of Chernobyl, unrelenting hostilities are coming to an unfathomable end, and the old guard is to varying degrees uncomfortable with the forthcoming future, or the titular undiscovered country**. But I think it may be a byproduct of living in a political era that could—politely—called “interesting” that the macro machinations of the galaxy here can’t help but feel relevant to the here and now. This is when Star Trek often works the best, and it shows.

* Could you imagine? Don’t. #2017jokesfiresale

** Which is a strange title for this film, if treated to any further scrutiny. The Wrath of Khan was originally called The Undiscovered Country, and as it is an allusion to Hamlet, and specifically death, it feels more appropriate to that film. Here, it is essentially saying that the sometime arduous road to peace only ends in death. Ominous. Mad ominous, folks.