Star Trek Sundays: "The Undiscovered Country" is a rousing send-off
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the final Original Series film, STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. Enjoy…
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
1991, Dir. Nicholas Meyer
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
“In space, all warriors are cold warriors.”
The Undiscovered Country is a wickedly smart, soulfully written movie that represents what makes Star Trek at its best so great: Offering pulpy sci-fi on a big pop canvas, but with real, well-articulated ideas expressed through amazing characters who stand the test of time.
Many popular franchises forged in the fires of the Cold War went into the 1990s facing the challenge of how to adapt themselves to its thawing, but Star Trek handled it better than most, in part because the in-universe future established through The Next Generation, which had run several years at this point (a fun game to play with this movie is ‘spot the TNG set,’ since they reused many sets from the series to save costs, most obviously the conference room) gave them a perfect starting point: How did the Starfleet go from constant conflicts with the Klingons to having them as allies? In effect, the film gets to kill two birds with one stone, filling in a crucial piece of diegetic history, while also gesturing to the politics of the day, and the major questions that were on the audience’s mind in 1991. And because Wrath of Khan director and voracious reader Nicholas Meyer was on board, they did it with a whole lot of Shakespeare quotes and a wonderful flair for the dramatic.
So we get what is in effect the Star Trek version of a political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate but in space, and while it is clearly informed by the real-world fall of the Soviet Union, timeliness never consumes the film. It works entirely on its own terms, and the conflicts the characters face feel wholly earned and appropriate. I love that they let Kirk be a little ugly here, in understandable and nuanced ways; he is, after all, a soldier who has spent a lifetime fighting and losing people to the Klingons. He has this line early on – “How on earth can history get past people like me?” – that absolutely took me aback with its quiet, simple force and wisdom. I know William Shatner was uncomfortable about playing a prejudiced Kirk during the film’s production, but it gives him so many interesting notes to play, and of course the character’s heroism ultimately shines through much brighter by pushing past that prejudice to embrace changing times. Kirk is the greatest Star Trek captain for a number of reasons, but chief among them is his vibrant and unquenchable humanity, and rarely does it shine through brighter than it does here.
The extended cast is particularly strong this time around. Kim Cattrall slides into the ensemble with ease – she is particularly great opposite Leonard Nimoy – and after the big plot turn revealing her true colors, she’s even better. This part was originally written for Lt. Saavik from The Wrath of Khan, but they made the right call letting Cattrall create a new character. It’s a nice touch to see Michael Dorn playing an ancestor of The Next Generation’s Lt. Worf as Kirk and McCoy’s Klingon defense council, and one that makes sense – of course Worf would come from a line of Klingons with a strong sense of justice. And of course, there’s Christopher Plummer as Chang, a bald Klingon general with a pirate eyepatch who loves quoting Shakespeare, an absolute coup for all involved, and a part of the movie that only becomes cooler the older I get.
The original cast shines brightly here, as they always do. George Takei’s Sulu is on screen a little less, but only because the character is off being a Captain with his own ship, a promotion that is very well deserved. Honestly, if I could pitch any one idea for a new Star Trek TV series, Captain Sulu would be it – find a good younger actor to play the character, and do an episodic series about his time commanding the Excelsior. It would be a mostly blank slate, since one would get to create all the other characters, and this stretch of the timeline hasn’t been exhaustively covered before, but you’d have the extra appeal of a great, perpetually underused Star Trek character at the heart of things. It saddens me a little that we’ve never gotten that.
The final battle between the cloaked Klingon ship and the joint forces of the Enterprise and Excelsior is a true masterstroke of outer space naval warfare on screen. There is almost nothing fancy going on in terms of the special effects, relying instead on extremely good editing, a strong sense of tactical thinking, and a constant ratcheting up of tension. It is one of the all-time great pieces of Star Trek action, and a perfect climax for this cast of characters.
Of course, the Original Series’ crew’s actual goodbye stands even taller. It starts with Uhura receiving a transmission, her face falling as she turns to the crew. “Captain. We’re to be decommissioned.” A quiet pause follows, as everyone contemplates the sudden but inevitable end. Spock is the only one who keeps his composure, a little glint of mischief in his eyes. “If I were human, I believe my response would be” – eyebrows raise expressively – “go to hell.” The original Alexander Courage theme blares on a single horn as Kirk smiles at his friend. “Course heading, Captain?” Chekov asks. Kirk sits down at the Captain’s chair, confidence restored. “Second star to the right. And straight on ‘til morning.” Smiles all around, as Kirk narrates his final Captain’s log, where he makes the shift in the classic phrasing from “no man” to “no one,” followed by the Enterprise flying towards the stars and each of the cast’s signatures appearing on screen. One could not possibly devise a better ending for these characters. The use of the signatures is such a classy, memorable way to signal ‘goodbye’ that Avengers: Endgame understandably stole it nearly 30 years later.
The Undiscovered Country is an outstanding movie. It has a little bit of slack around the middle, where Kirk and McCoy are left in reactive postures for too long, but when it fully kicks into gear for the final act, Meyer and company deliver some of the smartest, most emotional, most edge-of-your-seat exciting material in the history of Star Trek, and maybe of franchise blockbuster cinema in general. I find it all miraculous. This is a big Hollywood tentpole named for a Shakespeare quote, and riddled with Shakespeare in its dialogue, deeply engaged in the present-day politics of the moment it was made, dropping references to Francis Fukuyama (the “end of history” idea), and having its heroes confront their own prejudices and shortcomings, in a way that asks the audiences to take a serious look at theirs. It does all this with a well-aged main cast, their characters days away from retirement, contemplating their own legacy and usefulness in a rapidly changing world. And the film was, for its time, a more than solid hit.
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. They really don’t.
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