Star Trek Sundays: "The Voyage Home" is a joyous victory lap
"Admiral, we have found the nuclear wessel."
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 STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME. Enjoy…
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
1986, Dir. Leonard Nimoy
Originally published in 200 Reviews based on notes from 2022
Nobody planned for Star Trek II, III, and IV to act as a trilogy – The Wrath of Khan was itself something of a hail-Mary pass to keep the franchise going – but by the time one reaches the end of The Voyage Home, it really is remarkable how well the three films work together. Star Trek IV absolutely feels like a culmination, both narratively and in how much all involved have clearly learned about how to use these characters and how to play with the world they inhabit. The Voyage of Home is assertively excellent; it just moves from the word ‘go,’ building beautifully off the momentum of the last two movies, and while it is one of the higher-concept Star Trek films, the entire thing is so wonderfully light on its feet. The first act in particular is a supreme act of cinematic confidence, in introducing its cast and character arcs, quickly but clearly laying out the plot and stakes, and establishing a tone that, while often quite funny, is never ironic or detached.
A big part of this, I think, is how well Voyage Home understands something that is absolutely central to Star Trek for me: that at its core, Star Trek stories are about problem solving. At its best, this franchise is competency porn – engaging in the pleasure of watching smart, capable people tackle complex, multifaceted problems, usually as a team. That’s when Star Trek really sings. Obviously, you have to surround the problem solving with engaging characters and creative settings and, hopefully, some thoughtful sci-fi questions, but the underlying engine of good Star Trek stories is presenting the crew with a problem and watching them work through it. This is why the first film can feel a little too passive at times, or why Star Trek Into Darkness feels so inauthentic (because ‘big dumb conspiracy action thriller’ is a different beast entirely, almost anti-competency porn), or why it’s frustrating when The Next Generation stories over-rely on technobabble (it obscures the joy of seeing problems solved when neither the actors nor the viewers know what the hell anyone is talking about). While Voyage Home is a very different, more comedic kind of Star Trek adventure than usual, it feels right at home as a core part of the series because it serves as a really good example of this problem-solving ethos. I absolutely love the matter-of-fact way the crew analyzes the crisis at the outset and realizes the only option is to go find some 20th-century whales. Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II and VI, contributed to the script here; he is an obsessive lover of Sherlock Holmes (and writer of new Holmes stories), and one can feel the adage “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” rattling around in the film’s brain. And once the crew has taken the seemingly impossible step of sling-shotting around the sun to travel back in time, the rest of the movie follows them planning and executing on all the steps necessary to find those whales and haul them back to the future, meaning that no matter how funny or silly things get, the core engine of the action is still a competent, well-honed team working together to solve a big problem.
Of course, things do get extremely funny, and it is incredible how seamlessly The Voyage Home transitions the series into comedy. The cast is so perfectly on their game at this point, and Leonard Nimoy as a director is so good at giving everybody the space to be charming and witty, to demonstrate why each of these characters is so special, and no Star Trek film does a better job with the interplay among the crew. The film is frequently hilarious, but its approach to humor is also very smart; it’s never about making the crew suddenly dumb – they are, in fact, at the height of their competence – but embracing the fish-out-of-water aspects of time travel to create comedic friction. I love Bones in pretty much any circumstance, for instance, because DeForest Kelley is the best, but Bones as frustrated future country doctor aghast at present-day medical practices is definitely one of my favorite modes, perfectly threading that needle between competent professional and fish out of water. It’s grade-A character-based comedy, and the film as a whole is a really good case study in how one can take characters and a setting that aren’t usually comedic and push them in a funny direction without betraying anything about those characters and setting. It’s a rare high wire act they’re pulling off here, and I find it exhilarating to watch unfold.
There are countless classic moments here. James Doohan as Scotty trying to talk to the computer was always my dad’s favorite scene from this film, and it’s definitely one of mine too, a perfect bit of character-driven comedy (Doohan in general is this film’s greatest fount of joy – look at how blissfully he performs the line “Admiral, there be whales here!”). One of the bigger surprises for me, revisiting the film, is how sharp and quick so much of the dialogue between William Shatner and Catherine Hicks’ Dr. Taylor is; everybody remembers Shatner’s “double dumbass on you!” when the crew first explores San Francisco, but I think his comeback to Hicks’ line about “dipshit” military experiments – “No ma’am, no dipshit” – is even better. My favorite exchange in the entire movie is between the two of them.
“Don’t tell me, you’re from outer space.”
“No, I’m from Iowa. I just work in outer space.”
I might be biased, as a child of Iowa, but that’s one of my favorite Kirk lines ever. Shatner’s knowing little grin is what sells it; as a romantic leading man, he is at his absolute best here.
And when the film comes to its climax and resolution, there’s real emotional weight to how it all comes together. I love the poetry of the ending, that after this big three-film journey, Kirk is punished by Starfleet with all he really ever wanted: a Captain’s chair and a crew full of friends. Combined with Spock’s lovely goodbye to Sarek, this would have been a perfect ending for this cast (The Undiscovered Country pulls it off again, thankfully, though Generations then messes it all up for Kirk – you can only spin the chamber so many times, I guess).
The Voyage Home is wonderful, a fun, confident, ludicrously entertaining culmination to Star Trek’s 80s revival, and a stupendous celebration of these characters. As director, Leonard Nimoy really demonstrates how much he had come to love this series and his fellow co-stars, taking a great big victory lap with all of them and inviting us to share in the revelry.
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