TREKKIN' IT: THE VOYAGE HOME

Leonard Nimoy is a big softy. After the financial success of Search For Spock, he was given greater creative control to direct Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and what kind of film does he make? Not a space combat film like Wrath of Khan or a sterile, alienating thinker like The Motion Picture, but a movie about friendship, teamwork and saving the whales. On paper, it's this film, not Final Frontier, that ought to be considered the big misstep, the one no one talks about. But instead Voyage Home is one of the best, and certainly most delightful films in the series.

Picking up where the last film left off, we find Kirk (William Shatner) and the rest of the crew in exile on Vulcan, deciding to return to Earth and face the consequences for all the rules they broke so they could save Spock (Nimoy). As they approach Earth, things get impossibly goofy: in a reworking of the V'Ger set-up from TMP, the planet is being devastated by a mysterious, alien probe. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) decodes the probes signal as a Humpback Whale song. Evidently, the probe had expected to make first contact with some kind of Whale based civilization and instead only finds the Humans who, in this world, had long ago hunted them into extinction. Consequently, the only way to save Earth is to go back in time and find some whales to talk to the probe. Yes, that is the actual set up and it's a real testament to just how good these actors are that they sell the gargantuan leaps necessary to move the plot along.

After a trippy time travel sequence, the crew sets down in 1986 San Fransisco and splits up into teams. Kirk and Spock case out a local aquarium while the rest of the crew concentrate on modifying and repairing the ship. It's at this point where the film gets to what it's best at: fish out of water comedy. We get a lot of fun scenes of the Enterprise crew trying to adjust to their 20th Century surroundings.The highlight might be Scotty and McCoy trying to figure out how to use a Mac Plus and handing out future technology willy nilly.

The film is unusually democratic in handing everyone screen time. For years Walter Keonig's Checkov has had very little to do but sit around and be the likable Russian (it's telling for a franchise where people are defined by their jobs that Checkov's skill set remains undefined), but here he finally gets his own subplot, scoring some of the films better laughs when his obliviousness to Cold War hostilities lands him in trouble when he has to sneak around a U.S. nuclear vessel.

We also have a small subplot about just how culturally displaced Spock is. He's unable to relate to his crew mates, the 20th Century is even harder. There's an endlessly amusing gag about him being absolutely terrible at swearing, even worse than Kirk, who charmingly thinks "Double dumb ass on you" is a real phrase people say in 1986. Spock's inability to act Human is interesting as he is indeed half Human. Because he was raised in Vulcan culture, he was never that warm to begin with, but he used to be able to fake it just a little. The film makes a point of telling us that the ritual that brought him back from the dead also reset his brain and erased all the years he'd spent trying to reconcile his two sides.

While this is a very small subplot in the film, and a character point rarely touched upon, Spock's regression is the flip of the direction the film's were taking. Like Spock himself, Trek has always had to navigate between brains and heart. At one point Trek was primarily about allegory and big ideas, but that began to noticeably shift during Nimoy's tenure as director, and it's most apparent here. The big ideas in Search for Spock where jumbled and confused, here they're stripped away almost completely so the film can romp around with the crew. No one's going to argue "save the whales" as a goal, and the crew is alarmingly unconcerned with altering timelines. This is the first Trek film that's more about the star-power of the actors than anything else. The human focus is a welcome 180 from where the series started, but in going for the opposite extreme it also sets precedent or the series most indulgent, least enjoyable entries as we'll see with Final Frontier and the mostly ego driven Next Generation films.

Voyage Home is goofy, strains all credibility, but it's funny and it works like gangbusters. While easily the broadest, and most accessible of the series, it's also the boldest departure. Until now, the series had followed the traditional "bigger, darker" sequel model, but after all the heaviness of the last few films, it's nice that the Trek series took a break and made an impossibly fluffy, vacation style movie like this.

Grade: B+

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Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis)