SF -- I generally use Harlan Ellison's preferred abbreviation, as he always thought the more common "Sci-Fi" was dismissive and sounded "like crickets fucking" -- is sort of a cousin to horror. It's usually larger in scale, but it's still about viewing humanity through the lens of the fantastic. It certainly shares horror's tendency to be unconditionally dismissed as brainless tripe by film critics, unless their name happens to be Roger Ebert. Whether it's the classics like Alien and Predator or cornier cult stuff like Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror, the two genres also tend to overlap. Netflix and Amazon Prime have a lot of good science fiction available, so I hope to get a bit more into it on this blog from now on.
Nimoy directed our movie this week. I'm not often affected by celebrity deaths, but Leonard was such an iconic figure in nerd culture for so many years, and such a friendly, outgoing representative of that culture long before it achieved any sort of mainstream acceptance, that I find myself deeply saddened by his passing.
Live long and prosper in memory.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
It's generally acknowledged that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the best of the original-generation Trek movies, but that The Voyage Home is the most fun. This was my Star Trek, growing up. I watched this one about fifty times. The first three movies form a plot arc, and they're notably darker in tone than the original show tended to be. Kirk's character is torn apart layer by layer. He takes over command of the refitted Enterprise in the first movie and assumes he knows everything there is to know, nearly getting the ship blown up in the process because it's not the same ship he remembers. In the second movie, he's chomping at the bit to get back in the saddle, but he's been shoved behind a desk for so long that his instincts are rusty when it finally happens. The ladies' man turns out to have a son he never knew, who hates him. And way back in the original series episode "Space Seed," he stranded Khan and his followers on a desolate planet and then basically forgot to check in on them, which bites him in the ass big-time and results in the death of his best friend.
The Voyage Home wraps up most of that storyline in the first ten minutes. It also marks a complete change in tone, tossing the darkness of the previous three movies out the window in favor of comedy. An alien probe makes its way to Earth and starts vaporizing the oceans, emitting a signal nobody seems to be able to decipher. Spock figures out that it's replicating the songs of humpback whales -- which makes answering the probe functionally impossible, as humpback whales were long ago driven to extinction. Kirk, now demoted to Captain and given command of the HMS Bounty, the Klingon Bird-of-Prey they acquired at the end of the last movie, has an idea: slingshot the Bounty around the sun so hard that it flies back in time so they can bring some humpback whales back with them to communicate with the probe.
So that works, and the crew ends up in the "primitive and paranoid" culture of San Francisco in 1986, where they split up to accomplish the various things they need to do. Chekhov and Uhura go off to find a source of radiation to power up the Klingon crystals that crapped out on them when they landed, and sending the Russian to ask about a nuclear power source in a major American city during the last years of the Cold War turns out not to be the best idea. Scotty and Bones go to find a suitable material to build a giant fish tank out of. And Kirk and Spock go looking for the whales, which they find, fortuitously enough, in a mated pair of humpbacks at the nearby Cetacean Institute. After some trouble navigating the local culture.
"Well, double dumbass on YOU!"
While Kirk and Spock try to negotiate a solution with the whales' caretaker, marine biologist Gillian Taylor, Chekhov gets himself arrested after leeching nuclear power from a navel vessel in the bay. Scotty's mission isn't exactly going as planned either, as it turns out that the material they need hasn't been invented yet. He solves that problem easily enough by just inventing it himself, since he already knew its molecular composition. (They're playing kind of fast and loose with the Prime Directive in this movie, but it's funny, so we'll let it slide.) He also has to deal with those hideous off-white boxy Macs they had back in the 80s.
"Hello, computer?"
Another snag hits Kirk and Spock when Gillian, who finally more or less says "fuck it, okay, you're from space, let's go with that," because Kirk is really her only rescue option if he's telling the truth, reveals that the whales are about to be shipped off to the ocean and set free, where they'll more than likely be hunted down by whalers. The movie isn't particularly subtle in its message, but there are things you really don't need to be subtle about. It's also right about then that Uhura gets back to them and tells them Chekhov's being held by the Navy, who think he's a Russian spy, so they have to go bail him out after a wacky hospital chase scene. Eventually everything gets back on track and works out for the best, and Gillian comes with them since she'll probably be the only whale biologist around and the 20th century sucks anyway. (This, I can definitely relate to.)
This is one of my favorite movies. If I remember correctly, it's the movie that got me watching movies again, actually. When I was young -- I mean four years old young, or thereabouts -- I went to see Go-Bots and the Battle of the Rock Lords at the Eric Theater in the Tri-State Mall, which, at the time, was not the terrifying, mostly closed-down den of drug dealers it is today. The sound on that movie was about twice the volume it should have been, and I was terrified of loud noises at that age, so after over an hour of being temporarily deafened, I basically swore off movies for a few years after that. I'm pretty sure this was the first movie I watched after my irrational terror at the prospect of going to a theater had worn off.
"You're not exactly catching us at our best."
Everybody has their moments, but Spock is pretty much the best part of the movie. He walks around with his ears hidden by a headband, and since he's 1) recovering from being dead and 2) unfamiliar with Earth culture in the 1980s, he's acting super weird, which Kirk tells Gillian is because he did a little too much LDS back in the 60s. He also notices that the language is laced with "more colorful metaphors," and Kirk tells him that nobody listens to anyone in the 20th century unless they swear every other word, so Spock starts swearing every other word. Kirk eventually tells him he shouldn't use so many colorful metaphors anymore, and Spock says "Why the hell not?" He nerve-pinches a punk blasting a boom-box on the bus. He goes swimming in the aquarium. I think Nimoy must have come up with this story (with Harve Bennett) partly just so he could act like a total goofball without ever cracking a smile. Spock is great in this movie.
The special effects deserve a mention as well. In several sequences, the whales were small-scale animatronic models filmed in a high-school swimming pool, but they were so realistic that U.S. fishing authorities criticized the producers for being too close to whales in their natural habitat, unaware that they weren't using real whales for the ocean and bay scenes toward the end of the movie. The bizarre dream sequence Kirk experiences during the time-warp also marks one of the very first uses of primitive CGI. They may not look like much now, but it's important to remember where the effects of today came from.
I also have to say that every time I watched this movie on VHS back in the day, I would rewind this one part near the end and watch it over about five times, because my younger self found it completely hilarious for no apparent reason. I can't come up with a reason now any more than I could then, but it still gets a laugh out of me.
I can't think of much else to say, and writing this review is sort of making me cry. So I'll just say that if you have Netflix, you should watch this movie tonight. Whether it's in remembrance, or just because it's the best Trek movie out there.
Available On: Netflix.
Trivia: The punk on the bus is played by the movie's associate producer, Kirk R. Thatcher.
No comments:
Post a Comment