Category: Star Trek

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is obviously the follow up to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and it is the first Star Trek movie that I remember coming out as a kid.  I was very excited when Dad brought home the VHS tape for us to watch.  It is also the completion of a three story arch that started with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Is it as good as I remember? It is defiantly one of the better Star Trek movies.

This movie starts right where the last movie left off.  Spock is still trying to remember who he was and is, and the crew of the Enterprise is taking their stolen Klingon Bird of Prey home, so they can stand trial for disobeying orders and stealing the Enterprise, but on the way home a giant probe is threating the Earth and sending out some sort of strange sound.  When Spock hears it he recognizes it as humpback whale songs, but since they are extinct they cannot answer back, so the crew of the stolen Klingon vessel go back in time to get some.

Even though this is hardly the first giant thing to endanger the Earth in Star Trek, it is still a fun story, and seeing the crew as fish out of water in the 1980’s is pretty humorous.  The Voyage Home is one of the funniest Star Trek movies made.  Leonard Nimoy does a great job as the director of this movie, and gave Gene Rodenberry the time travel movie he wanted to make with the second movie, without the need to make sure JFK gets assassinated.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a good movie, and it is miles better then movies that are about to follow, unless I am remembering them wrong (I am not).  It is hard to believe that his movie is almost 30 years old, but then again I am almost 31 (sigh), but it holds up well.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is the first Star Trek movie directed by Leonard Nimoy, and even the though it is the third Star Trek movie it is really the second movie in a trilogy of sorts that ends in the next movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  So how does Nimoy fair in his directorial debut? Not bad, but not great.

This movie directly follows Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan‘s plot, so Kirk’s son is checking out the new Genesis planet, and Kirk is home mourning the loss of Spock, when Spock’s dad rushes in to Kirk’s apartment and asks why he left Spock’s body on Genesis, and why they didn’t meld minds at the end of Spock’s life to do some kind of Vulcan mind backup.  They soon discover that Spock backed up his mind in Dr. McCoy’s head, so they get McCoy, steal the Enterprise because Star Fleet is going to trash it, and are off to save Spock.  Also, Christopher Lloyd plays a Klingon trying to take Genesis as a weapon.

That is the type of plot you get when you realize killing off Spock, a major draw to your franchise, is a bad idea, so you have to unkill him, and the plot is really the weakest part of this movie.  The actors do a great job with what they are given, but the story really is just a way to bring Spock back from the dead.  Nimoy does a pretty good job as the director, and it is not hard to see why the kept him on to direct the next film.  He is definitely better then Shatner, but we will get to that later.

This movie is pretty good, despite just being way to have Spock back, and we all know that without Spock we couldn’t have had the latest Star Trek movie, so it is an important film for that reason alone.  It is not the best Star Trek movie, but there are much worse.

The Wrath of Khan is normally thought of as one of the best Star Trek movies made, and interestingly enough Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) was removed from this picture because he wanted to make a movie about the crew going back in time to stop the Klingons from stopping the Kennedy Assassination.  I think this is one of the rare times that the studio did the right thing.

In this movie Kirk decides to retake command of the USS Enterprise, so they can check on a transmission being sent out by his former girl friend Dr. Carol Marcus.  Meanwhile the USS Reliant has been captured by Kirk’s old enemy Khan, who sets a trap for Kirk and the Enterprise.  I haven’t given away the whole plot, but already more has happened then Star Trek The Motion Picture.

It was really smart to bring in a foe from the TV Show for this film, since most people going to watch the movie loved the show.  It was also briskly edited, so it didn’t drag so much, which was a huge problem with the previous movie, and watching Kirk and Khan yell at each other through space is always fun.

They made this movie on the cheep, so the special effects were kind of lame even for the 80s, but they did the best they could with the money they had, so they didn’t have to focus on cool special effects.  They did find the money to replace the blue pajamas with the cool red Velcro uniforms we have all come to know and love.

Khan isn’t just a good Star Trek movie it is a good movie period.  The story and the action is really top notch, and fact it is a Star Trek movie just makes it better.  There are only a couple of Star Trek movies that are must watch, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is one of them.

With a new Star Trek movie coming out this year, I have decided to go back and watch some the older Star Trek films, so why not start with the first one.  Star Trek the Motion Picture is a 1979 movie based off the Star Trek TV show.  It was originally the pilot to new TV show code-named Phase II, but that was too expensive, so it got scraped, but then Star Wars came out, and Paramount found the money to fund a new Sci-Fi movie.

The setup is there is an unknown object rushing towards Earth generating tons of power, and wiping out all life on its way, so the crew of the Enterprise, and the now Admiral Kirk have to go and see if they can reason with it and stop it from destroying the planet.  The story sounds kind of epic, but not a lot really happens in this movie.  Pretty much Kirk takes the Enterprise away from Captain Decker, who gets understandably angry, and then they go and stare at this giant ship for awhile while talking to a hot android that looks like the navigator Ilia, who the giant ship killed, and all while wearing cool blue pajamas that for some reason never show up again.

This movie’s main fault is that it could have used a better editor, it would have made a pretty good hour and half long movie, but at over two hours it really drags in some places, and there are more long ship pans then I think have ever graced the silver screen before or ever will.  This movie goes from some dialog, and then starts to pan over a ship for what feels like forever, and this happens a lot.

This movie did bring the crew back to the Enterprise, and you can tell that they were having fun being together again, so it is not a total loss, and when the mystery of the giant ship is revealed it is pretty cool.  They just needed someone to tighten it all up a bit, but I still enjoy this movie, and need to find myself a pair of those blue PJs.