The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Star Trek IV: The Journey Home (1986), directed by Leonard Nimoy

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Music to Watch Space Girls By", by Leonard Nimoy

     Another year, another Star Trek movie. It sounds a bit cynical, but actually this was actually one of the films I’ve been looking forward to the most, given the disappointing lack of Trek in my life. I mean I’m still not interested in Discovery, and I doubt that’s going to change soon, which leaves me with the extended universe content of books and games that comes with its own set of infeasibility, so I’m pretty much shit out of luck. I mean I may not have liked most of Voyager or Enterprise, but at least it was a world that I was familiar with that I could relax in for a short while. Hell I can’t even be bothered to finish a season of anything these days, my watch queue is a killing field of dozens of unfinished shows, plotlines left dangling, character arc undeveloped. Shows, even sci-fi shows, just can’t seem to capture my interest the way that Star Trek did. Yes, even Spock’s Brain.

     SPOILERS, just in case.


     Much like Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (which Nimoy also directed, by the by) was set directly after the events of Wrath of Khan, The Journey Home deals with the aftermath of Search for Spock. The Enterprise destroyed, Kirk and crew stuck on Vulcan after breaking all of the rules to shove Spock’s soul back in his body, Kirk’s son dead, and the Klingons calling for blood over the Genesis Project. It’s looking like a long trip back to Starfleet HQ and a court martial when an enormous ship emitting bizarre signals enters Federation space. No one can communicate with it, ships and electrical devices all fail in its wake, and when it finally reaches Earth initiates an environmental catastrophe that threatens to kill all human life on the planet. Kirk and crew are the only folks with a working ship, and it is Spock who figures out the truth: The mysterious signal the aliens are sending out is in essence a whale song, specifically that of the humpback whale. Apparently these aliens had visited Earth a long time ago, long before shitty humans showed up, and they really got along well with the whales. Trouble is, because humans are so shitty humpback whales went extinct a long time ago, and now there’s no one to call off the thousand mile wide death machine from shuffling man off of this mortal coil. So obviously the only thing you can do is slingshot around the sun in order to travel through time, grab a couple of humpback whales from wherever, slingshot around the sun again back to the future, drop ‘em off and hope they feel like putting a good word in for humanity. Simple, right?

     As I’ve likely said before, the common line with the Star Trek movies is that the odd-numbered ones are bad and the even-numbered ones are good. It’s a absolutist blanket statement that I don’t find helpful at all, but I will say that the films contrast each other in such a way that you can have a clear division between audiences. For example, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which I believe deserves far more love) is a slow-burn of a film, focusing more on gravitas and the visual spectacle above all else. By contrast, The Wrath of Khan is a tense, explosive action thriller, Das Boot in space you could say, with epic lines and character deaths and everything. Neither are bad movies, in fact they deal with a lot of the same things, like man and mankind’s legacy and dealing with mortality, just one is presented in such a way that it appeals to the Star Wars cult crowd. They compliment each other rather well, actually. Philosophy and action, the two sides of the

     Similarly, while both Star Trek III and IV are both ostensibly stories about death and rebirth, The Journey Home has a much different tone than The Search for Spock (Search is also probably the weakest of the four films, adding fuel to the fire). Where Search for Spock is this climactic, dramatic film, Journey Home is much more of a feel-good romp. While the stakes are technically much higher here than in III it never feels that way, preferring instead to breeze through an adventure packed with hijinks and stranger in a strange land type social satire. It’s like they decided that after all the heavy stuff we’ve been up to over the last three films they decided to step off of the gas a bit and let us cruise for a while. Remind the fans of the good old days, you know?

     If there’s anything overtly negative I can say, it’s that at times things feel a little bit too light and goofy. I mean stuff like the ‘nuclear wessels’ scene is great, and I think Spock in general is on-point the whole time, but then you’ve got things like Kirk being so ignorant of money that he doesn’t understand the concept of ‘exact change’ despite having been to the past several times and overall bumbling about with basic time travel rules that just comes across as lazy and unprofessional for what is supposed to be the finest members of Starfleet around. This goes for the female lead as well, our resident whale biologist Gillian Taylor(a name I had to pick out of the credits because I think they only mentioned it once or twice), who seems to exist only for Kirk to awkwardly hit on her from time to time. Another remnant from the ‘good ol’ days’ perhaps, but otherwise she’s not really all that exciting or compelling a character, to the point that she could have probably been excised completely from the script without too many issues. That’s not to knock the actress, I think she was fine, it’s that she’s essentially the woman guest star from every TOS episode, and thus unfortunately rather one-note.

     If you’ve already come this far into Trekland then you might as well come one more step, but that step is a pretty easy one. The Journey Home is not a mind blowing experience, it’s not going to get you on the edge of your seat like maybe The Wrath of Khan did, but if you’ve got it, a cold drink and a bowl of popcorn you’re going to have an enjoyable evening. Star Trek IV gets the recommendation, and hell, so does Star Trek in general. Maybe this Halloween it’ll bring you as much enjoyment as it has brought me.