Monday, August 27, 2018

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #199 - Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, dir. Nicholas Meyer)


The summer of 1991 was a wonderful time to be a Star Trek fan. The franchise was celebrating its 25th anniversary, Star Trek: The Next Generation had completed its fourth season and was rivaling its predecessor in terms of popularity, and a new movie with the original cast was due in a few months. I walked into a theater that July to watch a movie I remember nothing about, but witnessed something I’ll never forget, the teaser trailer for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Images from episodes of the original series and earlier films filled the screen in an overlapping, shifting collage while a narrator described the exploits of the crew of the Starship Enterprise over the last quarter century. Just as the narrator invited the audience to join the crew for “one last adventure,” the camera pulled back to reveal that the patchwork of scenes had been projected onto the hull of Enterprise itself, right before the ship jumped to warp speed!
I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not always easy to be a Star Trek fan because there’s so much inconsistency within a franchise that’s now over 50 years old. After a very uneven beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, director Nicholas Meyer effectively restarted and rejuvenated the movie series in 1982 with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which has become one of high points of the entire franchise. The series expanded over the next few years and actor Leonard Nimoy, best known for his performance of the Vulcan science officer Spock, directed the next two installments and delivered another franchise high point with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (best known to the general public as “the one with the whales”). William Shatner, who portrayed Captain Kirk, nearly harpooned the series with the dreadful, bloated, and misguided Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which he wrote and directed. After this low point, Meyer and Nimoy teamed up once more to craft The Undiscovered Country, one of Star Trek’s brightest moments, which just never seems to get enough credit.
The original television series in the mid-1960s established that Klingons were the primary enemies of the United Federation of Planets and served as stand-ins for Soviet era Russians in a loose parallel to the Cold War that ran through many episodes. Decades into the future, as depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, we know that hostilities have ended between the Federation and the Klingons, but we don’t know any of the details of how it happened. Meyer and Nimoy wisely seized the moment of current events with the recent collapse of the Soviet Union to illustrate how this peace was achieved. This story brings a logical conclusion to the series’ Cold War parallels, offers up one last great challenge for the original cast that allows all seven actors to shine, and merges the narratives of the original cast and The Next Generation (Nimoy also guest starred on a two-part episode of that series in a tie-in with the movie just weeks before its release). In addition to the seven original cast members, the movie features an outstanding ensemble of supporting actors including Christopher Plummer, Kim Cattrall, Brock Peters, Rosanna DeSoto, David Warner, and Michael Dorn (who plays the grandfather of his character, Worf, in The Next Generation). Yes, I could certainly go on about all of the fascinating minutiae connected to this movie, but I don’t want to distract from the fact that is an exciting sci-fi adventure with elements of a political mystery that’s well worth your time.
As a fan of Star Trek, there have been few moments that compare with the excitement and wonder I felt when I watched that teaser for The Undiscovered Country in the summer of 1991. The reason those feelings have stayed with me over the last 27 years stems from the fact that the movie delivered on the promise of that trailer as well as the entire series itself. When Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek in 1966, he wanted to present an optimistic view of the human race exploring the universe in the future. In a way that few other Star Trek stories have been able, The Undiscovered Country reconciles that positive outlook with a view of humanity with which the audience can identify. On the path to universal peace, Meyer and Nimoy were willing to reveal the flaws and prejudices of a noble group of heroic explorers. Traveling through this darkness allows the light of peace and reconciliation to shine with meaning and consequence. On the final voyage of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the veteran crew members show us once again how to meet the future (the undiscovered country) with courage, humor, and hope.

-         John Parsell

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