Review: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Rating

Director

Leonard Nimoy

Screenplay

Leonard Nimoy, Harve Bennett, Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer

Length

1h 59m

Starring

William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Jane Wyatt, Catherine Hicks, Mark Lenard, Robin Curtis

MPAA Rating

Review

Analogy in science fiction is common but a direct reflection of the present day is a little less so. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home aimed to tell a story that used 1980s Earth as a framing device for a important philosophical narrative.

Tying together the events of the prior two films, Adm. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew are in hiding on Vulcan as their actions in the prior film have merited them a court-martial trial, which they eventually return to face but discover that Earth has been powered-down by a strange alien vessel broadcasting a signal that Spock (Leonard Nimoy) deciphers as matching the humpback whale, a species that had gone extinct on Earth. Using the Klingon bird of prey they stole in the prior film, the crew uses a controversial slingshot maneuver around the sun to send them back in time to present-day Earth.

There, the crew splits up in an effort to find whales to take with them, build a tank to transport them, and obtain a nuclear reactor to repower their vessel. Various setbacks occur and the fate of their mission hangs in the balance.

The original series seldom had multi-part episodes and even most of their successors struggled with the concept of tying together three or more episodes but in the film universe, the adventures of the crew of the Enterprise were successfully strung from The Wrath of Khan through The Search for Spock to this film, a seamless transition that helped build to the successful cinematic narrative that was The Voyage Home. The large team of screenwriters included director Nimoy, prior contributor Harve Bennett, Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, and Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer. That could explain why the depth of the storyline is surface thin and, while several of the one-shot jokes in the film (“We are looking for nuclear wessels,” “hello, computer”) certainly land, none of that is particularly thought-provoking.

The high level overview of the environmental concepts in the film helped The Voyage Home easily become the top-grossing original series Star Trek picture. Environmentalism itself wasn’t a novel concept at the time but this film greased the skids of the movement and helped energize its successes in the late 1980s and 1990s. That forward trajectory began to stall as the 1990s drifted into the new millennium but for the part Star Trek played in that renaissance, The Voyage Home deserves immense credit.

Popularity never diminishes the salience of the Star Trek universe but a film like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home helps expand the fanbase and, for a franchise whose vision of the future is one of hope and prosperity, that’s always a positive sign. For fans of the franchise, this is often cited as one of the best and even non-fans will find something fun and engaging within.