Leonard Nimoy sends the Enterprise crew to 1986 to fetch two humpback whales, and it is the lightest and funniest film in the series. The plot around the jokes is thin and the effects wobble, but the company is good.
After two films about death and resurrection, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Leonard Nimoy, directing for the second time, has made a comedy. The premise is that an alien probe is wrecking the Earth because nobody is left who can talk to it, and the only creatures who could are humpback whales, which have been extinct for two hundred years. So Kirk and his crew take a stolen Klingon ship back to 1986 to collect a pair. It is the most likeable film in the series and also the slightest, and we would recommend it to anyone, including people who have never sat through an episode.
The first half hour is the weak part. Kirk’s extradition hearing before the Federation Council, with Robert Ellenstein’s President looking pained and John Schuck’s Klingon Ambassador shouting, is stage-bound and slow. The probe itself is a long dark cylinder that hums, and Donald Peterman lights the council chamber and the Vulcan scenes with the flat brightness of a television studio. Leonard Rosenman’s score is brassy and bouncy and plays as if a parade were due at any moment; it is more cheerful than the film needs to be this early. Then the Klingon ship lands, invisible, in a San Francisco park, and everything wakes up.
The script, credited to Peter Krikes, Steve Meerson, Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer, splits the crew into pairs and sends them out into the city with no money and no idea how anything works. Spock, in a white robe with a headband over his ears, tries to learn swearing from Kirk and gets it wrong every time. Chekov and Uhura ask a policeman for directions to the nuclear vessels, and Walter Koenig’s grave politeness made us laugh out loud; the joke is not the accent but that he cannot see why the man is staring. Scotty and McCoy talk their way into a plastics factory, and James Doohan addressing a computer as if it were a slow colleague is one of the best things he has done in the part.
The whales live in a tank at an aquarium across the bay, looked after by a biologist who is the only person in 1986 the film takes seriously. The scene that stayed with us is Spock climbing into the tank in his robe and headband and swimming down to lay a hand on one of them. Peterman shoots it from below, green and silent, and it is a sight gag to begin with. Then Spock surfaces and reports, in the same level voice he uses for warp calculations, what the whale has told him about how it feels to be kept there, and the laughing stopped. It moved us more than we expected a film with a talking probe to manage.
Not all of it holds. Peter Landsdown Smith and Jack T. Collis have given the Klingon ship a cramped, murky bridge that is hard to see into, and the time-travel sequence, with the crew’s faces drifting through a fog, has dated worse than anything else here. Robert Fletcher’s costumes serve the comedy well enough (the crew in their maroon uniforms look exactly like a club on a day out) but nothing about the design is memorable. Peter E. Berger has a lot of threads to cut between and the middle hour sometimes stands still while one pair catches up with another. The environmental point is made in speeches, and Kirk’s flirtation with the biologist over pizza is there because a Kirk film requires one.
Set against the series’ own standards, The Wrath of Khan is the better-made film and this is the more enjoyable one. What Nimoy proves, at 118 minutes, is that these seven actors are the reason people came back, not the ships. Nothing explodes for most of the running time, nobody fires a phaser in anger, and it does not matter.
Watch it with someone who has never seen an episode and see how long they last before asking whether the Vulcan one is all right in the head. The fate of the planet rests on a man in a headband remembering how to swear, and we would not change a frame of that part.
