Nicholas Meyer gives the original crew a Cold War thriller to retire on, and for an hour it is the smartest the series ever was. The middle sags on an ice planet and the villain talks in quotations, but it is a decent goodbye.
The Klingon moon Praxis blows up in the first two minutes. The Empire has fifty years left, Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) wants peace, and Spock has volunteered the Enterprise and a captain who wants no part of it to escort him. Nicholas Meyer, directing the series for the first time since The Wrath of Khan (1982), has made a Cold War thriller in space and given the original crew something to retire on. For an hour it is as sharp as the series ever got; then it goes to an ice planet and loses the thread.
The dinner is the best scene. Gorkon and his party beam over, the Romulan ale comes out, and soon everyone we like has said something a diplomat would resign over. Chekov (Walter Koenig) mentions inalienable human rights and Gorkon’s daughter Azetbur (Rosanna DeSoto) asks him to listen to himself. Chang (Christopher Plummer) quotes Hamlet, and Gorkon says you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon. We laughed, then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because the joke is on the crew and the film means it to be. The script by Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn has one idea and it is a good one: the heroes are the bigots at the table.
Shatner lets Kirk be ugly. ‘Let them die,’ he says to Spock, and he does not soften it. The film spends its length walking him back from that line. DeForest Kelley’s McCoy is old and cross and gentler than ever. Warner plays Gorkon as a tired man who knows he will be hated on both sides, and he is gone too soon. Plummer’s Chang wears an eyepatch riveted to his skull and has a quotation for every occasion, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet again, and by the last reel we were counting. He is fun. He is not frightening, and the film needs him to be.
Hiro Narita lights the Enterprise darker than in any earlier outing, corridors in half-shadow and the bridge lit from its own panels, so the ship looks like a place where someone could be killed. Herman F. Zimmerman builds the Klingon courtroom as a round black pit under one shaft of light. Cliff Eidelman’s score drops the fanfares for low brass and chanting male voices, so the titles sound like a funeral. William Hoy and Ronald Roose cut the assassination well: the gravity fails on Gorkon’s ship, the blood rises off the floor in pink globes, and two figures in Starfleet boots move through it without hurry. We were horrified, and it was the slowness that did it. A PG rarely gets that close.
Then the film goes to the ice planet and stays too long. Back aboard, Spock runs the murder inquiry like a school prefect, the clues are a pair of boots and a torpedo inventory, and we never once wondered who did it. The Cold War allegory is not shy, and most critics have said so. Nichelle Nichols is handed a joke about not speaking Klingon that is beneath her, and George Takei, given a ship of his own, spends most of the film on another set.
After The Final Frontier (1989), anything competent would have looked like a triumph, and this is well past competent. But Khan had one enemy and one grief and trusted both; this has a treaty, a conspiracy and a trial, and the shape of a good episode padded to 110 minutes. What holds it together is that Meyer plainly likes these people and has noticed they are old, and lets the film notice too.
The last minutes are a goodbye to the original cast, and the film knows it. We were moved more than we expected, mostly by Kelley, who can make a line about retirement sound like a eulogy. Worth your evening if you know these people, and worth it for the dinner, the assassination and Warner even if you do not. It runs 110 minutes and carries a PG.
