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When Leonard Nimoy took the helm of the Enterprise and directed Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), he did more than revive everyone's favorite Vulcan. He rescued a series that had gone boldly into no man's land and put it back on course.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has a back-from-the-future plot that evokes the television series in its happy balance of humor and sobering ethical issues. In only his second outing as a director, Nimoy has perfected and polished the tone of these films so that puckish wit combines with pungently relevant social comment. It improves upon what he did in the third film, and that is no small feat.
What he has achieved can be measured by where the series was when he assumed double duty as director and first officer of the Enterprise. The ponderousness of Robert Wise's Star Trek : The Motion Picture (1979) was typified by a shuttle ascent to the Enterprise that took longer than a Jerry Lewis telethon. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Nicholas Meyer restored some sorely needed vitality to the films, but the humor was too camp and Ricardo Montalban's scenery-chewing Khan was grotesque. It was a diverting movie, but it wasn't Star Trek .
Spock came back to life in Star Trek III and so did the series. Star Trek IV completes the story of the resurrection of Spock, who appeared to have died in the second film, and finds an ingenious way of tying up the loose ends. Time travel has been in such vogue on the screen since Back to the Future (1985) that another variation on the theme may seem poorly timed. But in the right hands - as Francis Coppola demonstrates in Peggy Sue Got Married - it's a wonderfully pliant device.
Star Trek IV doesn't have the wistful substance of Coppola's scintillating fantasy, but it aims higher than the easy humor sparked by the friction between the customs of past and future. Nimoy and his writers, who include Meyer, come up with some delightful jokes, but their story hinges on what the mindless brutalities of the present could mean to man's future.
Without ever turning the bridge of the spaceship into a soapbox, Star Trek IV takes up the greed that leads to the extinction of an entire species and its possible irreversible consequences on the planet. The movie opens in the 23d century with the crew of the Enterprise, which was heroically sacrificed in Star Trek III, deciding to return to Earth to face a court-martial. Spock is back from the dead, but by no means himself.
However, before they can reach home in a captured Klingon ship, Kirk and his team learn of a giant marauding space probe that emits eerie sounds and destroys everything in its path. It is, of course, Spock who deduces that the probe is trying to communicate with intelligent life on earth - whales rather than men. And since whales had been wiped out by the beginning of the 21st century, there is no one to answer, and thus stop, the onrushing probe.
The enterprising crew responds by hurling its borrowed ship through a time warp to 1986 San Francisco. The improbable, if not impossible, mission is to kidnap two humpback whales and take them back to the future. In the old television series, time travel was a standby. Here, the temptation to turn Star Trek IV into a stand-up comedy is resolutely avoided.
The humor is easygoing and there's even an echo of the old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures in the repartee of Kirk (Willian Shatner) and Spock. Spock is the straight man who takes everything said to him literally, and Kirk is the one who suavely talks their way out of trouble as they knock around San Francisco. They are always amusing and occasionally irresistible. Nobody who has lived in a city and endured the roar of a teenager's boom box will fail to rejoice in Spock's choice of a Vulcan nerve pinch as a solution to the problem.
Some misjudgments and problems of pacing arise from a middle act that becomes a sequence of vignettes giving the spotlight to individual crew members. They are loosely connected to a subplot involving the collection of various elements - nuclear power, high-strength materials and the like - necessary for the care and feeding of whales in a time warp. Some work better than others, but the overall result is a slackening in what is otherwise a very taut narrative.
One of the minor ironies of Star Trek IV is that its top-of-the-line special effects come courtesy of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. It was the success of Lucas in the Star Wars trilogy that made the Star Trek film series a possibility in the first place. With no more Star Wars movies in the near future, science fiction has increasingly become the province of Lucas' imitators, and the rudimentary ideas of quest and the galactic collisions of good and evil that appeal to kids.
It is the Star Trek films - under Nimoy's assured guidance - that have restored the notion that science-fiction movies can be about something. The conditions of the movie marketplace mean that original pieces such as The Fly, or even Aliens, don't come along that often. Faced with the cost of mounting state-of-the art special effects, the studios have played safe and essentially recycled the Star Wars plot.
With a worldwide built-in audience for each new installment, it's to the great credit of the team behind Star Trek that they have taken chances when they didn't have to. The commercial returns on this risk are likely to be huge, and nothing could be better for the future of screen science fiction than a grown-up mega-hit that will also attract kids.
It's often been said that the fierce loyalty that Star Trek inspires has to do with its optimism about the future and its hopes for man's place in it. With his two films, Nimoy has given us renewed optimism for the future of this always intriguing and now revitalized series. As Shatner takes over as director of Star Trek V - due for probable release in 1988 - there's every sign that this series will live long and prosper on the big screen.
