Watching the Star Trek Movies (SPOILERS)

[The Baron]

Thought it would be fun to re-watch these, since I finally picked up a copy of Star Trek - Into Darkness from the cheapie bin, which  means I now have copies of all of them.

 

So, on into space, the filmic frontier...

[Luke Blanchard]

It's years since I watched the original cast movies. I enjoyed II much more, but to my way of thinking TMP was the one from the series most like the TV show. The similarity is there in its main plot and the Dekker/Ilia/Ilia robot strand. I've not seen IV.

[PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod]

Richard Willis said:  Although I really love this movie, I thought Kahn's hatred was a little overplayed. It's not like Kirk knew the planet would be as drastically changed as it was.

Khan wasn't playing with a full deck.

The video sequence demonstrating the Genesis device was the first entirely cgi sequence in a theatrical film. The division of Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic that did it later became the company known as Pixar.

[The Baron]

Star Trek III - The Search for Spock

 

 

Directed by Leonard Nimoy

Written and produced by Harve Bennett

 

Random thoughts:

 

1. I notice that they didn't list Nimoy in the opening acting credits.
2. Another good score from James Horner.
3. I liked Christopher Lloyd as Kruge. I thought he played the part well. Not someone I would've picked to be a Klingon, but that just shows why I'm not a casting director.
4. I didn't like the design of the Excelsior. I thought it was kind of goofy-looking.
5. "The Enterprise is twenty years old."  I'm pretty sure that's way off.
6. Robin Curtis takes up the role of Saavik. I thought she did OK.
7. Mark Lenard is good, as always.
8. "Don't call me 'Tiny'."
9. There's James B. Sikking (Always Howard Hunter of Hill Street Blues to me) is Stiles.  He always did play officious jerks well.
10. "You Klingon bastard, you've killed my son!"  ("Oh, my God! They killed David! You bastards!")
11. And then they blew up the Enterprise!
12. "You said you would kill me."  "I lied."
13. Dame Judith Anderson as T'Lar. I confess to never havign hear dof her outside this picture.

 

Overall:  Not a bad little picture. One of the better ones they did, I think. Of course, the revival of Spock wasn't a huge surprise.  It would've been more surprising if they hadn't revived him, frankly.

 

 

[Richard Willis]

There's James B. Sikking (Always Howard Hunter of Hill Street Blues to me) is Stiles. He always did play officious jerks well.

Sikking (with a beard) played a quite different character in the movie Outland.

[Mark S. Ogilvie]

Again this is where reading the book fills in some intersting gaps. There is a subtext with Valaris the klingon who steals the Genisis file and Kluge and some good stuff between Saavik and David. And some good background on Sulu whose joining Kirk did cost him the Exelsior for a while. I thought the design was a bit bottom heavy.
One thing that did strike me at the time was the way Starfleet under estimated Kirk and company. When you look at the records and what they faced the idea that they would just step aside and let McCoy suffer is ridiculous. This group has challenged gods after all.

[Philip Portelli]

There were tribbles at the bar where they arrest McCoy.

And they redo the self-destruct sequence from "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield".

Amazingly Starfleet has no idea what to do with Vulcans when they die. No wonder few Vulcans serve!

[Ron M.]

The tribbles were kind of like what if shmoos didn't do anything.

[The Baron]

Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home (1986)

 

Directed by Leonard Nimoy

 

Story by Leonard Nimoy & Harve Bennett ,  Screenplay by Steve Meerson & Peterr Krikes, Harve Bennett & Nicholas Meyer

 

1. We start with a dedication to the crew of Challenger, which I thought was a nice touch.
2. I liked the score by Leonard Rosenman.
3. Another mysterious probe threatening Earth? Again?
4. I liked John Schuck as the Klingon ambassador. I mosly knew him from TV at this point, so I was surprised to see him in there at the time.
5. They've been on Vulcan for three months? I guess Vulcan doesn't have an extradition treaty with Earth.
6. Nice to see Jane Wyatt again, she seemed to excel at playing people's moms.
7. And there's Brock Peters as the Admiral. He turns up alot in Star Trek.
8. I'd forgotten how they pretty much dump Saavik early on in the picture. Wouldn't they have wanted her to come testify?
9. I liked McCoy's attempts to engage Spock in conversation about death.
10. The "Leningrad" reference dates the film a little
11. "Angels and minsiters of grace defend us."  Love a Hamlet reference.
12. Scotty says that re-crystalizing dilithium is impossible even in their time, and Spock almost immediately says there's a way to do it.
13. "This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture."  Lots of dumping on the 20th Century in this.
14. They sure are taking their chances on no one bumping into their ship in the middle of the park like that.
15. The whole business of Spock trying to swear is more amusing than it probably should be.
16. They don't seem to be too worried about disturbing the web of time here.
17. The whole "nuclear wessels" bit is a little too cutesy for me, plus it makes Uhura and Chekov look like dopes.
18. The bus passengers all applaud Spock for knocking out the punk. But why? They don't know what the Vulcan neck pinch is - for all they now, Spock just quietly snapped the guy's neck.
19. Catherine Hicks is OK as Gillian - she does the Earnest Young Specialist well.
20. I enjoyed Scotty's overacting at the plastics plant.
21. "How do we know he didn't invent the thing?" As I recall, the novelization implies that Scotty did know this.
22. I liked the bit with Chekov on the ship/ Nice that Koenig got a chance to shine, there.
23. They could have just beamed Gillian back out of the ship again, at the end. sure hope she wasn't meant to have any important descendants or anything.
24. "One damn minute, Admiral."  He finally gets it right!
25. I also liked the scene where they terrorized the whalers.
26. Earth is lucky the whales told the probe to leave.
27. Kirk and company get off quite lightly at the end.
28. The scene where Sarek apologizes to Spock at the end was cool. Nimoy manages to convey Spock's astonishment that his dad would admit to being wrong quite subtly.
29. And they get a new Enterrpise. I recall some source material suggesting that they just took a new ship that they happened to have ready and hastily re-named it.
30. Interesting that after two films with a strong baddy, there's no real heel in this.

 

Overall:Another one of my favorites - I found this a little creeky in parts, but still quite enjoyable.

[Mark S. Ogilvie]

I think that Sarek is the main reason they were able stay on Vulcan for three months. The rest of it I liked. At the time I figured that Spock was filling his mind with all sorts of stuff and might have recalled an obscure research paper on the dilithium problem, just as he recognized the whale songs.

[ClarkKent_DC]

I've come to this thread late, too, but I'll chime in:

• I don't know the name of that artist who did the movie posters, but I loved his work. I remember reading that he passed away.
• As noted elsewhere (here), I'm not the biggest fan of Star Trek the TV series, and I haven't seen all the episodes. Likewise, I haven't seen all of the movies.
• As pointed out above, Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture was originally conceived as a revival of the TV series. But at the time, Star Wars was an unexpected box office hit, so every movie studio was looking for a science-fiction property. When the Star Trek II proposal came across Paramount CEO Michael Eisner's desk (yes, that Michael Eisner, who went on to make Disney the massive empire that it is), he declared, "That's it! This is OUR science-fiction movie!"
• I agree with everybody who complained about the ponderous pace of the movie. I chalk it up to the movie makers being so wowed that they got to make a movie, with a movie budget -- like the scene with the entire crew, all 437 of them! in costume and makeup! -- that they forgot to make it interesting, too.
• I did actually read the novelization, which went down some interesting paths the movies and TV series never took -- like Spock's enhanced hearing making it difficult to be around all those 437 crew members, especially when they engaged in *ahem* off-duty recreation. It also explained better than the movie did about Ilia and why she has a statement of celibacy on record and why we the audience should care.
• Everything I don't like about Star Trek the TV series -- particularly, the incessant nagging Spock has to suffer about not being human -- is in evidence in the movies.
• On the other hand, there is the shot of San Francisco -- and the Golden Gate Bridge is still there! That's one thing I do like about Star Trek -- just because it's the future, it doesn't mean the past is totally erased.
• I never saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I don't know why. I just haven't.
• I also never saw the TV episode featuring Ricardo Montalban as Khan Noonien Singh.
• I didn't see Star Trek III: The Search for Spock until about 2010. By then, all surprises within were quite thoroughly spoiled.

[ClarkKent_DC]

I did see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in theaters. It was a lot of fun.

• Yeah, it was kind of odd that they left the invisible spaceship in the park and it was fine. I would have to think that more than a few people might have bumped into it, and that would have attracted some attention.
• The bit where Kirk sells the antique eyeglasses to raise cash was funny. But the following moment, when he divided the cash and gave it to the crew members so they each could do their part of the mission inadvertently looked to my wife like a drug deal.
• "Your associates are people of good character." "They are my friends."
• Isn't it kind of odd that, for all the machinations they go through to get the whales and bring them back to the future, we never find out why? That is, this alien probe shows up nearly destroying everything, Spock figures out they're talking in humpback whale-speak, they get two humpback whales, the whales talk to the alien probe, and that's that. But what did they say? And we're really lucky that these two whales knew whatever it is the aliens wanted to know and could tell them that, aren't we?

[The Baron]

ClarkKent_DC said:

The bit where Kirk sells the antique eyeglasses to raise cash was funny. But the following moment, when he divided the cash and gave it to the crew members so they each could do their part of the mission inadvertently looked to my wife like a drug deal.

.......

Isn't it kind of odd that, for all the machinations they go through to get the whales and bring them back to the future, we never find out why? That is, this alien probe shows up nearly destroying everything, Spock figures out they're talking in humpback whale-speak, they get two humpback whales, the whales talk to the alien probe, and that's that. But what did they say?

 

 

Maybe the whales were doing a drug deal.