Review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) by Jason R — 22 Jun 2009

It's the "Save the World" Star Trek and probably the lightest of the series. The movie is dated, but that is ok since it suppose to take place in 1986, but in opening up the time-travel portion of the plot, the story takes incredible leaps in logic.

Ignore the fact that the humpback whale idea is really dumb and a minute write-off ("Whales were on Earth before humans, and the probe is probably trying to contact them"), half the time the characters act like they can't interfere in the past and the other half of the time, they go for the ontological paradox idea (the past can't be changed because we already exist in a future tied to that past).

There should have been no rush for the characters to get back to the present day since they could have calculated a return at any time. So with any logical storyline eliminated, the movie has to fall back to the plot (already weak) and fish-out-of-water gimmicks.

It works about 50% of the time making it an average movie. It is still better than The Search for Spock.