Review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) by Adam S — 21 Mar 2014

By the time "The Voyage Home" was released, Kirk and Spock were well and truly entrenched into pop culture lexicon. They'd seen them work together on the bridge, they'd seen one sacrifice his life for the other, you'd seen the other sacrifice his career to reverse the death. Now watch the two futuristic friends....... catch the bus, tour a museum and swim with whales.

Facetiousness aside, "The Voyage Home" is an inconsequential but light hearted and very fun installment of the Star Trek franchise. Like "The Search for Spock" before it, it can be congratulated for giving the spotlight exclusively to William Shatner and director Leonard Nimoy, but also giving the supporting crew things to do, this time in a 20th century setting - Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) attempt to breach a naval base (made more fun with the crew unaware of the severity of a Russian found in an American military facility), while Scotty, Bones and Sulu (James Doohan, DeForest Kelley and George Takei) attempt to build a space friendly whale enclosure, with Scotty upgrading the world's technology to get there.

Including time travel can muddy a lot of stories, but this film is simple enough with the premise that it avoids most of the logical fallacies, and the environmental message may grate on some viewers, but it's fitting with the ideology of the franchise, which has always been slightly left leaning (and consequently something I fully support).

A fun sci-fi entry.