Review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) by Sam B — 30 Dec 2009

With Star Trek IV the series maintains its new color, an almost comic-book tone and palette apparently brought by Leonard Nimoy as director. The production feels more cohesive and the quality of the images has improved slightly in Nimoy's second mission as hidden captain. Nicholas Meyer, the mastermind and director of The Wrath of Khan, is back writing the middle section of the script, a jaunt through 80s San Francisco by the crew of the world's most famous recently destroyed starship, now arriving by derring-do (a time-bending solar slingshot) on 20th century Earth having commandeered a Klingon vessel with serendipitous cloaking abilities.

IV closes, in a big and a small way, a trilogious arc begun in II. To this effect, a small scene catches Kirk selling reading glasses given to him by McCoy during the opening of The Wrath of Khan, back before the Genesis hijack (when aging was his biggest concern). It gives away little to say that by the end of the movie, having destroyed his ship over Genesis while doing calisthenics for rescuing the home planet, Admiral Kirk is demoted to Captain of a new Enterprise. In the now famous terminology of the mythological scholar Mircea Eliade, this is an "eternal return" to the starting grounds of the first movie.

Especially pleasing are the crew's bumbling through time in culture shock, Spock's smooth regeneration beyond his former understanding of human peculiarities like humor and guessing, and scenes (for the first time fully imagined) involving the Federation. Each crew member gets full exercise in danger and humor. The ending tapers a bit thin, and the score, while it has moments of grandeur, remains nothing on the heights in I and II. Still, it's hardly possible not to love the one where they go back to Earth.