Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy), 1986
It's the kind of plot idea you might have assumed the franchise had abandoned after the straightforward shoot-em-up action of III: Enterprise crew (sans Enterprise) travel back in time to the 1980s to find a whale to save 23rd century Earth from a strange alien probe.
Well, whatever. There have been plenty of Star Trek plots this silly on the old TV show, and the fourth movie returns to the cheerfully dumb tone of some of these episodes. Which is a warning rather than a justification: if you like your Trek believable, then you'd be better off with II or VI. There are numerous implausible moments in this one, most notably the conceit that you could park a giant invisible spaceship in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park without it being detected. But if you can believe women find Kirk attractive, that shouldn't be too much to ask.
What really allows the film to get away with such nonsense is the quality of the script. Seeing this immediately after its predecessors, you can't help but be struck by how much wittier it is. The character interplay is richer, and virtually everyone gets something interesting to do for once. Where III missed obvious possibilities, IV is more ingenious: it spices up the Spock / McCoy interplay, for example, by playing on McCoy's distrust of Spock's mental state. Nimoy is the perfect director to realise the potential of such character bits.
The biggest problem is an inadequate score by
Leonard
Rosenman. How can it have taken them so long to realise they needed
Jerry
Goldsmith back?
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© 2005 by Stephen Rowley