Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer), 1991
After the unqualified debacle that was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, it was time to revive the series (if only to make sure it could be sent off in style). Who better for the job than Nicholas Meyer, who had revamped the franchise with Star Trek II and had also had a hand (as screenwriter) in the other quality outing, Star Trek IV? Meyer is all class, and this film is even better than those earlier even-numbered installments.
The story anticipates Star Trek: Generations in trying to bridge the gap between Kirk- and Picard-era conceptions of Trek: the concern here is the establishment of peace between the Federation and Klingon Empire. Kirk is a reluctant ambassador sent to welcome Chancellor Gorkon, who wishes to work towards a treaty between the two powers. But Gorkon is mysteriously killed in circumstances that implicate the Enterprise, and Kirk and McCoy are charged with the murder. The rest of the crew must find the real killer while the two accused attempt to escape from prison. This is great material for Meyer, who has dabbled with mysteries before (he wrote the revisionist Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven Per Cent Solution). It's not much of a whodunit, I'll grant you, but it's fun to watch Spock in sleuth mode as he leads the crew in their search.
There's no doubt that this is the slickest Trek film of the Kirk era; it moves confidently between its two main plot strands, and Meyer's dialogue is the best since IV. What I enjoy the most, however, is that Meyer is so willing to take on aspects of the Trek mythos that he finds inappropriate or incongruous. In the early encounter with the Klingons, for example, the discussion is centred on the prejudices inherent in Trek's human-centred ideology. And in one great sequence, Meyer sends up the image of Kirk as all-round action man and stud by creating an identical double: not only do we see Shatner fighting himself, but he also declares that kissing himself "must have been [his] life-long ambition."
One query though: the cast insist that "The Undiscovered Country" was a phrase used by Shakespeare to describe the future. But surely it's a metaphor for death? As in:
But that dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns...
(Hamlet, Act III, Scene I)
This couldn't be an elaborate joke about the end of
the franchise on Meyer's part, could it? What appears to be a leap into
the
future for the series, is merely death...
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© 2005 by Stephen Rowley