about the IV title

[xvicente]

better known as Star Trek IV - The One With The Whales

What "Voyage Home" is the title referring to?

Is "home" literally the Enterprise ("my friends, we've come home")?

Or Earth? for in the beginning they were on Vulcan with nothing to do.

Coming to think of it, the movie series up to IV made a mess (in a good sense) of Star Trek: Kirk was promoted to Admiral and that was not good, Spock died, the Enterprise was destroyed, Earth almost was destroyed too (twice), very little was left from the tv series. Except of course, the heroes.

Maybe this is why the TNG movies were generally more bland, they were too much like from the tv series model?

But back to the question? What "Voyage Home?"

 

[F. King Daniel]

I always saw it as the fight back from Vulcan to Earth, to face the music for what they did in Search For Spock. That's what they were doing - they just ended up saving the world en route!

 

[RoJoHen]

I always saw it as the fight back from Vulcan to Earth, to face the music for what they did in Search For Spock. That's what they were doing - they just ended up saving the world en route!

Yeah, that's how I took it as well, but it could also have multiple meanings. I like the idea of the voyage home doubling as their return to the Enterprise at the very end.

 

[Gojira]

I always saw it as the way King Daniel has mentioned. Also see it as a metaphor about the time travel from the past and back to the future.

 

[DonIago]

I always assumed it was intended to have multiple meanings.

 

[22 Stars]

Of course it has a layered meaning. Back to Earth, back to the Enterprise, to their positions in Starfleet on the Enterprise and as a film, back to the audience's home being present day Earth.

 

[R. Star]

I always assumed it was intended to have multiple meanings.

Me too.. the most obvious meaning is going home to face the music for last movie. Though when they ended up trapped in the past, they had to fix the ship to get home... and Kirk said we're home when he got the new Enterprise.

 

[Tom]

Also, Spock's journey to become more like his old self.



It was originally going to be 'Star Trek IV: Back to the Future' but that that was taken

 

[Lance]

The Voyage (to the old folks) Home.

I mean let's face it, they were all beginning to get a bit long in the tooth for all this space adventure stuff by that stage.

 

[22 Stars]

The Voyage (to the old folks) Home.

I mean let's face it, they were all beginning to get a bit long in the tooth for all this space adventure stuff by that stage.

Well, for older men and women, they did quite well. IV was a critical and popular success, marking what many would consider the dawn of the second golden age in Trek. It inspired Paramount to green light Star Trek: The Next Generation and crossed over into pop culture and appealed to non fans like no Trek film had done before.

 

[Lance]

I remember reading somewhere that TNG was apparently in very early pre-production even before TVH's premier. So TVH's massive box office might not have had anything to do with TNG being commissioned after all. Although obviously it wouldn't have hurt. Paramount probably saw the dollar signs and it made them feel much more comfortable with the decision they'd already made to steer Star Trek back to television.

 

[Christopher]

Titles are as much about promotion as they are about reflecting story content (and sometimes more so -- Nick Charles was not The Thin Man, and the later Pink Panther movies had nothing to do with the Pink Panther diamond). So I figure the meaning of The Voyage Home was largely to promote the idea to audiences that the movie would be taking the characters, not to some strange new world, but to a recognizable Earth, to our home. Yes, nominally it referred to the voyage back to Earth to deal with the consequences of their actions, but that was secondary, I think.

And yes, I think it's also reflecting the idea of the restoration of the status quo, getting the Enterprise and their old posts back.

 

[Chrono85]

I have always thought the title was a bit strange, because the Enterprise actually voyages home quote often. Really, though, almost all of the Trek's have awkward or obtuse titles . Wrath of Khan is actually a bit cheesy, and Undiscovered Country is just a strange title all together.

 

[CoveTom]

^ "The Undiscovered Country" was Nick Meyer attempting, as he often does, to sound all high brow and intellectual while making a sci-fi space opera. And "Wrath of Khan" was the marketing department's answer to him trying to do that with Star Trek II.

 

[Chrono85]

Ironically, I think that Star Trek V: The Final Frontier had the best title It sounds cool and exciting for one, and it was, at the time, supposed to be the final film with the original crew, and so the title kind of brought things back full circle with the word 'final' and the phrase being linked to the series from the beginning. It also fits with the plot, because they are supposed to be voyaging to a part of space which is the ultimate unexplored region of the galaxy. It words on all levels It's just too bad that the movie does not!

 

[Silvercrest]

I always thought the titles of TFF and TUC should have been reversed.

 

[DonIago]

I always thought TFF was a cheesy title because it's just quoting from the opening narration.

 

[Christopher]

I have always thought the title was a bit strange, because the Enterprise actually voyages home quote often.

I like the titles of the "Genesis trilogy" taken collectively, because they work quite well as descriptive chapter titles. The first film in the trilogy portrays the wrath of Khan, the second depicts the search for Spock, and the third chronicles the voyage home (by a roundabout route) after those events.

...Undiscovered Country is just a strange title all together.

No more so than any of Trek's Shakespearean titles. TOS gave us "Dagger of the Mind," "The Conscience of the King," "By Any Other Name," "All Our Yesterdays," and maybe "Wink of an Eye," and Shakespeare's works were quoted or alluded to in the bodies of several other episodes. So why shouldn't the movies have continued the tradition? Let's hear it for foisting a bit of literacy on the moviegoing public.

And of course it's a very evocative title to anyone who knows Hamlet's soliloquy (and anyone who doesn't was cheated by their school system), for "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns" is death. Which is why Meyer wanted it for the title of TWOK, a film that was very much about the idea of mortality. It's not quite as good a fit for the film it ended up on, though; Meyer kind of had to cheat by giving it a second meaning of "the future," but I guess it was about people fearing the death of their way of life and being afraid to move forward, which does have parallels with what Hamlet was talking about.

 

[Greg Cox]

I have always thought the title was a bit strange, because the Enterprise actually voyages home quote often. Really, though, almost all of the Trek's have awkward or obtuse titles . Wrath of Khan is actually a bit cheesy, and Undiscovered Country is just a strange title all together.

Not really. The Enterprise never returned home in the original series, aside from the occasional time-travel jaunt to the Great Depression or the Cold War. It was the later series that tended to make return visits to Starfleet Academy and such.

We never even saw 23rd Century Earth until TMP.

 

[Christopher]

^Right. And the other TOS movies all begin with the crew at Earth (or just arriving there, as in TSFS) and show them going off somewhere else to get into an adventure. TVH is the only original-cast movie where Earth is the destination rather than the starting point.