The Voyage Home: Star Trek in name only?

Let me preface this by first saying IV was the film which first really got me into Trek. It's still an enjoyable film which holds up for me and is like a form of visual comfort food - if I'm sad or depressed about life I watch that film and it keeps cheer me up.

That said, rewatching it last night, I couldn't help but feel it was really un-Trekky. Yes you have the cast, and they get in good fitting lines, especially in the interactions between the newly reborn Spock and McCoy, and McCoy's scenes in the hospital are classic Bones. But the rest of the film - thematically and the entire thing behind it - just feels like a typical mid 80s comedy movie which just happens to have the TOS cast. It feels almost at times like a parody of Star Trek. Yes, there's a funniness to the fish out of water aspect of the film with the crew not understanding the 1980s but I feel it panders to the lowest common denominator. The overall plot - that there's a probe wanting answers to a question and is threatening Earth until it gets those answers - is basically a rehash of V'Ger in lesser form. Seeing the crew act like fish out of water is interesting to a degree but it stands to make them look like bumbling fools. Consider in comparison City on the Edge of Forever, when Bones, Spock and McCoy travel back to 1930. An even more primitive time than the 1980s yet Kirk seems almost enamored, comfortable there, besides his growing infatuation with Edith Keeler. He quickly lends to blend in and adapt to the period and even is going with Edith to see a Clark Gable picture. Here, Kirk seems to truly not understand anything about the time period, and seeing Kirk out of his element and almost bumbling around is kind of an insult to the character.

Kirk also was the galaxy's womanizer and he was damn good at it. And here we see him trying hard and pathetically failing to get Gillian's interest, which also kind of deconstructs his character.

It's just out of all the time periods in history, and out of all the extinct animals they could've used, they pick the 1980s and whales (I love whales, don't get me wrong)? "To boldly go where no man has gone before?" I mean I guess braving the insane fashions of the 1980s and all of its gaudiness is bold, but imagine if the film required a much more ancient extinct creature: Imagine for instance they needed to find some creature which died out during the Ice Ages or during the time of the Dinosaurs. They'd be travelling to a time so far removed from our world that it would truly feel like a journey to the unknown. But for a series which is supposedly about exploration and discovery, travelling to 1980s Earth just doesn't arouse that much excitement.

It works as a good mid 80s comedy for me but as a science fiction film it kind of falls flat.

Also, it's 1986 and there's no sign of the Eugenics Wars tearing apart Earth? What gives?

 

The movie had to have general appeal.

And our heroes happened to be in an area not directly affected by the Eugenics Wars.

Kor

 

Wasn't it released shortly after Crocodile Dundee was a HUGE hit in the US? Fish out of water stories were really big that year.

 

Spock lists the Eugenics Wars as taking place from 1992-96 (See: "Space Seed"). So there should be no indication of them.

Not my favorite Trek outing, but it feels like Trek to me.

 

This is only 6 years before. To use a real life analogy, consider the build up from 1933 to 1939 to World War II, or from 1900-1914 to WWI. I would've imagined that Earth (in the timeline Star Trek exists in) would've been a much more turbulent and restless place in 1986 with a global conflict less than a decade away and all of these petty tyrants and would-be kings rising up all over the globe. Khan controlled a good chunk of the East, IIRC. I would imagine he would've had competitors in the West. There were a good number of these Augmented humans in that conflict but they're nowhere in sight a mere six years earlier?

 

I still don't see the conflict? They were in San Francisco. We aren't going apeshit with fear even thought the incoming administration is seemingly in bed with Russia and rattling sabres at China.

 

The United States was simply not involved in the Eugenics Wars. So there's no reason to expect scenes set in America (whether it be films like this, or VOY's "Future's End") to have any evidence of them.

 

If Kirk and Co had traveled back to a present day setting that was in horrendous turmoil because of a fictional conflict, general audiences would have been like

Kor

 

My whole point is it would've been interesting to have gone back to some much more far past time.

 

That would have cost money. There's a reason most Trek time travel to the past involves the present day in which it is filmed.

 

Well, what you're describing is a completely different film than the one they wanted to make. They very consciously chose to send the Trek crew to the present day and have more comedic elements in order to draw in an audience that didn't normally see the Trek movies. The humor that arose out of the fish-out-of-water element was part of what made Back to the Future such a big hit the year before.

If they'd just done a more typical time travel movie with the crew going to some ancient time or an alternate present devastated by a fictional war, they wouldn't have gotten any of the crossover audience that they did.

 

TVH made more money but sold less tickets than TMP.
Adjusted for inflation
TMP $278 million
TWOK $228
TSFS $193
TVH $245
TFF $111
TUC $152

They sold a few more tickets to non Trek fans than the earlier movies, but they may also have lost some repeat business from Die-hards. I didn't see TVH as many times in theater as I did the first three.
It's only real legacy is that it introduced comedy into the TOS movies that polluted 5 and 6 with forced humor. That and their ungraceful aging turned the Trek movies even more into a "silly" thing that it was before.
EDIT: fixed the order of the movies.

 

If you think TVH introduced comedy to Trek than you and I watched a very different TOS.

Comedy is as much "real trek" as bad technobabble and Melville quotes. And I don't even particularly like TVH.

I love that we're seeing unsourced blanket "It would have made more money if it pandered to true trek fans" statements applied to movies from three decades ago and not just in the Kelvinverse forums though.

TNG would have been a lot more successful if it had been set in the 23rd century and starred Riley finally commanding his ship, with a ship wide dance every week. That would have been real Trek, not that Picard poser who was so serious and boring. Sure, TNG might have got some more mainstream appeal, but how many die hard Trekkies did it turn off that a Riley centric series would have had coming back for more and more?

 

Try again. I specifically said, "introduced comedy into the TOS movies".
The first three movies had moments of comedy -- but they weren't comedies.
TVH was a comedy set mostly in 1986 and there is no doubt that Paramount mandated 5 and 6 have comedy because they thought that was what the fans wanted.
They actually wanted good stories.

How many comedy episodes did the TOS series have?-- 3 or 4 out of 79?
The movies series for all intents and purposes had 2 of 6 -- with TFF having idiotic comedy as late as the third act -- not just at the beginning of the movie.

That was a legacy of TVH. It was well-documented at the time that the suits at Paramount thought they had discovered the formula for making hit Trek movies.

 

Uh huh. Comedy does not equal Trek. Real fans only accept serious Trek. Comedy is only for the lamestream and TVH would have made a lot money without comedy and if it pandered to the fans. I heard you the first time.

Course if you're arguing legitimacy based on percentages of episodes were of a type in TOS vs the films, then TWOK isn't real Trek either. A lot more comedy episodes than Kirk returning to the Enterpise old and embittered and haveing to engage in a submarine battle against a returning nemesis.

TMP either for that matter. Probably just as many comedy episodes as "Enterprise must stop a computer probe from the past that achieved sentience" episodes.

How many strict cold war allegories in TOS? Enough to make TUC valid?

TFF isn't a comedy. It's an action adventure with comedy. Hence the gun fights, drowned cat woman, fist fights, ship to ship battles, and dramatic "I need my pain" scenes.

You may not like the film(s) but that doesn't make them any less "trek" than the rest of the franchise, nor does it somehow prove that further pandering to the base instead of a more general audience would have equalled a greater sucess.

 

But that doesn't make The Voyage Home a "bad movie" or "not Trek", it just means the suits at Paramount in '88 and '89 were idiots.

 

eh it happens. Every series has their comical episodes. This is just the comical star trek movie.

 

Too much LDS.

 

I didn't say TVH was a bad movie. It just wasn't that great in some people's eyes. It did have the effect of altering the course of the movies. I like all the Trek movies. TVH isn't great and it isn't bad by any stretch. It didn't expand the audience if it was intended to and I don't care if it did or not. For me, in retrospect, if we were to get only 6 TOS movies -- I wish none had been set in 1986 and none had been full blown comedies.

As for the other guy -- he seems to want to take offense, give speeches and psychoanalyze someone based on a couple of posts and show his superior intellect. Awesome.

And yes, TFF is cursed with way to much comedy despite many good dramatic scenes.

 

And here I thought I was replying to a post on a discussion forum.