For no strong reason — perhaps I just want to relive a time that had could view its moment in history with hope — I rewatched Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country tonight. Although clearly of another era, it holds up pretty well. There’s more to the main story than I remembered and a lot more humor, some of it pretty ham-fisted. It’s also aggressively earnest about its end-of-Cold War message but that plays well. Star Trek, especially the original series, has never been the most subtle of works — can you say “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield“? — and, as TV Tropes likes to say, some anvils need to be dropped. If you’re going to ruminate on the end of history, or its new beginning, it behooves you to state your theses boldly.
Released in 1991, it is (I believe) an early example of that 1990s staple, the conspiracy among nominal enemies who fear the outbreak of peace and work together to undermine it. If my recollection is correct, there were a lot of these movies. I guess everyone felt at least a little existential unease as the world order remade itself after the fall of the Soviet Union. Trek, with its long-standing expy of the Soviets handy in the Klingons, was well-positioned to make its case. As someone online commented, it’s an ironic statement: The fact that conspirators from both the Federation and the Klingons could work together so seamlessly to prevent peace, proved that the Federation and the Klingons could work together.
I was impressed at the level of craft. The guest actors do well. David Warner projects an amazing presence that has you believing in Chancellor Gorkon despite his very limited screen time. Christopher Plummer chews the scenery as General Chang but in a grand fashion, making him of Trek’s most memorable villains. And really, having an acclaimed Shakespearean actor quoting the Bard’s greatest hits puts just the perfect bow on TOS’s well-established conceit of utilizing Shakespeare in its titles.
But the true surprise and joy lies in the original cast. Leonard Nimoy had already brought a reserved dignity to Spock, both on TV and in the earlier movies. DeForest Kelley plays the country doctor without overplaying it, and is a very believable portrayal of someone easing into the comfortable outlines of a lived life as age advances. George Takei sells you on Sulu as captain very well; the handing off of the torch to a new generation is palpable. (In a better timeline, we’d have gotten that show with Sulu in the captain’s chair.) Even Walter Koening, Nichelle Nichols, and James Doohan get enough lines to live in their characters. Uhura, especially, has no fraks left to give during the onboard investigation and Nichols nails that no-nonsense exasperation. Kim Catrall tries so hard as Valeris, but Vulcans are hard to do well and the character is just dropped into our awareness. It would have been much more effective — and devastating — had the producers been able to line up Kirstie Alley to reprise Saavik.
And I’m going to go on and say it, internet traditions be damned: William Shatner can act. Yes, there are moments when the caricature seems apt. But his character is the only one with a serious arc, and he rides it with professionalism and impact. Neither his initial skepticism and malice, nor his eventual renunciation of them, feels forced or unlikely. He’s a man who’s lived his life pretty sure of his moral superiority, and that self-confidence in his own virtue gets rattled pretty hard, and Shatner absolutely conveys that.
The visual effects, it must be admitted, feel a little dated. I can’t find confirmation but I’m fairly sure that all of the space scenes are physical models. (I believe that DS9 was the first Trek to utilize CGI extensively, and not until halfway through its run.) The models are gorgeous but quite clearly models and have the too-smooth, too-clean feel of Trek physical models. Their motion is largely static. (To be clear, modern Trek has leaned too far the other way, where space scenes are overwhelming kinetic and disorienting.)
The whole movie does feel of an earlier era. By today’s standards, the pacing is slow — not that that’s bad, actually, but modern audiences might not have the patience for it. There is a lot of talking — it is Star Trek, after all — and a mix of many genres: Some war movie, some diplomacy, a detective story, a prison movie. It’s a bit of a mash. Overall it works though. The scriptwriters do a nice job keeping the narrative flowing and transitioning from one genre to the next without it being too jarring. It helps that the actors are comfortable with their roles, and that the original show also hopped from genre to genre.
How about the message? Well, it’s hard to disagree with the overarching “Peace is preferable to war” theme. I’m sure social historians could mine a PhD or two about how Star Trek captured that moment in American (and world) history. I was struck about how well it translated TOS’s original optimism into a 1990s form. In the 1960s, there was a presumption that the larger institutions were trustworthy and good. By the 1990s, Trek admitted that there could be some rotten fruit in paradise: Conspirators willing to lie, cheat, and murder to advance their cause — though it does feel like the conspirators are earnest in their justifications. In the early 21st century, Star Trek — like the wider culture — largely gave up on the institutions. (It’s important to note that the trope of the insane admiral, which has more or less consumed Star Trek at this point, gets its real start on Star Trek: The Next Generation. In TOS, while we encounter a handful of mad brass officers, in each case it’s a response to extreme circumstance, not a personality defect.) Getting back to The Undiscovered Country: The conspiracy is wide-ranging and includes a large number of higher-ups (including the obligatory admiral) but overall, it’s implied, the Federation’s intents are honorable and Starfleet is dependable.
I’m not sure if it was intentional, but I really like that the ultimate solution to the threat of General Chang’s fire-capable cloaked Bird of Prey comes not from Starfleet’s military might or overwhelming force. It stems from Starfleet’s scientific mission. No one said “Let’s carry sensors for gaseous anomalies so that we can hunt cloaked ships”. It was a spinoff technology. I’m sure there are Federation bean-counters wondering why Starfleet spends so many resources on wide-ranging studies with no practical point. Defeating Chang offers a justification. You never know when, say, stellar cartography might save the Federation.
As a coda to the original crew, the movie plays well. Everyone was clearly very aware that this would be the last outing of this group of actors (barring minor cameos), and they all invested themselves in the roles and the movie. Obviously, Star Trek continued but the Original Series ended, and this was a well-written, well-executed finale — the one the actual TV show never got.
