Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Christopher Plummer, and Kim Cattrall
Rated: PG
Runtime: 113 min.
by Brian Eggert
Reviewed:
04/30/2009
Original Release Date:
12/06/1991
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country launches the last cinematic voyage for the original crewmembers, gathered together for the final time onscreen, and reformats their traditional narrative climate canonized by three television seasons, five movies, and countless followers around the world. It’s a darker film than the others, strewn with political commentaries and fatalistic notes about the end of an era, uncharacteristically burying any idealistic architecture the Trek-verse was built upon.
With the 25th Anniversary of the original Star Trek series approaching in 1991, Paramount Pictures scrambled to conceive a new way of commemorating the franchise’s history up to that point. Among the proposed ideas were a story where Kirk and Captain Jean-Luc Picard from The Next Generation meet, and former producer Harve Bennett pitched “Top Gun in outer space,” where the young Kirk and Spock attend Starfleet Academy. Though both ideas were rejected, they were revisited in the near future. What finally united the producers was Leonard Nimoy’s concept of closing out the original Star Trek crew’s tenure by ending their long-running conflict with the Klingons, thus signaling the end of one era and the passing of the torch to The Next Generation, which at that time was a wild success on television.
The film begins with the explosion of the Klingon moon, destroying their planet’s main source of energy and ozone layer, forcing the nubby-headed warmongers to make peace with their enemies. Being the most experienced crew in the Federation’s Starfleet, the Enterprise troop is rustled from their humdrum retirements for that ever-discussed “last mission” that always proves to be second-to-last. Kirk (William Shatner) and company meet the ship of Klingon counsel member Gorkon (David Warner)—a visual amalgamation of Klingon, Melville’s Ahab, and Abraham Lincoln—to initiate peace talks. After an uncomfortable and tense welcome dinner where cultures clash but peace is discussed, both parties retire to their respective ships. In the night (Is there night in space?), the Klingon dignitaries are apparently assassinated by the Federation. At least, that’s how the killing was meant to look.
Investigated by lifetime soldier General Chang (Christopher Plummer), a one-eyed Klingon desperately accustomed to the warring ways between his empire and the Federation, Kirk and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) are accused of being assassins, and a tribunal sentences them to life on a wintry prison planet none-too-fond of Starfleet. Along with the help of shape-shifter Martia (Iman), they attempt a desperate escape to prove their innocence. Meanwhile, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) conducts his own investigation into the coup with the help of his new Vulcan replacement-in-training Valeris (Kim Cattrall).
The film presents a Cold War parallel, with the potential armistice between the Klingon Empire and the Federation standing in for that between the former Soviet Union and the United States, complete with all lingering prejudices. Following that analogy, appropriate undercurrents of racism and archaic stereotypes between the two parties come through in the dialogue. The emotion-driven Kirk, for example, cannot conceive of peace with the Klingons based on his years of bad experiences (not to mention that one of them killed his son in The Search for Spock). Spock, bent on logic, doesn’t find any reason behind Kirk’s rage, and instead sees the prospect of peace idyllic. Both Kirk and Chang are depicted as men fearful of change, so attached to the past that they oppose anything new.
What’s more, the film dramatically diverts from the original Star Trek ideal created by Gene Roddenberry, largely based on the authority of writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose other foray into such territory was The Wrath of Khan, widely considered the best in the franchise. In both films, Meyer rubs away the glimmering sheen of the Enterprise, makes the corridors more claustrophobic and the sci-fi jargon fixed in naval vocabulary. Though Roddenberry desired a future more reliant on ideals, Meyer proposed realism and suggested that humans are still flawed individuals despite their advancements. Meyer’s approach and success on his previous Trek film outweighed the sometimes over-romantic conceptual approach of Roddenberry, whose narrative model was as fantastical as the science in his science-fiction yarn. Only when The Next Generation television series began in 1987 did writers attempt to embrace a new political and scientific realism into the franchise, which strived for idealism, but faced the sometimes hard truth that ideals are impossible to attain.
Meyer best illustrates this movement from idealism to realism in his frequent references to Shakespeare, whose romantic texts are fraught with tragedy and certain drama, whereas life after the black and white conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire is nothing short of ambiguous. The end of the Federation-Klingon struggle means an end to classicism, and so those clinging to that conflict quote Shakespeare. Chang’s dialogue is almost completely composed of references to Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and The Merchant of Venice, among others. Even the title comes from Hamlet’s soliloquy.
In a questionable attempt at humor from Meyer, Gorkon claims, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” However silly and nonsensical this line proves to be within the film, doesn’t it make sense that the Klingons, so dedicated to honor, would engulf themselves in the theatricality and romanticism of The Bard? Especially for Chang, who refuses to surrender to his longtime opponent, and in the end chooses an honorable death in battle over submitting to a post-modern way of life.
Star Trek, though often containing literary references and weighty themes, has for the most part left pronounced social commentaries or allegories on the wayside. But along with his concept for The Voyage Home, Leonard Nimoy spearheaded The Undiscovered Country’s ingenious reinvention of the series’ standard formula here. That the film is among the best acted and directed of all Trek films, and remains fully entertaining throughout its exploration of change, confirms its triumph. With this final farewell, the entire cast is sent off by a film that shows what their original series always had the potential to be, yet only occasionally achieved, by becoming a device through which we examine our own world via the exploration of others in the stars.
More from this series:
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Star Trek (2009)
