Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

No dying, no shooting, no stereotypical bad guy

Six weeks into its American run, the film had sold 81.3 million dollars of tickets, more than the second or third films of the series, and finished at 133 million worldwide. Audiences polled by CinemaScore graded it A+, and four Academy Award nominations followed.

Leonard Nimoy directed, and wanted something lighter: no dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser blasts, no stereotypical bad guy. Harve Bennett, producing, wanted the same: an environmental message and no clear-cut villain. Much of it was shot in and around San Francisco across ten days, and Industrial Light & Magic made the whales twice over: four-foot radio-controlled models, run in a San Mateo school pool by four handlers and divers, and full-size animatronics for the breaching shots.

The Story

The film is set in 2286, the former Enterprise officers in exile on Vulcan, flying a captured Klingon ship. A cylindrical probe reaches Earth, knocks out the global power grid and generates planetary storms; Spock works out that its signal matches the song of humpback whales, extinct by the twenty-third century. So they take the Klingon ship back to 1986 San Francisco to fetch two.

Eddie Murphy was attached at one point, as a Berkeley astrophysicist, and left to make The Golden Child. His part was folded together with a marine biologist and a reporter to make Gillian Taylor, the Sausalito cetologist played by Catherine Hicks.

The Ideal Audience

It runs 122 minutes, rated PG, Common Sense Media at ten and up: stock footage of whales killed and butchered, a spaceship explosion in flashback, Spock swearing his way through the twentieth century, social drinking, and Kirk passing Spock off as a man who did heavy drugs in the 1960s. A Klingon ambassador demands Kirk's extradition over the captured ship, and the crew flies home from three months of exile to answer for taking the Enterprise to Genesis. We would send newcomers to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock first, and everyone else straight here, for the entry where two animals settle the crisis.