Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Meyer
CAST:
William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, Kim Cattrall, Christopher Plummer, David Warner, Iman, Kurtwood Smith, Rene Auberjonois
REVIEW:
WARNING: This review discusses elements of the film’s plot
The end of an era came in 1991, when Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country hit theaters, featuring the adventures of the Enterprise with her original crew for the last time. The end credits are prefaced with each of the principal cast member’s (Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, Takei, Nichols, Koenig) signatures writ large across the screen, and in fact the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, starring Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, was already airing. The baton had been passed. Kirk and friends’ final outing as the crew of the Enterprise is not their greatest adventure (most would consider that 1982’s The Wrath of Khan), but it’s a respectable final effort that has considerably more life and interest than its dreary immediate predecessors. Kirk and crew didn’t quite save the best for last, but they also don’t go out with a whimper.
The explosion of the Klingon moon has destroyed their key energy production facility and their home world’s ozone layer, leaving the Klingon Empire on the brink of collapse. Weakened beyond their ability to maintain their long-held stand-off with the Federation, the Klingons propose peace negotiations, but Kirk (William Shatner) is deeply suspicious of their sincerity. ‘They’re dying’, his old friend Spock (Leonard Nimoy) reminds him. ‘Let them die!’ Jim snaps, unable to get past his bitter resentment of the Klingons since the death of his son at a Klingon commander’s hands. To his chagrin, the Federation sends the Enterprise to meet Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) and escort him back to Earth for negotiations. After a tense dinner onboard the Enterprise between her crew, now including Spock’s Vulcan protege Valeris (Kim Cattrall), and Gorkon and his chief military adviser, General Chang (Christopher Plummer), the Enterprise appears to fire on the Chancellor’s ship, rendering it powerless, followed by two crewmen beaming aboard and murdering Chancellor Gorkon. Kirk insists the Enterprise did not open fire, but is unable to explain the ship’s records showing that they did. To appease the Klingons and avoid derailing the vital peace negotiations, Kirk and Bones (DeForest Kelley) are deemed responsible for Gorkon’s death and stand trial in a Klingon kangaroo court, followed by their banishment to an icy prison planet. The Enterprise crew scrambles to find a way to both rescue Kirk and Bones, and unmask the traitors in their midst, and along the way, uncover a bigger conspiracy to thwart the peace negotiations on Earth.
Star Trek has always, at its core, been about themes and ideas, with Gene Rodenberry working carefully to use the space opera as a vehicle for presenting current social and political issues, and The Undiscovered Country is less-than-subtle in its real-world parallels with the crumbling of the Soviet Union (the Klingon prison is explicitly called a gulag by a Commandant whose accent sounds suspiciously Russian). Spock tells Kirk ‘only Nixon could go to China’; just as only the staunchly anti-Communist Nixon could open talks with Red China without being regarded as a sellout or a weakling, so too does it take someone with as deep anti-Klingon prejudices as Kirk to take the step toward peace. By director Nicholas Meyer’s own commentary, Chancellor Gorkon is inspired by both Mikhail Gorbachev and Abraham Lincoln, and his fate inspired by those of men like Mahatma Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin, and Anwar Sadat, leaders assassinated by hardliners among their own people for extending an olive branch toward ‘the enemy’.
The Undiscovered Country is tightly-paced and flows smoothly for the most part, but it has a few plot weaknesses. For as much time as it spends on the whodunit mystery, it’s not as clever as the filmmakers seem to think. The fact that there is only one new character of any significance aboard the Enterprise makes it a pretty easy guessing game who the traitor in their midst is, and when the primary villain is revealed, it’s hardly a shock. On the plus side, the assassination, a climactic dogfight between the Enterprise and a cloaked Klingon warbird, and the race to stop a second assassinatioon, are handled with genuine energy and tension, and the film always maintains interest even when it’s not being as tricky as it thinks it is. The visual effects are quite good for the most part, and have come a long way from 1982’s Khan.
William Shatner is not the strongest of actors at the best of times, and he doesn’t put as much into his performance here as he did in The Wrath of Khan (in which, by his standards, he was exceptionally solid), but he’s mostly effective (and does make a priceless jab at his own egotistical reputation). The rest of the Enterprise crew are their usual selves. Nimoy and Kelley are probably the strongest actors in the bunch, but the rest are fine in roles they’ve inhabited for decades.
Of the ‘guest stars’, Christopher Plummer has some fun munching on the scenery as the incessantly Shakespeare-quoting General Chang, but he doesn’t have enough screentime. Still, Chang is entertaining, his scheme devious, and his cloaked war bird a dangerous adversary, putting him among the better Trek villains, if not up to the level of Ricardo Montalban’s Khan. Less memorable is Kim Cattrall’s Valeris; there’s nothing wrong with Cattrall’s performance, but the character is a one-dimensional plot device, and feels like a clone of Saavik from The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock. In small roles are David Warner as the ill-fated Chancellor Gorkon (not playing a villain for once), an unrecognizable Kurtwood Smith as the Federation President (sporting, for some reason, Fu Manchu makeup), Iman (Mrs. David Bowie) as a shapeshifting alien, Rene Auberjonois as a Federation Colonel, and Michael Dorn (who would go on to play Klingon Whorf on Star Trek: The Next Generation) as Kirk and Bones’ Klingon defense attorney. Attentive viewers may even notice a very young Christian Slater in a bit part as an aid to Sulu.
With the cast’s farewell signatures crawling across the screen at the end, some Trekkies may be disappointed that Kirk and co. went out in an installment that’s more murder mystery/political drama than breakneck space adventure, but The Undiscovered Country is a far more satisfying entry to leave off with than the Enterprise going back in time to rescue whales, or dealing with Spock’s religious fundamentalist brother, and on the whole it runs up behind The Wrath of Khan as among the best entries featuring the original cast. Kirk and friends’ Trek voyages may have finally come to an end, but most viewers should feel they stopped at a satisfying destination.
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