Houston, we have a problem!
This guy Klaa is an idiot. To my knowledge, there is no war between the Klingons and the Federation, therefore he has no sound basis on which to attack the
Enterprise. Yet he blatantly, and without any orders from Central Command, targets the ship and continues to hunt it. He thinks himself a mighty warrior, but what Klingon would attack a defenceless shuttlecraft, as he had intended to do? How would that play as a “glorious victory” in the songs to be sung of him? Surely he is pissing on everything that the Klingons hold dear, staining his honour and also putting, had he known it, one of his own generals in mortal peril?
When Kirk tussles with Sybok as they exit the shuttlecraft, the rifle is kicked away and Spock picks it up. He points it at Sybok and Kirk screams “Shoot him!” This is not something Captain Kirk would do. Shoot a man (assuming the rifle has no stun setting, or at least is not set on stun), without a trial or a chance to tell his side of the story? Knock him out, certainly. Nerve pinch him maybe (do nerve pinches work on Vulcans?) but shoot him? That's a very uncharacteristic reaction for Kirk I feel. But, why, if he could not shoot him, did Spock not at least incapacitate Sybok? Even if the Vulcan nerve pinch would not work on him, he could have punched him out, hit him over the head with the but of the rifle, slapped restraints on him .. but no. He just back the rifle. Spock, you big pussy! Of course later we learn why he was so reluctant to hurt Sybok, but still, I believe the taunt stands.
In general, I've always had a problem with the idea of Klingons using the cloaking device. I mean, they're supposed to be warriors, unafraid of anything, and with a strong sense of honour that drives them. So how is it honourable to sneak up unseen on your enemy before attacking? Would not proud Klingon warriors prefer to face their foe out in the open, winning a glorious victory through force of arms and strength of numbers, superior strategy, courage and guile, rather than due to some --- let's not forget --- Romulan technology that allows them to hide until the moment of the kill? Certainly, as warriors they would have stalked, in their ancient history, wild beasts and for those purposes stayed to the shadows, waiting for a chance to strike. But these are not animals they hunt. These are men, and men should have a fighting chance.
I just feel the whole idea of the cloaking device goes against everything the Klingon Empire stands for, and I'm surprised they use it. If, for instance, the Federation had the technology and not them, I feel sure that they would be villified in statements like “The humans cannot face us in a fair fight! They must strike under cover of darkness and invisibility, hiding like cowards in the shadows!”
The constant idea of the Enterprise being the only ship that can carry out this mission also annoys me. I know it's integral to the plot, but surely they could have justified it better? A simple "All ships out on manouevres" or "Nobody in range" maybe, but not just the fact that Kirk, and only Kirk, is trusted to negotiate this hostage situation? And considering his ship is basically in a flatpack state at the time, ready to be rebuilt, it makes less sense even than in the first movie, of which we shall endeavour to speak no more. How must the rest of the commanders and captains in Starfleet feel? "Here I am, twenty years in the service with commendations up the wazoo, a powerful starship at my command, ready to go into battle, but no. They send me to the Rigellian Cluster to catalogue nebulae and give the plum job to that Kirk again. What's he got that I ain't got?"
Laughing in the face of death
As Kirk ands McCoy begin the ardorous climb up several levels of the ship, the turbolifts being inaccessible, Spock appears wearing a pair of anti-gravity boots, like the kind he used when, back on Earth in Yosemite, he rescued Kirk when the captain lost his grip and fell down the cliff.
Memorable scenes and effects
The crossing of the Great Barrier is a very effects-laden one, and probably took up a lot of the film's budget, the largest yet for a
Star Trek movie up to this point (this movie had more than the budgets of
The Wrath of Khan and
The Search for Spock put together). Just a pity it's over so quickly.
There's a very touching scene when Kirk, unable to believe the ship has penetrated the Great Barrier, looks in wonder and his hand slips down the mockup of a ship's wheel whereon is a plaque saying “To boldly go where no man has gone before” as the original
Trek fanfare plays. Very well done, guys. Very well done.
The scene right at the end, where Kirk stands alone against the might of this godlike creature (does he not know who he's dealing with, this guy?) on top of a cliff, and then out of nowhere the Bird of Prey rises up behind him like an avenging angel and destroys the alien, is really excellent. I'm not quite sure why, having despatched "God", Spock turns the ship's disruptor towards his captain. Perhaps the Vulcan was having a little joke, no?
Themes and motifs
The most obvious one of course that runs through this is faith. Faith, whether it is real or imagined, manufactured or ingrained in us from a young age, can make us do amazing things, things both wonderful and dreadful. Kirk has faith in his ship, and in his comrades, and this does not prove to be misplaced, although to be fair the rest of his crew fall rather easily to Sybok's blandishments.
The Unknown, always a constant in any science-fiction series, and so much more so in
Star Trek (One of Picard's first speeches to Q: “If you'd earned that uniform you're wearing you would know that the Unknown is what brings us out here!”) beckons like a scary and yet enticing hand, and as Sybok says, the Great Barrier at the end of the galaxy is the physical representation of that universal fear. Even Kirk, for a short moment, seems ready to believe that the being they stand before could very well be God. Well, why not? But of course it is not: that would never do, would it? And the creature is revealed to be just an evil alien pretending to be God.
Friendship, as ever, gets our heroes through just about everything and sustains them through the worst times, while pain, another constant theme running through this film, drives us on and often causes us to surmount even the toughest obstacles. Sybok wants to take away everyone's pain --- whether for his own purposes in recruiting them to his cause or as a truly altruistic gesture is never quite established --- but Kirk doggedly holds on to his, reasoning that a man
needs his pain. It is this which sustains and pushes him at the worst times, and he believes that without pain a man is probably not really a man at all.
And then there's religion, of course. Sybok is like a prophet, a John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, looking for his saviour. But unlike the herald of Jesus Christ, the Vulcan is not prepared to sit and wait for God to come to him: he intends to go and seek him out. And in so doing he creates a kind of a religion of his own, a cult of personality based around himself in which anyone will do anything he asks. He takes away pain and asks those whose pain he removes to follow him. Is he, in this regard, any different from Jesus curing the lepers? But he does have, at least all of the time we see him, an ulterior motive, so his curing of people, as it were, cannot be seen as a purely selfless action, with nothing expected in return. He does expect something: loyalty and obedience, and he gets it.
But is there a deeper message here? Are we being warned that God can wear many faces, and some of them are not so glorious to look upon? And that we should not perhaps so blithely accept that any being who seems godlike is in fact God, or a god? Everyone, even the pragmatic McCoy, seemed to believe that the alien was God; it was only Kirk's reasonable quesiton that set doubts in anyone's mind, doubts which grew and then coalesced as the being began punishing Kirk, and then Spock.
But religion has caused people to do some of the most heinous things, and wars of bloody carnage have been fought over whose god is the real one, so it's clear religion has a power all of its own, and that people's beliefs can be used, manipulated, shaped to the ends of whomever has the strength of will to control and bend them to his own will.
Does this movie deserve its reputation?
Often cited as one of the worst Trek movies (though I personally doubt anything can, or ever will, trump the first one) this has also been said to have been the movie that almost killed the franchise. It's not hard to see why. Part action-movie --- the first hour or so concerns the taking of the hostages on Paradise City and Starfleet's attempts to rescue them,
Die Hard style --- and part existential theological discussion, it's almost the film that can manage to offend everyone. Again, like some of the other movies, there is virtually no space battle at all. The ony shot we see fired in anger misses the
Enterprise, and then there's Spock's shot that destroys the alien on Sha Ka Ree (or whatever the planet is) but that's not in space so doesn't count.
There's again a little too much humour and virtually no drama. Nobody dies. Nobody. Not even one of the ambassadors, who surely would have been expendable --- although I guess they had to retain Korrd for the rather silly resolution of the poorly planned Klingon part of the plot, such as it is --- and so far as I can see, not even one crewman gets injured. At least in
Star Trek IV Chekov fell and was close to death. There's just no real tension in the movie and as I already said, the crossing of the Great Barrier is done almost in a single bound. Bo-ring. The effect is good, but only that. Even “God” is something of a letdown, dissolving into basic energy after the photon torpedo hits.
There's little personal conflict. If Spock had gone over to Sybok's side, then there would have been a dilemma for Kirk. But no: he stays loyal, and though he loses his brother it somehow doesn't have the impact we expected it would, and Sybok's sacrifice at the end is very much telegraphed from an early point. Scotty has most of the best lines, but even at that they're poor, and Uhura is reduced to alternating between dancing sexily in the moonlight (Lord preserve us!) and trying to come on to Scotty, embarrassing for both of them. Also stupid, as there was never seen to be any sort of attraction or sexual tension between these two, neither in the series nor in any of the preceding movies.
So what are we left with? Something of a shell really. A rather aimless plot that, rather like Sybok himself, wanders all over the place looking for something to do before finally finding God and blowing him up. Yeah. Says it all really.
Overall, I think the movie does deserve its very poor rep; it's a weak start for Shatner as a writer, not the best as a director either, and it's really hard to find, even among the main cast, any performance that really stands out. In the end, Sybok, rather like Khan, steals the show. Not that there's too much to steal.
All I can manage in this case then is a poor
