To Boldly Blow Where No Movie Has Blown Before
By Rich Bruso
July 2006
Consider it an adventure, if you will. Amy hadn't seen Galaxy Quest in quite a while, and we picked up a used copy cheap. And we had the classic documentary Trekkies at home already, which provides a scary level of insight into some very strange peoples' lives. So, the suggestion seemed natural: Let's watch all the Star Trek movies, in order!
Of course, there was the initial wrangling. Do we see them all, or just the good ones? Some raised eyebrows there, as Amy hadn't seen them all, so didn't really know what she was getting into. She wasn't familiar with the whales, Khan, Klingon prisons, or "The Nexus." And she certainly didn't know about…that one. More on that later, though.
A decision was made: We're going straight through. One movie a night, all the movies, in order of release, no matter how painful. Easy enough, as Hastings seemed to have them all on DVD, some even in special edition guise. Nothing to it but to sit back, relax, and watch the ever-expanding waistlines.
The first movie, The Motion Picture, went well, aside from the fact that we don't see the Enterprise until about 30 minutes in, and the cast isn't fully assembled for almost an hour. Very artistic-looking, at the cost of production delays and an ever-ballooning budget.
On to the next: The Wrath of Khan. Yes, Ricardo Montalban in a chest piece! One of my favorites, and, I believe, second only to the whales in cable replays. What fun, and we leave Spock dead on a remote planet, leaving us open for the third movie. The Search for Spock gives us an excuse for Kirk and crew to steal a Klingon vessel piloted by Christopher Lloyd and John Larroquette in full headgear and dreadlocks. The Klingon ship is needed for the time-traveling, whale-snatching good time known as The Voyage Home, the source of one of the most quoted scenes in Star Trek history: Scotty interacting with an 80's computer. Truly superb movie cheese there.
And there we were, staring it right in the face. How true to our mission would we be? The decision was made: Stay the course. And so, off to Hastings to retrieve The Final Frontier. What do you mean, you don't have it? And neither does Movies to Go? A quick phone call to Blockbuster Video and we're basically told, "We only rent movies that could make us money. Try online."
Could the fifth movie be so bad that nobody carries it? In short, yes. We eventually tracked down a VHS copy (I am loathe to admit the details, sordid as they are) so we were back in business. Just hit the play button and we're off on a rip-roaring adventure to find...God? Really? Hey, what's with the laughing Vulcan? And I don't ever remember anything romantic between Scotty and Uhura.
The movie starts with Kirk free climbing El Capitan, followed closely by Kirk inadvertently freefalling from El Capitan. Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of rocket boots, Spock saves us from a short bad movie, leaving us to watch the next hour and a half with pained expressions on our faces. What follows is possibly the worst fireside rendition of Row, Row, Row Your Boat in history, then a bout of marshmallow burning.
Fortunately, an extremely urgent diplomatic problem arises, and the intrepid (and comically high-ranking) bridge crew of the Enterprise is the galaxy's only hope. It sounds like a setup for a bad joke: A Klingon, an Earthling, and a Romulan walk into a bar… Then we're subjected to the aforementioned laughing Vulcan as a kidnapper, Uhura doing a feather dance on a dune, and the obligatory explosion-filled battle scene, ending, as these scenes often do, with the entire Enterprise being held captive by a madman. But here's the twist: He's found religion. Yes, our laughing Vulcan is on a quest to find God, who is currently located in the center of the galaxy behind a big, puffy dust cloud. Only one man can stop him!
Okay, three: Kirk, Spock, and Bones, to handle, respectively, hand-to-hand fighting and shirt ripping-off scenes, general logic and science stuff, and any medical or sarcastic remark related emergencies.
I'd rather not go into the details of the rest of the plot, mostly to shield you from their harmful influence, but the general feel is that some second-year film students took their mandatory philosophy class and decided what to do for their junior project. The good news: None of this is ever mentioned in any of the later movies.
Amazingly, this experience didn't derail us from our mission. We managed to see Kirk in a prison flick, the meeting of two captains, past and future, the Borg queen, some really, really, really old folks in a farming community, and even Ron Perlman as a Romulan Viceroy. And not a single laughing Vulcan along the way.
Unfortunately, the tale won't end here. Despite promises on the box cover for Nemesis, it seems that one of the intrepid Star Trek crews is going to have at least one more mission, as the eleventh movie in the series has been announced for 2008. I predict there will be a huge crisis, some moments of high anxiety where the crew appears to be in mortal danger, some non-central crew deaths, a visit to an alien world, and the initiation of the ship's self-destruct sequence. With any luck, we won't get any more karaoke from The H.M.S. Pinafore soundtrack.
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