After two relatively lighthearted films, with "The Voyage Home" being a (brilliant) comedy much of the time, the Trek film series returned to darkness and foreboding intrigue with "The Undiscovered Country". It is probably a more flawed film than "The Voyage Home" and "The Wrath of Khan" (which are my favorite Trek films), but "The Undiscovered Country" nonetheless is a great, great send-off for the original crew (damn you, "Generations"!) with a very good story and villain and more than a hint of the political intrigue which would become a big part of "Deep Space 9". Indeed, though it features the original crew with their trademark interactions intact, "The Undiscovered Country" does bring them into a story perhaps generally more at home in "The Next Generation" or "Deep Space 9". Though I much prefer "The Original Series" to anything which came after (outside of a couple of seasons of DS9), this was an interesting direction to go for the original crew's final film, and one which paid off largely again due to the characters being so well-handled.
A fairly complex plot in comparison to what we'd seen before in the Trek film series, so I won't bother explaining it, but there's lots of Klingons, lots of politics, and an air of mystery well-created by director Nicholas Meyer, returning as director to the series for the first time since "The Wrath of Khan" and as writer for the first time since "The Voyage Home". Meyer seems to have an uncanny grasp on what makes Trek click and absolutely nails the character interactions as well as the tone of the films, which are ultimately optimistic regardless of how melancholy things can get. It's a great screenplay overall, with the social and political commentary being pretty obvious but very well-done and the characters, again, handled extremely well. Great dialogue too, with Chang being Shakespeare to Khan's Melville and Spock especially getting some classic lines. The cinematography by Hiro Narita is also worthy of note.
Overall the cast here is definitely worthy of much praise. Of course the original cast, Mark Lenard as Sarek, and other Trek regulars like Michael Dorn as Worf need no comment as they are all reliable performers. It must be said though that Shatner still had a little of "The Final Frontier" in him and didn't really deliver a performance on par with his work in the trilogy formed by II, III, and IV. However, there were some very good additions as well. Kim Cattrall doesn't even come close to deserving the sort of criticism she's gotten from some, as she plays her Vulcan character pretty much flawlessly, and I daresay better than Kirstie Alley or whomever took over from her as Saavik. It helps that she's the hottest Vulcan not from Alberta. Christopher Plummer is really, really great as the villain Chang, who isn't as good a character as Khan, but I think Plummer gives perhaps the better performance.
Overall an exciting, thrilling adventure filled with political intrigue which never loses sight of the soul of Trek: the characters. I do think "The Voyage Home" has eclipsed this as my second favorite Trek film upon this most recent viewing, but I still love "The Undiscovered Country" and consider it not only in the top tier of Trek films, but also a great addition to the original crew's adventures and one of the better genre films around. Great stuff.
1 comment:
Although I have always loved The Voyage Home and later First Contact, this is the best of the films so far.
How did you get through writing a review of this film without comparing the story to the collapse of the USSR and the United States becoming allies with Russia?
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