At the heart of the Star Trek film franchise is the trilogy that kept it alive. And the man made a significant contribution to keeping it going was Leonard Nimoy. While he didn’t direct the first film in the trilogy, his guidance of the second two films ensured that Gene Roddenberry’s creation could breathe on the big screen as well as the small one.
Following the mind-numbingly slow Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Paramount needed to regroup and rethink how it was going to handle Star Trek if it wanted to keep the series alive. The studio managed to take control of the moves from Roddenberry to let Harve Bennett produce and oversee the films.
Bennett’s best decision was completely disregarding The Motion Picture and starting fresh. He hired Nicholas Meyer to direct The Wrath of Khan, which set the standard for all Trek movies. Released in 1982, the film launched the trilogy and ended with an inconceivable idea: Spock was dead.
But Trek is science fiction and there’s always a way to bring someone back to life. Nimoy was so impressed with Khan that he asked to direct the third movie, and the result was The Search for Spock, a movie that exists solely to bring Spock back to life. It’s a flawed movie, easily the weakest point in the trilogy, but it wasn’t entirely terrible. It didn’t completely kill the momentum from Khan.
Search ended with the crew in exile, having just destroyed the Enterprise. Now, they had to come home. In 1986, they finally did, but had to take a detour.
The Voyage Home isn’t the best Trek movie, but it is one of the most unique blockbusters ever greenlit by a major Hollywood studio. Under the helm of Nimoy, Trek suddenly became a comedy. There’s no good vs. evil in The Voyage Home. Instead, there is a goal - to bring humpback whales to the 23rd Century so Starfleet can communicate with a mysterious satellite.
The science is a bit weird. In order to travel back in time to 1986, the crew - traveling in a beat-up Klingon Bird of Prey - has to slingshot around the sun. While in our world, the crew goes through a series of bumbling adventures. After the super-serious Search, Nimoy shows how much better ability he has when it comes to comedy.
Sure, a more experienced director might have done better, but you never feel like Nimoy is learning on the job here. Part of that has to be the familiarity with the material. He knew these characters inside and out, just as he knew how to handle the actors. Whether William Shatner ever wanted to admit it or not, he was never better as Kirk than he was in Nimoy’s films.
Today, it seems inconceivable that a movie like The Voyage Home could be made. It’s so different in tone from today’s blockbusters. It’s a sci-fi comedy starring our favorite characters. It shows exactly how we think the original crew would act in our society.
The original crew Trek films often feel like watching a family’s home movies. The crew had worked together from 1966 to 1991, finishing off with Meyer’s vastly underrated The Undiscovered Country. These films summed up what Trek was about - traveling around space, visiting new worlds and boldly going where no man has gone before, both in terms of visual and plot.
While J.J. Abrams may have rebuilt the franchise as an action series, it rarely was like that before. Nimoy may have given those films his blessing by his presence, but he knew better what Roddenberry was originally trying to get at. These characters can be used to show how human nature has thrived through centuries in the past and will into the future. It will be difficult to see how Trek could have ever continued to exist if Nimoy didn’t get his shot at really defining it for us.
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